On filling voids

In January this year, Donald Trump reportedly described various South American, Caribbean and (apparently all) African countries as ‘shitholes’ (or, according to some, ‘shithouses’) during a meeting on immigration with senators in the White House (Gambino 2018) – eliciting widespread, often ‘forceful’, protest, including from individual African countries, the African Union (AU) and United Nations (Gerits 2018; Smith and Rawlinson 2018). Why indeed should (or does) America welcome immigrants who were, according to the president, presumably manifestly ill-prepared, by virtue of their origins, to contribute meaningfully to the task of Making America Great Again?¹ Whether or not this represents, as the AU claimed, racism, xenophobia, prejudice and bigotry (Finnegan 2018), or indeed whether Trump already ‘had form’ in this area, as Wolffe (2018) forcefully argues, is academic. But an equally significant indicator of Trump-era US–Africa relations was provided by the fact that, after a whole year, the administration had still not outlined a clear Africa policy nor filled vacant senior diplomatic postings in both the US State Department and embassies on the continent (Schneidman and Temin 2018).² For us at the Review of African Political Economy, however, the significance of this particular episode of POTUS Reigns lies elsewhere – in its affirmation of the need for ROAPE to continue to provide ‘radical analyses of trends, issues and social processes’ in Africa, both in the pages of the journal and, increasingly, across diverse spaces of mobilisation and sites of resistance, including social media (see roape.net).

This last is of more than passing significance. Twitter is, after all, Trump’s favoured means of communication, the one he resorted to with his denials and obfuscation when news of his alleged remarks broke. Indeed, even as it trended on Twitter, the comment was also being widely ridiculed, debated and contested in the blogosphere (Nair 2018) and online news sites, forcing Trump to send placatory letters to African leaders restating US commitment to their continent (Wadhams 2018) as the row threatened to overshadow Rex Tillerson’s planned first official visit to Africa as US Secretary of State (Schemm 2018). Asked by the African press in Addis Ababa for his reaction to the president’s remarks during the visit two months later, Tillerson declined to comment, as did his host Moussa Faki, AU Commission Chairperson, who declared the matter closed, with both men opting rather to highlight ‘areas of cooperation’ which had proved ‘useful to both parties’; instead, lingering disagreement over China’s current and future role in Africa provided the rare discordant note to these public proceedings (Wadhams 2018). On the eve of his departure for Africa, and in the process of identifying priorities of US Africa policy, as well as for his five-country visit, Tillerson had contrasted ‘the U.S. approach of “incentivizing good governance”’ with China's, ‘which encourages dependency, using opaque contracts, predatory loan practices and corrupt deals that mire nations in debt and undercut their sovereignty’ (Ching 2018). However, his attempt to return to the subject in Addis Ababa by advising African countries ‘to carefully consider the terms of [Chinese] investments’, apparently elicited the response from Faki that, not only are Africans ‘mature enough to engage in partnerships of their own volition’, but that ‘[t]here is no monopoly, we have multifaceted, multifarious relations with [different] parts of the world’ (Wadhams 2018).

Faki was right. The United States, European Union and China all play competing, contradictory and, sometimes, complementary roles in aid, trade and investment relations with Africa (Schneidman and Weigert 2018). But so was Tillerson, who would be unceremoniously removed from office by Tweet after his return from his Africa travels, even if the motivation for his initial concern may have been far from primarily altruistic (Schneidman and Ngubula 2017). Most importantly, perhaps, the ‘multifaceted, multifarious relations’ in question are all integral to complex and dynamic processes of transformation under capitalism and imperialism, and thus merit considerably closer and more critical attention than that offered by either Faki or Tillerson.

Meanwhile, and entirely coincidentally, a debate on imperialism and capitalism (thus, in a manner of speaking, on Faki’s multifaceted, multifarious global systems and relations) between John Smith (2018a; 2018b) and David Harvey (2018), which would subsequently include Adam Mayer (2018) and Patrick Bond (2018), had started on the ROAPE Blog (ROAPE 2018) a few days prior to Trump’s outburst. This robust exchange includes, among other things, the ‘changing landscapes of global capital’ (Mayer 2018); the abandonment of ‘the concept of imperialism … in favour of a more open and fluid analysis of shifting hegemonies within the world system’ (Harvey 2018); the ways in which ‘production outsourcing to low-wage countries … implies new and greatly increased flows of value and surplus value to US, European, and Japanese TNCs from Chinese, Bangladeshi, Mexican and other low-wage workers, [in a] transformation [which] marks a new stage in the development of imperialism’ (Smith 2018a); and how and why ‘[t]he missing links in contributions from both Smith and Harvey relate to processes of subimperial accumulation and class struggle, especially at a time that so-called global governance (multilateralism) has successfully assimilated the potential challenge by the main bloc of semi-peripheral countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (the BRICS)’ (Bond 2018). These are ongoing debates over the interpretation of existing theories of, and the advancement of, the beginnings of a possible new theory for imperialism.

Indeed, if Trump was truly interested in why America attracts far fewer immigrants from Norway than from ‘shithole countries’ in Africa and elsewhere, he could do a lot worse than start his quest for enlightenment by considering these debates, the potential challenges of such an endeavour notwithstanding. He would, we assume, recognise global capitalism’s implication in ‘differential geographical mobilities of capital, labour, money and finance’ (Harvey 2018), if only from his business dealings and family history.³ It would be equally safe to assume, too, and for similar reasons, that he is attendant to the existence of a ‘global-scale buffer elite … which the imperial powers generally find useful in terms of legitimation, financial subsidisation and deputy-sheriff duty – even when anti-imperial rhetoric becomes an irritant…’ (Bond 2018).⁴ Alternatively, he would find Mayer’s (2018) preoccupation with ‘the fate of the subaltern and the excluded, the figure of the migrant who desires legal, social and cultural capital’ nothing short of bewildering, given his well-known views on this category of persons and his belief in the need for walls to police or control their movement and visa bans to deny them access outright. But it is the following extended excerpt from Smith’s Imperialist Realities blogpost which must possess the greatest potential for eliciting Trump's infamous response of ‘fake news’:

Yet while most of this is unlikely to even register directly with Trump in his pursuit of his America First policy, much of it remains central to an understanding of – and probably contains the elements for fashioning forms and strategies of resistance to – the types of capitalism and imperialism, and which appear central to Making America Great Again. In a sense, then, roape.net and the ROAPE Blog are becoming increasingly important to the task of promoting radical political economy analyses and debates – of filling intellectual, academic and revolutionary voids.

Nonetheless, our articles and debates in the print and online journal, sister to roape.net in our endeavour, remain central to this task. Issue no. 155 contains four articles and, exceptionally, an extended Debates Special Issue. The issue as a whole also has a distinctly North African focus and a particular interest in class dynamics and social movements.

In the first of the research articles, Pnina Werbner focuses on one of ROAPE’s earliest and longest-running preoccupations – that of class – with a theoretical and empirical overview of the study of labour and class in sub-Saharan Africa since the mid 20th century. In this African political economy of labour, as Werbner rightly describes it, she argues for the ‘continued centrality of identity, class and globalisation to critical African studies’. Max Ajl continues in a similar vein, providing us with another historical overview and examination of an established intellectual and political theme in African Political Economy – delinking. In reality, Ajl’s paper addresses in impressive detail the complex and intertwined histories and dynamics of intellectual ideas, scientific practices and the politics surrounding delinking, food sovereignty and popular agronomy in Tunisia, using the case study of La Via Campesina. But while at heart this is a story about ‘Tunisian accumulation, dependence, and production’, it is also – and maybe just as importantly – about the historical limits to development partnerships.

The next contribution, by Lorenzo Feltrin, is a further Tunisian case study. Its main focus is social movements in the wake of the Arab Spring, paying particular attention to the development and social composition of the social movement which emerged in protest at youth unemployment and precarity in the Kerkennah Islands. There is undoubtedly solid support here for Werbner’s observation that the perceived dearth of interest in, and value of, class analysis is a bit premature. In the final article, Lois Debuysere maintains the focus on social movements and class in Tunisia, but this time on working-class women in the Tunis region. She demonstrates the intersection of class and gender grievances over the long term against a backdrop of neoliberal transformation, and ‘argues that a global political economy has been a crucial factor in affecting and influencing women workers’ “lived realities”’. The latter, Debuysere reiterates throughout, demonstrate unmistakable ‘class-based fault lines’ which, in practice, ‘hamper the political representation of working-class women’, on the one hand, and render the practicalities of struggles for gender justice and (working-class) women’s advancement even more challenging, on the other.

Also in this issue, as mentioned above, we are publishing for the first time a Debate Special Issue. This is a collection of Debate pieces that follows a specific theme, much like any other special issue, although in this case shorter, more opinionated contributions. In forthcoming issues of the Review there will be a similar collection of Debate pieces, with different editors, for each of the workshops ROAPE has been hosting with long-standing partners in Africa on radical transformation. First, however, Cemal Burak Tansel edits the ROAPE Debate Special Issue on the Egyptian revolution. The Debate pieces discuss the ideas of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and their relevance to revolution and counter-revolution in North Africa. Leading researchers and activists debate the process of revolution and counter-revolution, the agency of ‘the people’ and of the ruling classes in times of popular revolt. And, from our website www.roape.net readers can access these articles for free by registering and logging in at http://roape.net/register/.

Based on a close reading of Brecht De Smet’s recent book Gramsci on Tahrir, this Debate Special Issue emphasises the importance of understanding the ‘Arab Spring’ as a long-term process of revolution and counter-revolution within the context of political–economic transformation across the country, as set out in the introduction by Tansel and De Smet. In response, Anne Alexander and Sameh Naguib challenge De Smet’s reading through the lens of Caesarism. Roberto Roccu’s piece looks at subaltern subject formation, probing the possibility of alliances between different actors in the Egyptian protest movement. Tansel’s contribution then highlights the significance of understanding passive revolutions as concrete historical episodes of mobilisation and state formation, while Sara Salem also uses the concept of passive revolution to discuss the continuities and discontinuities within Egypt’s trajectory of development and state construction. The Special Issue concludes with a detailed rejoinder by De Smet, where he restates the importance of using Marxist methodologies in studying economic and political change in the peripheries of global capitalism – a project of theoretical and methodological investigation that is close to this publication’s raison d'être. Our hope is that the first ROAPE Debate Special Issue will be read as a demonstration of the continued vitality of Marxist analysis.

In addition to the Debate Special Issue, we publish the second part of Arndt Hopfmann’s discussion on the significance of the Russian Revolution for the Global South. He considers the legacy of the model of development inherited (and taken up) by movements and governments across the continent from the experience of transformation in the Soviet Union. This is part of our discussion on the impact of the Russian Revolution for the continent that we have promoted on the roape.net website – for example, Matt Swagler’s splendid two-part blog post that considers how the Russian Revolution drew the attention of black intellectuals and workers from Africa and across the African diaspora – Swagler 2017, with Part II due for publication in the coming months.

A further piece by Horman Chitonge focuses on debate over the meaning of capitalism. This is part of a series on capitalism in Africa that we have published in the Review and online (see the blog posts online, edited by Jörg Wiegratz: http://roape.net/debates/). Chitonge argues that the historical context for such a debate today is very different from the 1970s and 1980s – when ROAPE was at the forefront of scholarly discussions on this topic. Finally, we have Isaac Akolgo’s Briefing on Ghana’s economy and the growth paradox. He argues that we must penetrate beneath the propaganda about ‘Africa rising’, where Ghana is often held up as an example, to look at what is really happening on the continent. The 2016 elections, Akolgo suggests, provide evidence of the failure of political leadership to confront the country’s development, as the elite has continued to seek refuge under the illusions of GDP figures and the high prices of gold and cocoa. Once more, we have followed many of these arguments on roape.net with a blog post by Franklin Obeng-Odoom on the illusions of economic growth on the continent (Obeng-Odoom 2017).