The articles in this issue are in one way or the other concerned with the state and its function within the economy. ROAPE has since its inception engaged with issues relating to the nature and role of the state in Africa. ROAPE no. 5, published in 1976, focused on the class character of the state, debating which factions of the petty bourgeoisie, or the ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’, or a ‘political class’ dominated it (Cliffe, Cohen, and Lawrence 1976). The state itself was variously labelled by the contributors to that issue as ‘relatively autonomous’, ‘overdeveloped’, ‘unsteady’ or in the case of Amin’s Uganda, ‘unhinged’. In the global North, the state was not regarded as Marx and Engels’s executive committee of the bourgeoisie, but rather as relatively independent of class forces, acting as a referee between capital and labour and ensuring some degree of fair distribution of income and effective provision of health, social welfare and education services. This view fitted well with the idea of a capitalism declining under the weight of its own contradictions and socialism being on the agenda for the near future. In Africa, as in most of the global South, the state, was seen as the necessary principal actor in mobilising resources for investment for development.
However, over the period in which neoliberalism became the dominant ideology buttressing capital’s political fightback against labour’s increasing share of value and the ensuing falling rate of profit, especially from manufacturing, the order of the day has been to force the state to retreat. Financial liberalisation, the privatisation of state assets, the subcontracting of public functions to private enterprises, curbs on public expenditure, and laws curtailing the rights of trades unions were the building blocks of a process that saw capital recapture a greater share of value. These policies were not only pursued by governments but also became the key parts of the policy instructions to countries of the global South seeking help from the international financial institutions, along with other ‘liberalisation’ measures concerned with exchange rates, capital flows and trade. Yet these recommendations flew in the face of the history of the very successful East Asian economies, especially South Korea, examples of a ‘developmental state’ in which investment was directed by a technocratic elite to specific productive activities as part of a manufacturing industrial and rural development growth strategy involving parallel state investment in education, skills and social welfare.
The state under neoliberal capitalism has been undergoing a process of what can best be called colonisation by capital such that the interests of the dominant global capital, both financial and industrial, were effectively aligned with those of the state. Now commonly known as ‘state capture’, this alignment has been enabled by the ‘revolving door’ through which political figures move into business and back into politics and vice versa, by business lobbying, by business funding of political parties at election time, and, as a consequence of privatisations and subcontracting of public services, by an increasingly systemic relationship between capital and the state. There have always been close relations between powerful business lobbies and governments, but nowhere near as blatant and corrupt as they have become.
Today, the neoliberal project is under attack as never before, especially in the global South as its failure to achieve real structural change becomes increasingly evident. Even in the global North, it is clear that especially since the 2007–08 financial crash, there has been a failure to deal with the causes of that crisis and a new one is predicted to be imminent. For the countries of the African continent, the ‘developmental state’ is looking an attractive label to adopt, even if the policies that are being pursued by those countries that adopt it, with the possible exception of Ethiopia, do not encompass the range and intensity of execution that characterised East Asian developmental states.
The research articles in this issue relate to many of these themes, and especially in the case of the first three, to the ways in which global corporate power manipulates the state in its own interest, supplanting previously national capitalist class influence over government policy. In Malawi, Julia Smith and Kelley Lee show how the colonial and post-colonial states have pursued policies that have been in the interests of the tobacco industry. In the colonial period, policy detrimental to the growing number of smallholder growers was determined in favour of estate owners and tobacco companies. With independence, as some of the estates passed to political allies of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda, policy reinforced their new economic power once again to the disadvantage of the smallholders, both in terms of the price they received and the quality of leaf they were permitted to grow. The increasing domination of the global industry by a few tobacco corporates then led to the state-supported growth of contract farming, once again ensuring that the estate producers and the global corporates took a larger share of value. They also gained sufficient power to prevent the state from challenging them by changing policies in favour of smallholders. The authors point to another aspect of state capture which emphasises the importance to the Malawian economy of tobacco cultivation even though Malawians receive little of the value, with the corporates blaming the anti-smoking lobby for falling demand and lower prices.
‘State capture’ is a phrase which in South Africa came to be associated with the relationship between the Gupta family and their business activities and the then state president, Jacob Zuma. Less attention has been given to other global and local interests that have been given favourable status in that country and which can also be seen as state capture. David Masondo documents the way in which the South African motor industry has been subsidised by what he terms the ‘business nanny state’ as opposed to the ‘developmental state’ under which banner this policy sometimes has appeared. Unlike a development state which directs investment, in partnership with enterprises and with the agreement of the capitalist class, to specific areas of the economy in order to, for example, maximise upstream and downstream linkages, the state in this case can only impact on the levels of production and exports. Masondo argues that what South Africa’s Motor Industry Development Programme has done is to reinforce the business strategy of the global motor corporations that control the industry, a strategy which ensures their profits by lowering production costs through state incentives, subsidies and lowering of tariffs so that more production is located in the country. In the case of South Korea, for example, vehicles were produced under licence to begin with, but the developmental state ensured that these domestic producers could acquire and develop the technology not only to produce the whole car, rather than just assemble imported parts, but could also develop automobile technology further so as to produce new locally designed models, thus keeping more of the value within the economy. Masondo shows that the original domestic automobile industry operating under licences from foreign corporates did not follow the South Korean path but was allowed to be subsumed into the strategies of the dominant global firms whose continued presence in the country was assured through state financial support.
The consequence of neoliberal market ‘freedoms’ is that global corporations, like those controlling the South African motor industry, are able to move capital around the world wherever it can generate the highest returns, with the supplicant governments offering financial incentives to compensate for higher start-up or operating costs. Hence there has been a call, especially from progressive quarters, for instituting capital controls. Ilias Alami examines the history of capital controls and in particular their class character in reproducing capitalist social relations. He argues that it is important to discover the class dynamics behind capital controls especially given the calls from trades unions and progressive groups and academics for controls over the flows of money-capital across borders. Whereas previous capital controls under the apartheid state were necessary to maintain state power in the interests of Afrikaner capital, for any new capital controls to be progressive, they would have to have the objective of transformation of social relations with a greater empowerment of labour. The range of policy measures which Alami suggests to achieve this objective, involving as they would substantial regulation of foreign exchange and other financial markets, does raise the question of how far state capture has gone that would prevent such policies even being proposed by a South African government (or most others around the world). The political question of how to mobilise popular support for such policies in the face of global capital mobility remains as yet unanswered.
The state, whether captured or not, interacts with its citizens in many guises. One is through the collection of taxes. In a fascinating account of boat traders and their relations with state agents on the River Congo in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Maria Eriksson Baaz, Ola Olsson and Judith Verweijen show how payments to different state authorities on the river by boat traders carrying goods and people along the river are regarded by the traders as legitimate taxes and the extent to which they regard such payments as official, the DRC authorities having made certain payments illegal. In spite of their illegality, many of these payments are still made to recognised state authorities such as military personnel stationed on the river. One factor determining the legality of a payment is whether it provides a service worth paying for, rescue from capsizing for instance, rather than whether it is within the letter of the law or collected by state agents. The authors suggest that our distinctions between official and unofficial, or indeed between legitimate and corrupt, are not necessarily relevant or helpful in understanding how such taxes are accepted and how the money collected is apportioned. In this case we see taxation, both legal and illegal, used to fund the provision of services and to remunerate the service providers directly in the absence of a conventional paid employment system.
The Debates section of this issue is larger than usual, as we feature a Debate Special Issue on the ROAPE/Third World Network-Africa workshop on Radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa held in Accra last November. This is the first of a series of three workshops which ROAPE has sponsored across the continent in cooperation with local organisations. A similar version of the second, held in Dar es Salaam in April of this year, will appear in a forthcoming issue. These workshops deliberately avoided an academic character and included a substantial proportion of activists from across the continent as well as academics and those who fit both descriptions. The feedback from participants has been very positive, as is evidenced by the response of speakers and other participants alike in respectively submitting their presentations and blog posts. The workshops have been filmed and we are planning for them to be available on our website. Most importantly for ROAPE, they reflected the journal’s original political purpose: to provide a forum for progressive and socialist activists and academics on the African continent which provides an analysis of African realities that will assist, however modestly, progressive forces in their struggles against corporate imperialism. The workshops also reflect the other founding purpose of the journal: to find or stimulate answers to the question of what is to be done to effect radical change, a question more on the agenda today than ever before.
In the first of other Debates and Briefings in this issue, Adam Mayer writes passionately about the great Nigerian writer Ifeoma Okoye, activist, Marxist and feminist. Mayer makes a clear case for committed and political fiction in a writer who did not and does not shy away from the hardest and most vital questions of her country and age. Raymond Adibe, Ejikeme Nwagwu and Okorie Albert, in their Briefing on the Nigerian petroleum industry, discuss the dramatic and alarming privatisation of ‘security’ and how this deepens ‘rentierism’ and the continued (and escalating) siphoning-off of resources. This is followed by Aleksi Ylönen's Briefing on Somaliland, which examines the recent electoral process while avoiding falling into the Eurocentric trap of a comparison to perceived Western political ideals. Ylönen's analysis of the recent elections, with the enduring impact of clannism and how geopolitical conditions in the Gulf states have affected the electoral process, is a vital and necessary update. Finally, we publish Bettina Engels's review of Ernest Harsch's book Burkina Faso: a history of power, protest and revolution.
In Roape.net this quarter, we continue the debate on the contemporary nature of imperialism, and whether there is now a historic shift in the flow of value from West to East (or whether these geographical categories are useful in our understanding of contemporary capitalism and imperialism). For the anniversary of 1968, we focus on Africa's decade of revolt and protest. In a blog post on the extraordinary events in Senegal and South Africa in 1968, Heike Becker and David Seddon (2018) ask why the study of 'global 1968' persists in excluding the continent.
In addition, debates from the second of the three ROAPE Connections workshops, held in Dar es Salaam in April, continue in blog posts on themes discussed in Tanzania: first, Zimbabwean activist Takura Zhangazha (2018) writes about Africa's liberation and ideological left and the Review's place in contemporary anti-global neoliberal and anti-imperialist politics. Ugandan writer and activist Norah Owaraga (2018) then asks what it means to be a socialist and a comrade. She muses on why ROAPE chose to draw on lessons from the Russian Revolution as opposed to focusing on the lives and work of revolutionaries from the African continent. In other posts on the workshop we include an extensive range of short video interviews with scholars and activists (see Roape.net 2018 for all of these). Finally, ROAPE contributor and activist Lila Chouli, who died in 2016, has had her third book on the history of student militancy in Burkina Faso published, posthumously. Bettina Engels (2018) reviews the book, reminding us that ‘Lila never saw herself as a one-sided researcher, journalist, or activist; her works were rather shaped by her being convinced that these are in no way activities that could be separated from one another – and that, accordingly, a self-designation as “activist scholar” hardly made any sense to her.’ A lesson that we all have much to learn from.
We encourage all readers of ROAPE to visit our website Roape.net and contribute to the debates and discussions online.