Samir Amin died on 12 August 2018, far into his ninth decade. His contributions to radical political economy in practice as well as in scholarship, to the ways we see the world and realise the world we wish to see, have immeasurably influenced the direction and focus of The Review.
Amin was a towering figure of radical political economy on the continent. He shunned institutional fame and celebrity for activism and Marxist education. One of his last periods of activism was in the World Social Forum (WSF) movement in the 2000s, in which he took a leading role.1 Amin saw the possibilities within the WSF of connecting the continent’s diverse movements to a global struggle against neoliberal capitalism. His immense generosity with younger comrades was combined with a willingness to lend his intellect and political energy to movements and struggles on the continent. He will be remembered especially for this theoretical work that sought to apply Marxism not as a dead philosophy – a series of ‘Hail Mary’ formulas – but as a living tradition which can be wielded to respond to the challenges of socialist transformation on the continent. The breadth of his contribution is enormous, covering underdevelopment, socialist transformation, delinking and Eurocentrism.
Amin relished controversy and disagreement not for the sake of it, but because he knew that in debate our arguments and movements are sharpened. ROAPE has published interviews and articles by and about Amin for over 40 years, including the first full article in The Review in 1974, an interview for our 40th anniversary wherein he revisited his work on underdevelopment and dependency among other topics (Amin and Bush 2014), and most recently an interview in Dakar for Roape.net in 2017.2 We dedicate this issue of the journal to our comrade Samir Amin. In the first part of this editorial, we republish tributes from Peter Lawrence, Natasha Issa Shivji, Ray Bush and Ndongo Samba Sylla which were originally posted on our website, along with further dedications from Issa Shivji and John Saul (Roape.net 2018b).
The second part of the editorial introduces the articles in this issue, which reflect the ‘obsolescence’ of imperialist capitalism and consequentially, its desperate need for ‘second-rate propagandistic discourse’ to function (Amin 2008, 49). This complicity between private and public institutions (including universities) obscures, evades and minimises what is central to conditions of existence – nature and labour. The stringent management of development statistics in Rwanda could be seen as an ultimate manifestation of this evasion and it also finds political currents in deterministic notions of patronage politics. The articles in this issue expose some of the myths enabling this critical stage of capitalism. They also point to ways to reconceptualise political ecology and work, and to understand the diverse and democratic alliances, strategies and discourses that bring us closer to our revolutionary objectives. Finally, we introduce the Debates and Briefings in this issue and on our website, which includes wide-ranging discussions on imperialism, capitalism in Africa and critical agrarian studies.
Tributes to Samir Amin
Samir Amin on centre, periphery and the world economy: an appreciation of his original insights, by Peter Lawrence
Samir Amin, already a major figure in the political economy of development, was the author of the first article in the first ever issue of ROAPE, in 1974 (Amin 1974b). As the editorial of that issue noted, the article was ‘a summary of his basic model of the workings of the international system as a whole’, presented at length in his two-volume work Accumulation on a world scale published earlier that year (Amin 1974a). The editorial continued:
It provides us with an ideal starting point: a general view of international capitalism, identifying the crucial differences in the dynamic of accumulation at the centre and at the periphery: differences which promote development in the metropoles and inhibit it in Africa. It is our hope that his work, which represents the most significant African contribution to the debate on underdevelopment, will be studied widely and discussed critically. (ROAPE 1974)
And so it was. Some of the subsequent issues of ROAPE in the 1970s, as well as books and articles in other journals published in that period, endorsed or took issue implicitly or explicitly with his model of accumulation. The idea that a home-grown capitalism was developing in African countries contested any view of the world in which Amin’s centre was inhibiting any possibility of, in his phrase, a ‘self-centred system’ in which value is transferred from the periphery to the centre through a process of unequal exchange where returns to labour at the periphery are less than returns to labour at the centre. Cheap labour produces the exports of raw material, both agricultural and mineral, to a centre where the value of labour embodied in the final product is higher. In his overall model, the centre produces the capital goods that produce the consumer goods for their mass markets. The periphery produces export goods which pay for the imports of what are relatively luxury products for a small elite class within the peripheral economies. Even if some of those consumer goods are produced within the peripheral economies, their markets are small and the capital goods needed for that production have to be imported from the centre.
Re-reading the analysis in Amin’s article is a sobering experience: fast-forwarding to the present, little has changed. Even if there were countries which tried in some way to break with the system – Nyerere’s Tanzania with its policy of Socialism and Self-reliance, for example – they never broke or were allowed to break with the system of capital accumulation in which profits found their way to the developed economies of what we now term the ‘global North’. Of course there has been some development of capitalism in Africa but this has not resulted in significant structural changes to economies. They are still largely dependent on the vagaries of world commodity markets, exporting raw materials and importing capital and consumer goods directed to a domestic market of higher-income consumers, whose income derives from the high end of commodity trading, financial activities and their servicing, and those with larger farms and estates. Meanwhile large proportions of the African populations languish on or below the poverty line. The self-centred economy described in Amin’s article and books has as its ‘central determining relationship’ that of the production of capital goods for the production of consumer goods for the mass market. In the periphery, on the other hand, that relationship is a ‘peripheral-dependent’ between earning export income in order to consume ‘luxury’ goods. In the capitalist developed countries this system had been achieved in Amin’s approach, by a ‘social contract’ between increasingly monopolised capital and organised labour which allowed for some degree of ‘planning’ to avoid the cyclical fluctuations associated with capitalism before the second world war and especially between the first and second world wars. Amin defines the underlying contradiction of capitalism which causes these fluctuations as one between what the system allows to be produced and what it prevents, in its search for profit, people to consume, but argues that ensuing cyclical fluctuations have been moderated by the ‘social contract’.
However, in analysing the system in this way, Amin rejected the prevailing view in both the capitalist ‘West’ and the socialist ‘East’ the idea that development entailed catching up with the developed capitalist countries. His key insight was to argue that given the way the global system worked, countries such as those of Africa were not going to achieve the status of a developed country by imitating their development trajectory, or by concentrating on their raw material export base and slowly industrialising by importing capital goods. The history of the world was not about followers catching up with leaders but about dominant civilisations being ‘transcended’ by peripheral ones as the former decline and the peripheral overtake them with different social organisations. In this case a socialist self-centred development would eventually transcend moribund capitalism. This required an overall strategy of ‘self-reliance’, but one built up from popular bases ‘becoming aware of reality’ (Amin’s emphasis), and allowed for the increasing domination of a ‘self-centred’ system. Of course the political activity required to achieve this in the face of an active and global imperialism has been and continues to be the key issue, and not just in the periphery. As Amin observed:
It is quite appropriate to describe the task of transition thus: transition from the capitalist world system, based on hierarchies of nations, to a world socialist system, which cannot be made up of relatively isolated and autarkic ‘socialist’ nations. Here the true solidarity of the peoples involved in the struggle for reshaping the world comes to the fore, due to the limited prospects for progress in the Third World where the conditions for transcending advanced capitalism express nothing more than the weakness of the forces of socialism at the centre of the system (Amin 1974b, 20).
Amin regarded the China of the Cultural Revolution as addressing this issue and indeed although China developed in a way that Amin may not have foreseen there is some basis for the view that it did first ensure an autocentric development path, only engaging with global capitalism when it was in a strong position to do so. Much has changed in China since 1974, as is the case across the world. We are now possibly in an even less favourable phase of world history. The contradictions of capitalism at the centre are being resolved in ways which inhibit the periphery even further from a socialist self-centred development. In the past four decades we have lived through the triumph and the crisis of neoliberalism, the global financial monopolisation of capital, the colonisation of the state by private capital principally by the privatisation of state assets, and the liberalisation of the labour market with stricter anti-union laws and transnational freedom of movement resulting in the suppression of wages with the consequent increased social inequality and deprivation. Africa economies and the rest of peripheral capitalism have been ruthlessly subject to neoliberal policies which have made them even less able, even if willing, to pursue a self-centred path.
These developments are fundamentally the reaction to the falling profit rates of the 1970s as wages, after pressure from organised labour, took an increasing share of the value of output. Capital’s recovery of value from labour points to the central contradiction of capital that Amin set out in his article: that the only way value can be realised in a mass consumption market is for the masses to have the power to consume. As consumers’ incomes were squeezed under neoliberalism, this contradiction was resolved by increasing credit to consumers which led to the financial crash of 2007/8 and can only lead to another financial crash, which some believe is imminent. Underlying these developments is increased automation, computerisation and robotisation which reduces the need for physical labour, creates ever cheaper durable consumption goods and leads to a contradiction between technology and the way society is organised, or as Marx would have put it, between the productive forces and the relations of production.
Samir Amin’s later writings (see, for example, The implosion of contemporary capitalism, Amin 2013) clearly recognised the changes that the world had seen since 1974 outlined above, but his conception of the period since 1974 as a long crisis of capitalism and his advocacy of peripheral countries ‘delinking’ from the global economy, more fully discussed in John Saul’s contribution (‘On Samir Amin … and the importance of “delinking”’, Roape.net 2018b) and touched on by Ray Bush, do find their origin in his work four decades earlier. It is a mark of the power of his original insights that they are as relevant today as they were then.
Peter Lawrence, Manchester, 19 August 2018
A letter to Samir Amin, by Natasha Issa Shivji
Dear Samir Amin,
I write this as if you were still here amongst us, for an individual such as yourself who has lived for a continent remains alive well after their death. You will not be lost in histories past, you will not be deemed irrelevant by futures to come, you will stay here in the material present as we struggle for the continent you committed your life to.
As a young lecturer in 2009 I recall desperately looking for books, articles, and ideas to use for teaching in my history classrooms. Ideas produced within the continent, ones that did not simply regurgitate the formulas of the West. My sweet encounter with Global history: a view from the South (Amin 2010) was all I needed. I read your work alongside Walter Benjamin, writing histories in spaces of contradiction, histories of the oppressed in worlds shaped by the demands and exploits of capital. How are we to struggle to produce ideas on our own terms? I used these methods in my classes; methods that belonged to our history, relevant to our struggles that revolutionaries such as yourself had the audacity to speak of. Producing a framework relevant to our context wasn’t simply a parallel project to the Eurocentric view of the world, but it was in direct opposition to it. A view from the global South was a history of the oppressed as a weapon against oppression, it did not fashionably sit side-by-side by Eurocentrism as an ‘alternative’, but it was indeed a confrontation with the assumptions of an Africa without history. An affirmation of an Africa that was complex and an Africa that was coerced into capitalistic social relations but found hope in the oppressed.
This was important for the young lecturer making sense of our history to a group of undergraduate students. It was important not to romanticise our futures as alternatives to the West, but not to become so pessimistic as to lose hope in the struggles that lay before us. It was precisely because of our contradictions that we found pockets of resistance everywhere. Class was not merely an imported Marxian term, but a lived history which we saw everywhere on the edges of capital in our world, in our shared history. It made sense to us through your writings.
Soon after, I was elated when I met you at the University of Dar es Salaam campus in the Nkrumah Hall in 2010, overflowing with students and a few lecturers who still believed in the importance of ideas. We eagerly listened to the exchanges from the high table adorned with bouquets and coloured cloth. Samir Amin, you sat in the audience with your simple cloth bag, attentively listening with the rest of us. The talk was on pan-Africanism, a topic dear to us all as it held the dream of unity, for the continent. The question for all of us was clear: whose unity? What was the basis of this unity? Our questions were not answered in the hall. In the naiveté of a young person but with the courage that comes with naiveté, I stood up and questioned the cultural unity that was being celebrated by one speaker, the oneness of Africa premised on its cultural heritage and riches. The assumptions of an ‘African’ way of being, an untouched history, stagnant and unresponsive to the exploits of the world, encapsulated by the fragile bubble of culture. I asked, what of the political unity Kwame Nkrumah spoke of? What of the anti-imperialist motive of a pan-African vision and what of a shared history of oppression? Were these not more urgent in constructing our pan-African vision? I sat down, and Samir Amin took the floor in agreement with the young woman who had just spoken before him. I vainly cling on to that memory to this day.
In very few words you reminded us that we did not have the luxury to speak of cultural unities in an unequal world, for we did not share one culture. Pan-Africanism ought to be a project of the oppressed of Africa against imperialism and its compradors. Pan-Africanism was not merely a celebration of who we were as a people but a forced assertion of our existence in the form of resistance. Pan-Africanism must be thought of as a political project from below, as a class project in defence of the peasantry and working people and as an anti-imperialist project birthed from the nationalist movements. Asserting our intellect not merely as cultural artefacts but as political social beings strategising a revolutionary future. Flowers did not adorn you nor did colour cloth!
I started my PhD studies with a proposal of intellectual histories of Islam and Africa as political projects, writing of the tributary mode of production and the destruction of Islamic city-state formations. I was enthralled by the depth of these histories and the immensity of these worlds. However, these worlds brought us to a political present, one where superficial binaries concealed economic contradictions, where the world was polarised between the Orient Muslim and the modern non-Muslim. Who was the oppressed? What did Political Islam come to mean in our world? As I grappled with these questions I met you once again in 2015 at the CODESRIA General Assembly.
Once again, a brightly decorated panel accommodated speakers discussing Political Islam in Africa. Once again you were seated in the audience. This time not so patient with the discourse! You intervened in the discussion showing no sympathy for the advance of Islam on the continent as a political project or an alternative. Political Islam, at best, was a cultural project that concealed the class character of our societies, that if given the chance would act as all purely cultural projects have acted historically, reactionary and against the oppressed masses. Political Islam, you emphasised, was not a movement of the oppressed, it was an identity that sought a piece of the capitalist pie and at best it was a sigh of the oppressed, quickly coopted by the logic of the forces it sought to oppose.
You live on, Samir Amin, your life and your ideas live on – not in dusty bookshelves nor in adorned panel discussions with coloured cloth but in our imagination of a more just world and in the fight against oppression.
Natasha Issa Shivji, Dar es Salaam, 13 August 2018
Samir Amin: An appreciation, by Ray Bush
I met Samir Amin only once. I was lucky though, as our meeting was spread over three days at a conference and I later interviewed him by telephone for ROAPE. I described him to friends and colleagues, who heard that I had been fortunate enough to spend time with him, as indefatigable – he would stride out ahead of the group to locate the baladi (local) place to eat and places to visit. He was trenchant in his defence of the working class and peasantry, full of energy and ideas and he was engaged with not only theory and concepts but with people and those downtrodden by capitalism. Thus, his energy and appetite for life, which was contagious, led him to understand people’s conditions of existence wherever he was. That was very clear. He was a sympathetic and humorous comrade who clearly drew inspiration for his Marxism from the lessons he was always learning by his engagement with people.
Of course, there was also a steely side, that did not let bullshit pass without critical comment. He chastened a government minister of a city state where our meeting took place and corrected him on his idiocy regarding free trade as a vehicle for promoting development in the global South. Samir Amin was clear. Since 1970 we have been living in a period of ‘generalised monopoly capitalism’ – where monopoly capital controls everything, all sectors of life which have now reduced to zero the relative autonomy of agriculture and industry to the gains of imperialist monopoly rent. This has intensified and since 1970 there has been a qualitative change in capitalism different from an earlier period of crisis between the 1880s and World War II.
He was clear that the internal contradictions of capitalism and financialisation were ruinous for the global South , falling rates of growth in the capitalist centre by more than a half in the period after the 70s drove an intensification of imperialist rent, that capitalism was now largely anonymous, abstract capital in contrast to being more easily identified with the monied families of the early 20th century, needed to be understood in terms of how it is created and its consequences and it also needs to be ruthlessly challenged by the left. But the imperialist triad of the USA, EU and Japan manages the world system and dominates in the areas of technology, access to resources, the creation and reproduction of a monetary and financial system of exploitation, dominance of the media and of course the armaments industry.
He saw China as a vehicle for contesting the dominance of the triad, as he said he was probably the most frequent visitor to most parts of China of anyone on the left and China was crucial in advancing a polycentric world. Amin’s (1974a) insights from his memorable and persistently important Accumulation on a world scale need to be set alongside his optimism for moving from global capitalism to global socialism and communism. A vehicle to do that was to advance autocentred development in the South – an initially inward-looking strategy to advance a form of delinking. But delinking did not mean a crude autarky. It was instead to help fashion a sovereign popular project: one that could emerge from new historical blocs to counter the comprador bourgeoisie in Africa that has always benefited from imperialism. The agenda for the left was always to analyse the contradictions of capitalism, to identify what different class interests demanded and to then be clear about developing counter strategies to quash the triad and their cronies in the global South. To do that required what he called independent initiatives that would vary depending on the different socio-historical circumstances and different local experiences. Sadly, we will miss Samir Amin’s insights as to how the exciting prospect of generating sovereign popular projects to challenge imperialism might be developed.
Ray Bush, Leeds, 18 August 2018
Tribute to the great master, comrade and brother Samir Amin, by Ndongo Samba Sylla
Samir Amin (1931–2018) was one of the thinkers of the global South who contributed decisively to starting the epistemological break with the Eurocentric discourse that permeates the social sciences and humanities. His passing on 12 August is a huge loss for his family, friends, collaborators and many sympathisers around the world. As much as the Marxist intellectual/Communist militant was exceptional with an uncompromising ethical commitment, Samir was also humble, obliging and generous. It was a privilege to have been able to collaborate with this father figure and ardent fighter for the internationalism of the peoples who always signed his emails with the mention ‘fraternally’.
It seems appropriate to reproduce the substance of the introduction that I brought during his lifetime and in his presence on 25 October 2014 at the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar. That day, Demba Moussa Dembélé, in collaboration with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, organised a ceremony in honour of Samir Amin that brought together African intellectuals, diplomats, politicians, students, etc. These are words I spoke on this occasion, which seem to me even more relevant today than ever:
Taking advantage of the opportunity given to me here, I will, with much modesty, try to articulate the intellectual scope of our dear Professor and what I have learned from his teachings. You will understand in a certain way that this is a talk of a student who wandered about with ‘Aminian intuitions’ before having been properly invigorated following the discovery and reading of the writings of Samir Amin.
What fascinates us with Samir Amin is to a certain extent his ‘indiscipline’. Indiscipline in a double sense. First, his thinking goes beyond existing academic divisions. Samir Amin has mobilised in his research knowledge that is relevant to areas such as history, politics, philosophy, anthropology, sociology of culture, sociology of religions, etc. Since his scientific contributions transcend the field of economics, it is reductive, therefore, to call him an ‘economist’. And all the more so because we know the definition he gives of the ‘economist’, namely a ‘sincere believer convinced of the virtues of liberalism’.
Second, it must be said that Samir Amin occupies a rebel position in the Marxist citadel, an aspect often ignored. His point of view has always been that being a Marxist means starting from Marx, not stopping at Marx. Amin’s problem with many Western Marxists is either that they did not try to go beyond Marx or, if so, they were not able to lucidly appreciate the analytical implications of the intrinsically imperialist nature of historical capitalism. On the intellectual level, writes Amin, ‘historical Marxism and the left in general are poorly equipped to face the challenge of globalisation.’
If Samir Amin is a prolific thinker, it is because he is at first an undisciplined thinker. The original syntheses he produced and the new breath he brought to the theory of development would not be possible without an attitude of epistemological vigilance which consists in refusing the inconsiderate worship of idols, even if they are comforting on a psychological and ideological levels.
What must also be said about Amin is that he is a systematic thinker. By this I mean that he is one of the few intellectuals capable of proposing great theoretical syntheses which start from a careful examination of historical facts, which are based on coherent reasoning from beginning to end, which makes it possible to understand from a new angle the world in which we live and which continues to keep their relevance with the unfolding of historical time. His scientific work is therefore quite the opposite of standard economics theorists who have the license not to discuss the theoretical assumptions of their models, to disregard reality in the construction of their models, to ignore new facts that may refute them and not to scrutinise their analytical implications. Indeed, for standard economics, normal science consists in the enhancement of the ‘epistemology of ignorance’ (to use a concept of the Jamaican-American philosopher Charles Wade Mills).
It is not my purpose to go into the details of Amin’s scientific contributions. I will confine myself to indicating some lessons which seem to me essential.
From his earliest publications, Amin defended the thesis that capitalism should be understood as a global system with specific historical properties. One of them concerns the new relationship it introduces between the economic on the one hand, the political and the ideological on the other. Amin rightly observes that the law of value, the fact that the economy dictates its law in all social spheres, operates only in the capitalist system. In earlier systems, as he emphasises, power commanded wealth. With capitalism, it is wealth that now commands power. This inversion, far from being a violation of the canons of historical materialism, is illustrative of the subtlety of a thought attentive to the qualitative changes that punctuate historical evolution. In insisting on the historical specificity of the law of value, Samir Amin allows us to see, following Marx, that capitalism is accompanied by a form of alienation (commodity fetishism) which differs from the preceding forms of alienation of a religious type. It also protects us from the temptation to apply the laws of capitalism to the historical systems that preceded it. A trap in which most neoclassical economists fall: for example, in the latest book by Thomas Piketty who claims to talk about capitalism, yet there are charts that show the evolution of the global rate of return on capital before and after tax, from Antiquity to the present day!
One of the most important characteristics of the capitalist system, as opposed to the type of historical system that preceded it, and to which Samir Amin gave the name of ‘tributary mode of production’, is its polarising nature. In other words, capitalism is a system which, far from homogenising the world under the rule of the law of value, creates and magnifies by necessity the economic inequalities between the countries of the centers and those of the peripheries. Indeed, the capitalist system is intrinsically imperialist. Imperialism, says Samir Amin in contradistinction to Lenin, is not the supreme stage of capitalism. Imperialism is inscribed in the DNA of capitalism. Moreover, its processes have evolved historically: from imperialisms in plural – that is, competing imperialist powers – we moved to a collective imperialism of the Triad (United States, Europe and Japan). By insisting on the specifics of contemporary imperialism, Samir Amin distanced himself very early from the rather vague and nebulous theories of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, authors who defend the idea of an ‘Empire’ without imperialists.
As part of his conceptualisation of historical capitalism, Samir Amin could not help tackling Eurocentrism. As an important aspect of the dominant ideology, Eurocentrism has the function of hiding the true nature of the capitalist system, including its imperialist foundations and the form of alienation it produces, to distort the history of its genesis via its insistence on European exceptionalism, and to mask its polarising character. Through his criticism of Eurocentrism and the culturalist reactions that it provoked, Amin was able to highlight its racist cultural foundations, its ideological nature as well as its scientific limitations.
If Samir Amin offered one of the most penetrating and original critiques of ‘scientific capitalism’ (a humorous phrase I borrow from James Ferguson) he also pointed out what alternative paths can lead the ‘wretched of the earth’ towards the authentic human civilisation that capitalism can only refuse them. At this point, we arrive to the Aminian reflections around ‘delinking’: a concept that does not mean an autarchic retreat but rather ‘a strategic inversion in the vision of internal/external relations, in response to the unavoidable requirements of a self-centered development’.
The ‘delinking’ program is based on the observation that there can be no economic ‘catch-up’ within the capitalist system. For one simple reason: what exacerbates the polarisation between centers and peripheries is the fact that globalisation operates only in two dimensions – capital flows on one side, goods and services flows on the other – and does not concern labour movements. If the peripheral countries, about 80% of the world’s population, want to ‘catch up by imitating’ the countries of the centers, they would have to find, according to Amin, five to six new Americas in order to reduce their structural surplus of manpower. To ‘delink’ for the countries of the peripheries thus supposes to break out of the illusion of ‘catching up’. Indeed, as Samir Amin says, when one realises, by virtue of the law of worldwide value, that the reproduction of the Western ‘model’ is impossible to realise in the global South, then it will be necessary to turn towards alternatives.
Yet, on this point, Samir Amin teaches us that the delinking strategies that were successful yesterday are not necessarily valid today. These must take into account the transformations of the capitalist/imperialist system. In the past, industrialisation could be an acceptable indicator of economic development. Nowadays, this is not necessarily the case because countries have been able to industrialise while remaining peripheral. So, according to Samir Amin, the opposition industrialised countries/non-industrialised countries has now lost its empirical relevance.
The struggle today for the peoples of the peripheries is, according to Amin, to put an end to the ‘five monopolies’ exercised by the Triad, which are the basis of the polarising dynamics characteristic of contemporary capitalism. These include the monopoly of weapons of mass destruction, the monopoly of technologies, the control of financial flows, the monopoly of access to the planet’s natural resources and the monopoly of communications. Tackling these monopolies is obviously not an easy task. For Samir Amin, this requires ‘daring’, a daring that must be translated in the global North by the emergence of an anti-monopolies front and in the global South by that of an anti-comprador front. At a stage where, to use his own terms, capitalism has become ‘senile’, ‘abstract’ and even ‘barbaric’ the delinking program implies in particular for the countries of the South to defend family farming, via a more egalitarian distribution of land. Otherwise it is difficult to imagine how these countries could manage in a civilised way their structural excess of manpower. This would figure among the starting points for the long road towards socialism.
I will end by pointing out that Amin is also a man of great generosity. Thanks to his sense of initiative, he has helped to set up high quality research institutes (Enda Tiers Monde, CODESRIA, African Institute for Economic Development and Planning, World Forum for Alternatives, Third World Forum). Through his writings, his interventions and conferences, he has never ceased to give and to highlight the perspective of the global South and the wretched of the earth. That he is at the moment one of the leading figures of the movement for a globalisation in the service of the peoples is not at all a surprise, considering his extraordinary intellectual itinerary.
Dear Professor, we will certainly never be able to pay tribute to you for the immensity and wealth of the contributions you have made over the last fifty years. But we will try to keep the Aminian tradition ‘hot’, especially with the younger generations. I also hope that the community of radical sympathisers, activists and researchers will soon be able to organise themselves in such a way as to be able to properly honour you. Thank you for your attention.
Ndongo Samba Sylla, Dakar, 16 August 2018
Articles in this issue: obsolescent capitalism, second-rate propaganda
The articles in this issue challenge official and mainstream narratives in African politics. They disrupt old narratives of primordial voting allegiances and patronage politics, the developmental promises of agricultural modernisation under a capitalist world economy, the ‘natural’ causes of food and water shortage that fall almost entirely on those who have been evicted and forced to base their survival on precarious work, and the capacity of formal trade unions to contest these impossible labour relations.
In South Africa, Mondli Hlatshwayo’s article focuses on organisational initiatives by women working as community health workers. They have been abandoned by trade unions, which do not recognise them as workers, and have instead constructed alliances that include left wing, labour-supporting non-governmental organisations and health organisations. Hlatshwayo highlights the ‘paradox of victory’ for the African National Congress (ANC), by which trade unions and workers achieved a formal dismantling of apartheid laws and gained organisational rights for labour, but economic liberalisation led to massive retrenchments, the rise of labour flexibility and the pauperisation of workers. This demands more focus on workers’ struggles outside the formal union structures, with care not to exaggerate or romanticise their nascent and fragile forms. In this case of health workers, it is a struggle for recognition as employees of the state who receive a living wage, rather than the ‘volunteer’ with a stipend and no employment benefits. Beyond this, the Gauteng Health Workers’ Forum takes influence from the Cuban health care system and debates the reconceptualisation of their role as agents for social change, no longer alienated from control of their work and with the interests of the poor and marginalised at the centre of their practice.
Also in South Africa, the mainstream narrative of access to water suggests a ‘natural’ scarcity crisis that is intensified by a lack of technical capacity in the national and local government. Michela Marcatelli’s analysis, in contrast, explains the structures of enormous inequality that keep the black rural poor from access to water. The neoliberal incorporation of nature into capitalism as a strategy for capital accumulation has emerged in large land deals that overshadow the ANC’s water redistribution programme. In a productivist logic, luxury recreational uses of water, for game farms or private nature reserves with swimming pools, private dams or golf courses, create economic growth and job creation. Meanwhile in small rural towns, shortages of water, sold by farmers to the municipality for a profit, are not perceived as a problem. In the Waterberg in Limpopo, these towns have developed as a consequence both of evictions from farms to avoid the provision of secure tenure for workers, and the casualisation of farm labour, which has also brought in migrants from southern Africa. Work on the farms bring the means of secure access to water, where ‘productive’ use of water allows it to flow unmetered, yet workers still have their consumption limited and, increasingly, face deductions from their wages for this water.
The productivist incorporation of nature into capitalist accumulation has overdetermined Rwanda’s programme of formalised land tenure, agricultural intensification and commercialisation through increased production of marketable crops. In this ‘Green Revolution’, An Ansoms and her nine co-authors question the claims of poverty reduction as well as the sustainability of the project. The authors find that the country’s Crop Intensification Programme simplifies regional agricultural systems in a rigid model to the detriment of nature and labour, while land tensions (re-)emerge in land registration programmes. Vulnerable groups are excluded both from policy making and from the outcomes of increased food production. They instead meet food insecurity and higher dependency on state services, private firms and financiers for provision of seeds, fertilisers and credit. As Rwanda’s policies and plans are based on quantitative performance targets which submit researchers to strict government control, statistics legitimise the programme and suggest it constitutes a model developmental state. The main contribution of the article by Ansoms et al. is to challenge the national data, using qualitative research that speaks for more than ‘a couple of hills’. The authors’ findings have already sparked debate and contestation on our sister website, Roape.net, which expands on the top-down, authoritarian nature of the Rwandan state, development myths, and the realities of poverty and hunger.3
Finally, we are exonerated from the notion that Nigeria’s electoral outcomes are determined by patronage, ethno-regional politics, fraud and violence, a notion that legitimises cynical engagement with electoral politics. Carl LeVan, Page and Ha instead find a class-based appeal that they label as a ‘talakawa effect’, in reference to a Hausa term for the ordinary people or working class who are excluded from clientelist systems. They use statistical methods that diverge from the inadequate GDP measures of economic performance and which incorporate debt levels, internal revenue, negative reports of the national economy and subjective levels of poor economic conditions. In doing so, they draw correlations between these economic conditions and electoral support for the opposition, Muhammadu Buhari’s All Progressives Congress. This support, they argue, is based on his economic populism. The growing cleavage between Nigeria’s booming middle class and the struggling labouring classes brought class-based interests to the fore in the 2015 elections. In indicating the effectiveness of Buhari’s class coalition, they point to the importance of economic policy performance in shaping voters’ decisions and their rising demand for public goods.
Debates and briefings in this issue and online
In the first of two Debate pieces, Dirk Kohnert looks at the effects in African countries of Donald Trump’s planned punitive tariffs against competitors of the USA, considering also the role of African agency and barriers to sustainable African development. In the second Debate, continuing our questioning of class and class analysis on the continent, Roger Southall looks at the apparent growth of middle classes in Africa. He shows that there has been immense theoretical diversity in the attempt to understand this process, but, Southall argues, we need to be guided by the classic issues around power, wealth and inequality.
Among the Briefings in this issue, writing on the dominance of foreign capital in the production of liquefied natural gas in Nigeria, Okorie Albert argues that the rentier character of the state has facilitated dominance of foreign capital in the gas sector, and he collects and marshals an impressive array of data to show this, alongside the dominance of foreign technology and paucity of indigenous science and technology infrastructures in the sector. In the second, Leon Parker and Elsje Fourie discuss how the Angolan government in 2009 announced an intention to revive the country’s agricultural sector with the construction of a series of agro-industrial farms, funded by the Chinese Development Bank and built by Chinese businesses. The Briefing unpicks the downfall of a transnational project, seeing it as an outcome of the fraught resource-based relationship between China and Angola. In a further Briefing, Tefera Gebregziabher and Wil Hout consider the political economy of Ethiopia since the EPRDF, the country’s ruling party, came to power in 1991. The Briefing identifies the rise of an oligarchy, notably through privatisation, land expropriation, and corruption. Ethiopia has recently been in the news with the much-heralded reforms of the new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed. In a blogpost on Roape.net, Yohannes Woldemariam discusses Ahmed’s attempt to take on the deep structural weaknesses at the heart of Ethiopia’s economy and its so-called ‘revolutionary developmentalism’ (Woldemariam 2018).
In the last quarter our website has been particularly active. We have posted further contributions on our wide-ranging debate on the contemporary role of imperialism (Roape.net 2018a). Esteban Mora (2018) argues that while inequalities and unevenness in the world market exist, with both strong nation-states and weaker ones, this is a division based not on countries or regions, nor on geography or ethnicity, but on relations of production. In a challenge to dependency theory, Mora argues that we must unearth the mechanisms of mutual profiting across all regions to see a class-divided world market. In contrast, Walter Daum (2018) writes in the same series that Northern imperialists exploit the labour and resources of the South and this is truer today than in the past. The debate has informed Marxist discussion on imperialism, with contributions translated into various languages and reposted on websites and in publications across the world.
In another Roape.net debate on capitalism in Africa, we have posted two ground-breaking contributions. Milford Bateman (2018) argues that fin-tech – ‘financial technology’ – has the potential to gravely undermine the position of the poor on the continent and to increase inequality while vastly enriching a narrow elite. In another contribution to the series, Tom Goodfellow (2018) looks at the weak foundations of industrial capitalism, the key role of land, infrastructure and real estate in the ‘operations’ of capital in Africa. He argues that continued exploration of how capital intersects with contemporary urban forms can help to bring Africa to its rightful position at the forefront of global debates on capitalist transformation.
Our web page on Critical Agrarian Studies (Roape.net 2017) includes Haroon Akram-Lodhi’s (2018) explanation of the term: its scope, mode of analysis, and departure from the frameworks found in peasant studies or the investigation of agrarian questions. Contributions to the page expand on the food sovereignty debate, found in Max Ajl’s interview of radical geographer and activist Habib Ayeb (Roape.net 2018c) and in Marion Dixon’s (2018) analysis of the commodification of food and the growing power of agriculture and food corporations in Egypt.
We have also published an interview with the South African scholar-activist, Mosa Phadi, who reflects on the legacy of Steve Biko’s radical thought, but also discusses how he did not consider cohesive alternatives that could now serve as a counter to neoliberal ideas (Phadi 2018). In a wide-ranging interview Phadi also considers the political and economic crisis in South Africa, the Economic Freedom Fighters, the failures of the ANC and the possibilities of a solution in the militancy and consciousness of working-class struggle. Continuing our look at the ‘other’ 1968, Remi Adekoya interviews Pascal Bianchini about Senegal’s street fighting years from 1968 to the mid 1970s (Bianchini 2018). It was a period of growth for the revolutionary left and it forced a multi-party system on the government of Léopold Senghor, which at the time was unusual in Africa.
We urge readers of the journal to visit our website Roape.net each week to read some of the leading radical political economy analysis, reviews, conference reports and debates on Africa available there.