Cultivating African Anti-Capitalism
by Patrick Bond
Z magazine, February 2003
When it comes to anti-capitalist resistance,
the most economically marginalized sites are among the most interesting.
Not because the greatest number of militant activists are out
in force-but because the trials and tribulations they overcome
along the way, and the consciousness they express, teach us vital
lessons about uneven capitalist development.
Consider the African continent, where
from Accra and Dakar in the West to Lilongwe, Lusaka, Harare,
Mbabane and Johannesburg in the South, growing movements closely
parallel the most sophisticated international protesters. Their
targets are the same-the World Bank, IMF, WTO, particularly venal
corporations and other purveyors of commodification and exploitation-but
because of conflicting legacies of African nationalism, the going
is slower and more careful.
Capitalism's Legacy
These were, after all, also sites of intense,
bloody resistance to previous epochs of globalization. The British,
French, Belgian, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Italian, and Afrikaner
states, which ran diverse colonies here during most of the 20th
century-independence was mainly won during the 1960s-were among
the most brutal in human history. In earlier centuries, they accounted
for tens of millions of slaves; in Southern Africa alone at least
two million civilian deaths during the last third of the century
can be traced to destabilization by the apartheid regime and allied
forces, including the U.S.
In the aftermath of formal independence,
Cold War politics and patronage battles broke out in and around
many African states, between clients of the United States and
Soviet Union, with Cuba and China playing mixed roles. Under the
circumstances, Africa became a meltingpot of war and organized
criminality-hence, an excellent platform for short-term capital
accumulation by extraction-oriented multinational corporations.
Resistance came in waves. The anti-colonial
tribal-based uprisings of the l9th century were suppressed by
the Europeans' brutal military superiority, ultimately requiring
automatic weaponry. Twentieth century settler-capitalism could
only take hold through coercive mechanisms that dragged Africans
out of traditional modes of production into the mines, fields,
and factories. Rural women had the added burden of subsidizing
capitalism with an infrastructure that reproduced cheap labor,
since schools, medical insurance, and pensions for urban families
were largely nonexistent.
Against superexploitation, Africa's rich,
interrelated radical traditions grew and intermingled. They included
vibrant nationalist liberation insurgencies, once-avowed Marxist-Leninist
political parties, mass movements (sometimes peasant-based, sometimes
emerging from degraded urban ghettoes), and powerful unions. Religious
protesters, women's groups, students, and youths also played catalytic
roles that changed history in given locales. These were some of
the most important anti-capitalist campaigns ever.
For example, the 1885 meeting in Berlin
that carved up Africa between the main colonial powers reflected
pressures directly related to the 1870s-199Os capitalist crises,
particularly in the London and Paris financial centers. The stock
markets reacted as badly to news of, for example, Ndebele raids
on Cecil John Rhodes's mine surveyors in Zimbabwe, as modern brokers
did to the Zapatista uprising and failure of WTO negotiations
in Seattle a century later.
But what kinds of globalized resistance
can be retraced? Anti-slavery was one of the most important international
solidarity movements ever. Later, an attempt was made by Marcus
Garvey to relocate African Americans to Liberia. African nationalist
movements exiled in London and Paris established even greater
Pan-African visions, as well as solidarity relations with Northern
critics of colonialism, apartheid, and racism.
The combined anti-colonial/imperialist
phase, from the 1960s through the liberation of South Africa in
1994, gave leftists and anti-racists (from militants like Malcolm
X and Stokely Carcmichael to church-basement activists) inspiration-although
as Che Guevarra found out during a hellish year (1965) organizing
and occasionally fighting in what was then Mobutu's Zaire, not
all peasant societies proved ripe for the struggle.
Names of that era's leading African revolutionary
writers and thinkers-Ake, Amin, Biko, Cabral, Fanon, First, Lumumba,
Machel, Nabudere, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Odinga, Onimode, Rodney, Sankara,
Shivji-still grace political reading lists and book clubs, ranging
from the world's great universities to political clubs deep in
African shantytowns.
As predicted, especially by Frantz Fanon,
terrible disappointments accompanied virtually all the transitions
from colonialism to neocolonialism in Africa. This is crucial
to point out at a time when blame-the-victim analysis of what
the Economist magazine has termed "the hopeless continent"
is rampant. Africa's worst socio- economic problems are better
considered as deep-rooted manifestations of a peripheral capitalism
manipulated at will by imperialist powers, accompanied by the
rise of complicit local ruling elites. Three sets of closely-related
problems can be identified, associated with what Fanon described
as " false decolonization. "
First, colonialism's artificial borders,
racism and ideological control, ethnic divide-and-rule strategies,
land acquisition, labor control, suppression of competition from
indigenous sources, military conflict (independence struggles),
and replacement by African nationalism together guaranteed a future
of distorted economics and failed states. Second, for women, pre-colonial
patrilineal systems evolved into colonial forms of inequality
(e.g., minority status and legal guardianship), which often persisted
and evolved as post-colonial forms of structured oppression (e.g.,
market-related brideprice). Third, political continuities from
past to present include unreformed state structures, international
political and cultural relations with colonial powers, and especially
class alliances involving compradorism (local sell-outs working
in league with international oppressors).
The economic structure of Africa's neocolonial
societies was relatively homogenous, suffering from international
commodity price fluctuations, an overdose of foreign debt and
"dependency." That structure resulted in uneven formal
working-class organization across the continent, resulting periodically
in strikes in especially the mining and railway industries.
But the forces of law and order were invariably
stronger and treacherous. Racism often flared worst just prior
to independence, as settlers held on to privileges with sophisticated
state repressive capacity, much of which carried over after majority
rule was won. So the post-colonial state was quickly harnessed
for neocolonial duty. This allowed, in turn, Africa to continue
expanding exports notwithstanding terribly unfair terms of trade
(the difference between prices paid for exports in relation to
prices paid for imports).
The peak of demand for Africa's raw materials,
before synthetic substitutes were invented, was during World War
II. From the mid-1970s, terms of trade worsened dramatically,
in part because of export-oriented policies, which most African
countries were compelled to adopt once they experienced debt crisis.
The prices of primary commodities (other
than fuels) have risen and fallen according to a deeper rhythm.
Exporters of primary commodities, for example, have fared particularly
badly when financiers have been most powerful. The cycle began
with falling commodity prices (1973), rising foreign debt (1970s),
dramatic increases in interest rates (1979), a desperate intensification
of exports, which lowered prices yet further (1980s), and in some
cases outright bankruptcy.
This process impoverished nearly the entire
non-industrialized Third World, with occasional, erratic exceptions
in oil-producing regions. For Africa, the trend to declining terms
of trade was especially devastating because of the continent's
extraordinary dependence on a few export commodities. Export-led
growth strategies, pursued since the 1970s by virtually all Third
World countries, meant that Africa's market share also shrunk
drastically.
Meanwhile, willing bankers promoted corruption
and capital flight-in the DRC, for example, Mobutu Sese Seko was
thought to be illegitimately worth U.S. $5 billion by the time
of his 1996 overthrow. The cost of imported oil rose dramatically
in 1973 and 1979 and markets for raw materials stagnated and declined,
requiring a short-term substitute for foreign-currency revenues
in the form of loans.
During the first part of the 1980s, the
World Bank and IMF took over as creditors to ensure that African
countries repaid Northern commercial bank loans in exchange for
power over virtually all aspects of public policy in African countries.
This resulted, uniformly, in austere macroeconomic policies that
emphasized liberalization, export orientation, and an end to social
subsidies.
But incoming funds continued to decline
and by 1984 net financial resource transfers to the Third World
were negative for the first time, as countries spent more on interest
payments than they gained in new loans. By the end of the decade,
the net South-North transfer had reached $50 billion a year, which
reflected the success of financiers in shifting the repayment
burden to not only Northern taxpayers but also to Third World
citizens.
Developing countries found that by 2000
they still had more than $2 trillion in foreign debt to repay
(up from $1.3 trillion during the early 1980s when the debt crisis
broke out and $1.4 trillion in 1990). Each year during the late
1990s, African countries paid $162 billion more than they received
in new loans, up from $60 billion in 1990. There was little hope
of balancing accounts by attracting inflows of foreign direct
investment.
Another crucial issue was the militarization
of the continent associated, initially, with colonial resistance
to change and then to neocolonial power plays that inexorably
resulted from partial transitions. Thanks in part to Cold War
machinations and lubrication provided by arms dealers, many African
countries witnessed extraordinary social, civil, and regional
conflicts ranging from genocide to attempted coups. In sum, debt,
trade, investment, wars, and more recent scourges like HIV/AIDS-exacerbated
by the refusal of pharmaceutical corporations to sell medicines
at affordable prices-all compel Africans to fight for peace and
justice locally, by invoking continental and international anti-capitalist
themes.
Anti-Capitalism Today
Much can be gleaned from specific social
struggles associated with local campaigns by popular organizations.
Many such campaigns centrally involve labor. An occasional catalyst
for regime change during the colonial era was the mass strike.
During the 1980s-90s, these intensified. Organized workers and
the urban poor invoked the "stayaway" periodically against
undemocratic regimes, as well as IMF riots against the lifting
of subsidies on vital inputs like staple foodstuffs and transport.
During the early 1990s, these strikes and riots resulted in dozens
of overthrows of governments, but without ideology and solid organization
of oppressed people, the parties that replaced the ruling elite
kept the systems of oppression intact.
Just as interesting are specific struggles
against local injustices. For example, in mid-2000, when the U.S.
EximBank offered $1 billion in loans for African countries to
import anti-retroviral drugs to combat HIV/AIDS, Africans involved
in grassroots advocacy (especially South Africa's Treatment Action
Campaign) recommended that their nation-states reject the advice
and instead import parallel, generic drugs at as little as 5 percent
of the U.S. corporate price from countries like Thailand, India,
and Brazil.
The fight against Big Pharma was one of
the most important in recent anti-capitalist history, for it forced
the South African government and World Health Organization to
reluctantly confront the power of patent protections in the World
Trade Organization. That fight did not end because Pretoria's
rulers appear ambivalent about keeping five million mainly unemployed
poor people alive (their stance is regularly labeled genocide
by serious observers).
International allies like AIDS Coalition
to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and Medicins sans Frontiers assist Africa's
courageous campaigners to the point that South Africa's undertaker-in-chief,
the mercurial president Thabo Mbeki, reportedly claimed in desperation
in late 2000 that the Treatment Action Campaign was part of a
CIA plot.
Another emblematic struggle is the grassroots
campaign by Jubilee debt activists for the return of Nigerian
dictator Sani Abacha's billions in looted funds, hoarded in Swiss
and London banks. Early success has helped to break open Swiss
secrecy (following similar campaigns over 15 years waged by citizens'
groups and governments in the Philippines and Haiti in relation
to the Duvallier and Marcos hoards).
The British government was particularly
embarrassed by its regulators' nodding and winking at the largest
London banks, which laundered Abacha's-and no doubt many other
tyrants'-dirty money without qualms. This followed well-publicized
Nigerian activist attacks on oil companies, which in Ogoniland
and other parts of the Delta continue to trash the environment
and people. Ken Saro Wiwa's Mossop movement had a subsequent boost,
after Abacha's 1995 execution of the fearless writer, when in
mid-2002 Nigerian women conducted sit-ins at the local oil complex
offices of multinationals just prior to the World Summit on Sustainable
Development.
In addition, progressive local African
groups and international allies have critiqued specific World
Bank projects, including the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline, the Lesotho
Highlands Water Project, which supplies Johannesburg with water,
and the Bujagali Dam at the headwaters of the Nile in Uganda.
Other growing campaigns that link African and international civil
society organizations include the environmental debt that the
industrial North owes the South and the campaign to ban "conflict-diamond"
trade that has contributed to civil war in Sierre Leone, the DRC,
and Angola.
In addition to various oil-related solidarity
campaigns, particular environmental justice struggles have linked
South Africans with counterparts elsewhere over dumping of toxics
(e.g., mercury), compensation for asbestos, anti-incinerator campaigns,
and air pollution. Corporate accountability is the overall demand,
but a much more radical politics lies behind the international
solidarity networks. Likewise, movements against privatization
of basic services-mainly water and electricity-began in Accra
and Johannesburg in 2000 and have attracted great international
support. Their influence is spawning similar campaigns across
Southern and West Africa. The Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee's
Operation Khanyisa (Switch On) illegally reconnects people whose
supplies were cut because of poverty and rising prices associated
with services commercialization. Similar community-based protests
in Durban and Cape Town against disconnections, evictions, and
landlessness have won international recognition.
African networks that build these campaigns
are evolving continually. The Lusaka Declaration was signed in
May 1999 by the leading African social movement and church organizations
working on debt. Dozens of Lusaka meeting participants launched
a process for drafting a mass-popular African People's Consensus
to transcend the development orthodoxy of the Washington Consensus
and the slightly reformed Post-Washington Consensus, and to do
so by building upon similar regional meetings in Accra, Lome,
and Gauteng in 1998- 1999.
The African People's Consensus went to
West Africa in December 2000, via the Dakar 2000 Coordinating
Committee. This initiative took on momentum in a Yaounde conference
in January 2000. The Dakar summit was supported by groups like
the Association des Femmes Africaines pour la Recherche et le
Developpement, as well as numerous West and Central African social
movements and NGOs. Dakar 2000 is networked across the Third World
through the International South Group Network's well-respected
Harare branch and internationally through the Paris-based Association
pour la Taxation des Transactions financieres pour l'Aide aux
Cityens (Attac), and the Comittee pour l'Annulation de la Dette
du Tiers Monde in Brussels.
The Accra-based Africa Trade and Development
Network was similarly active in opposing the United States free-trade
legislation known as the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. Its
member organizations pledged in October 2000 to lobby their governments
to refuse entry into the deal, which provides a slight amount
of market access to those countries that Washington (this time,
the U.S. State and Commerce Departments) deems economically responsible.
This follows similar work by the network
to promote Africa-Caribbean-Pacific unity in relation to Lome
and European Union trade negotiations more generally and early
critiques of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper initiative of
the IMF and Bank. The Trade and Development Network secretariat
NGO, Isodec, is also affiliated to the Penang-based Third World
Network and has consistently been the most powerful African critic
of the WTO.
Along with the Harare NGO Seatini (Southern
and Eastern African Trade Information Initiative), these were
the major African players behind the collapse of the proposed
WTO Seattle Round, working both in the streets and inside the
official African delegation. South Africa attempted to cut a side
deal in the Green Room deliberations of key countries, but Pretoria
was eventually shamed into accepting the Organization of African
Unity resolution that prevented insider-consensus on establishing
a Seattle Round.
Finally, an example of a superb network
in a subregion of Africa is the Southern African Peoples Solidarity
Network. Key participants include leftist think tanks, NGOs devoted
to social movements, radicals from the faith community, especially
in the Jubilee debt cancellation movement, trade unions, and the
Gender and Trade Network.
In January 2002, dozens of African social
movements met in Bamako, Mali as the African Social Forum, in
preparation for the Porto Alegre World Social Forum. It was one
of the first substantial conferences, since the era of liberation,
to combine progressive NGOs and social movements from all parts
of the continent and was followed by African Social Forum sessions
in Johannesburg (August 2002) and Addis Ababa (January 2003).
African groups began networking more actively in 2002 when the
neoliberal New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad) was
introduced by Mbeki and a handful of other African leaders.
The main point to make here, is not that
these and other progressive African movement networks (e.g., labor-related,
health equity specialists, numerous types of environmentalists,
and so on) are advancing strong, mature, ideological statements
about the debt, trade, and related economic oppression they face.
What is perhaps of greater interest is that instead of working
merely through NGO-type circuits, they are increasingly tying
their work to militant street action, as was evident at the Durban
World Conference Against Racism in August 2001 and the Johannesburg
World Summit on Sustainable Development a year later. Both cases
involved militant anti-capitalist and anti-Pretoria activism.
In other situations, however, instead
of synthesizing with mass protest, some local activities undertaken
by grassroots groups too easily fall into the trap of neoliberal
economic policies. This was a logical corollary to the global
rise of civil society discourses, and was not unique to Africa
by any means.
The rise of Community-Based Organizations
(CBOs) and associated development NGOs closely corresponds with
the desire of the international agencies to shrink Third World
states as part of the overall effort to lower the social wage.
The result is an ongoing conflict between technicist, apolitical
development interventions, on the one hand, and the people-centered
strategies (and militant tactics) of mass-oriented social movements
of the oppressed, on the other.
For this reason, there was a more rapid
initial acceptance of NGOs and CBOs within the broad configuration
of forces that reproduce, however weakly, African capitalism.
Donors and reformist international NGOs could justify more resource
flows and international conferencing; African ruling elites could
appear more tolerant; neoliberal agencies could get on with the
job of shrinking African states, now supported by the mopping
up role of NGOs, which more "efficiently" rolled out
the tattered safety net; and the NGO petit-bourgeoisie garnered
hard-currency salaries, 4x4 vehicles, and a certain degree of
local prestige. These elements gave paternalistic African rulers
greater breathing space and when NGOs became an occasional nuisance,
repressive legislation and registration processes usually did
the trick.
Thus by 2000, African civil society outside
the networks mentioned above had mainly been civilized, tamed,
and channeled. In this context, geopolitical maneuvers were solely
between African capitals, Paris, Washington, and London, although
another new player, Pretoria, would have to be accounted for South
Africa's subimperialist Nepad agenda consists of a few key components,
which progressive organizations in Africa have repeatedly expressed
skepticism about:
* Privatization, especially of infrastructure
such as water, electricity, telecoms, and transport, will fail
because of insufficient buying power of African consumers
* More insertion of Africa into the world
economy will simply worsen fast-declining terms of trade, given
that African countries produce so many cash crops and minerals
whose global markets are glutted
Multi-party elections are held, typically,
between variants of neoliberal parties, as in most countries,
and cannot act as a veil for the lack of participatory democracy
required to give legitimacy to so many failing African states
* Grand visions of information and communications
technology are hopelessly unrealistic considering the lack of
simple reliable electricity across the continent
South Africa's self-mandate for peacekeeping
gives no peace of mind, in the wake of Pretoria's ongoing purchase
of U.S. $5 billion worth of offensive weaponry and its unhappy
record of regional military interventions.
Likewise in areas of economic reform,
such as debt, financial flows, and foreign investment, Nepad offers
only the status quo. Instead of promoting debt cancellation, as
do virtually all serious reformers, the Nepad strategy is to "support
existing poverty reduction initiatives at the multilateral level,
such as the Comprehensive Development Framework of the World Bank
and the Poverty Reduction Strategy approach linked to the Highly
Indebted Poor Country debt relief initiative." Only after
trying these discredited strategies, replete with neoliberal conditions
such as further privatization, would African leaders seek recourse
through Nepad.
Yet Malawi's 2002 famine occurred because
the country's grain stocks were sold following IMF advice to first
repay commercial bankers, a telling indicator of power relations-although
one which has raised consciousness and helped mobilize grassroots
protests through the Malawi Economic Justice Network. In Zambia,
the Bank and IMF continue to insist that the Poverty Reduction
Strategy Program must include the privatization of the only bank
that offers black Zambians reasonable service, a mistake that
has provided leftist critics of neoliberalism a fresh organizing
handle on a silver platter.
Nepad's solution to the foreign investment
drought is consistent with international rhetoric about Public-Private
Partnerships (PPPs) in privatized infrastructure: "Establish
and nurture PPPs as well as grant concessions towards the construction,
development and maintenance of ports, roads, railways and maritime
transportation.... With the assistance of sector-specialized agencies,
put in place policy and legislative frameworks to encourage competition.
"
However, most infrastructure is of a "natural
monopoly" type, for which competition is unsuitable: roads
and railroads, telephone landlines, water and sewage reticulation
systems, electricity transmission and distribution, ports, and
the like. Nepad cannot make a case for competition in these areas.
There is, in contrast, an extremely strong case, based on public-good
features of infrastructure discussed in previous chapters, for
state control and non-profit operation. Most noticeably, privatization
of infrastructure usually prevents cross-subsidization to enhance
affordability for poor consumers.
In all these respects, Nepad's core arguments
reflect residual neoliberalism. Just as disturbing, the potentials
for democracy, good governance, and genuine participation by civil
society through Nepad appear slim, particularly after an attempt
by Mbeki to toss out political criteria from a voluntary (hence
already suspect) peer review mechanism.
A succinct critique of Nepad was issued
by an Accra meeting of the Council for Development and Social
Science Research in Africa (the continent's main academic body)
and Third World Network-Africa last April. To list just three
of the meeting's conclusions,
The most fundamental flaws of Nepad, which
reproduce the central elements of the World Bank's Can Africa
Claim the Twenty-first Century? and the United Nations Economic
Commission for Africa's Compact for AfricanRecovery, include:
* The neoliberal economic policy framework
at the heart of the plan repeats the structural adjustment policy
packages of the preceding two decades and overlooks the disastrous
effects of those policies
* The fact that in spite of its proclaimed
recognition of the central role of the African people to the plan,
the African people have not played any part in the conception,
design, and formulation of the Nepad
* Notwithstanding its stated concerns
for social and gender equity, it adopts the social and economic
measures that have contributed to the marginalization of women
The result of such critiques has been
to revitalize the search for an African People's Consensus as
an alternative program to Nepad. To that end, the anti-capitalist
movement in Africa is both old and new, with the wisdom of patience
borne of fighting colonial and imperial powers for 3 centuries,
winning only token control of states-and conversely, a freshness
based on new conditions for intracontinental unity. As a result,
the movement is both militant and careful because false steps
and excessive aggression are severely punished by more brutal
dictators and state security apparatuses than exist elsewhere.
These are some of the grounds for expressing
solidarity with a movement that has great momentum going into
the World Social Forum and whose anti-capitalist cadres are as
determined as those to be found anywhere. Africa Watch
Patrick Bond's recent books include Against
Global Apartheid, Unsustainable South Africa, and Fanon's Warning.
He teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
Africa Watch
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