As 2007 opens, the world's attention is predominantly focused on the worsening crisis and imperialist violence in Iraq and now, too, Somalia. In both cases, the current context has roots in the contradictions of the Cold War, when the Western powers supported and armed authoritarian regimes (including, during the 1980s, those of Siyad Barre in Somalia and Saddam Hussain in Iraq) and proxy forces (including the CIA-recruited Islamist ‘mujahideen’ which later formed the basis for al -Qaida) in the name of ‘containment’. Now in the era of the ‘War on Terrorism’ the same imperial logics are reproduced, as imperialist intervention reinforces and arms reactionary, sectarian and authoritarian forces. This may be seen as the other side of a coin on which the face value is the long-term promotion of neo-liberal ‘freedoms’ across the globe. The immediate nature of the crisis in the Horn of Africa, particularly in Sudan and Somalia, has distracted attention from this underlying agenda in which the condition of Africa had acquired a more prominent place in public discourse in the West, especially after the campaigns and debates surrounding Blair's Commission for Africa and the G8 summit meeting in Scotland in 2005. These events had prompted considerable public debate in Western media which was reflected in a series of articles about Africa published in non-Africanist journals in politics and international relations. One outcome for critical observers from the left was the need for greater analytical input and the encouragement for more work that seeks to understand the interplay between the political economies of specific African contexts and global intentions more deeply than these widely publicised events portrayed, and especially to allow scope for a greater degree of agency for social movements, politicians, organised workers and producers and activists in all those countries which are, or are likely to be, the object of Western attention.
We begin this Issue therefore with the opportunity which these events of 2005 provide, and their reflection of a perspective which is still contemporary, to conduct a critical review of some of the contours of debate and analysis as found in a sample of non-Africanist journals, taking as examples International Affairs, Global Dialogue and Historical Materialism. In our opening essay William Brown highlights some key differences between commentators who broadly accept the framework of Western policy towards Africa, but criticise the detail; and those who offer a more critical, wider perspective, situating conditions in Africa in the context of global capitalism and the legacies of colonialism. He sees three themes emerging across all three journals, to serve as a framework for his review:
recent policy responses to Africa's development challenge; broader understandings of the development of capitalism in Africa; and the specific debates around the South Africa/southern African conjuncture.
The remaining articles address different dimensions of contemporary policies to transform the character of the apartheid inheritance in neighbouring South Africa. In contrast to Zimbabwe, the ANC government has embraced a neoliberal commitment to market reforms, and seeks to redress the fundamental racial inequalities of the past through the creation of a black capitalist class. The focusof Roger Southall's article is the ANC's policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). Rather than considering struggles for radical alternatives, Southall emphasises the significance of structural dimensions of South Africa's economy and the nature of the political settlement of 1994 in explaining the character of the ANC's capitalist economic strategy. The severe extent of white control of the economy inherited by the ANC government in 1994 made it politically necessary for the ANC to use state power to redress the predominantly white ownership and control of the economy. Southall takes issue with the widely accepted view that the BEE process is creating a narrow ‘empowerment elite’, arguing that, while the process has led to the enrichment of a number of prominent, powerful figures within the ANC, the process has been more widespread than is generally acknowledged.
In the context of ANC policies which have led inexorably to the commitment of creating an African bourgeoisie, David Thomas examines the fate of the South African Communist Party. The nature and direction of the ANC's policies, described by Southall, are a clear departure from the historical commitment to socialism which was central to the anti-apartheid liberation struggle. Thomas details the efforts of the SACP to articulate explicit criticism of ANC policies, yet confronts the limitations of these very efforts. The constraints faced by the SACP arise from the historical relationship of solidarity and shared purpose between the SACP and ANC, which is manifest more directly in the over-lapping membership of the two parties. The SACP's written and practical efforts to contest the bourgeois character of ANC policy are blunted by retaining an insistent loyalty to the ANC.
Does the ANC's project of Black Economic Empowerment represent the logical unfolding of historical imperatives, as Southall suggests, or, in Hart's words, the ‘consolidation of conservative forces bent on working in alliance with white corporate capital to create a black bourgeoisie’? We are happy to publish in this Issue three essays which arose out of the Colloquium on Economy, Society and Nature Conference, organised by the Centre for Civil Society at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa, in March 2006. Gillian Hart, in the first of these essays, confronts the changing stakes of the ever-present relation between race, class and nationalism in South African society, through a reflection on the intense struggles within the ANC and its Alliance partners and the phenomenon of popular support for Vice-President Jacob Zuma, a politician who has been accused (but acquitted) of corruption and sexual violence. While many commentators understand this in terms of ‘false consciousness’, Hart argues for a more sophisticated and historically informed appreciation of the relationship between political consciousness, nationalism and deep historical memories of the liberation struggle. In order to develop this analysis she returns to earlier debates within marxism centring on the notion of articulation. She traces an important development in Harold Wolpe's understanding of articulation, which shifted from centring on relations in the economic base to an analysis of the cultural mediation of class, influenced by Gramsci through the work of Stuart Hall. This informs Hart's analysis of the way in which the ANC has articulated meanings associated with the National Democratic Revolution to its hegemonic capitalist project. GEAR represents not simply a neo-liberal project, she argues, but a re-articulation of race, class and nationalism, linked to new technologies of rule. Part of this entails inciting ‘not only the black bourgeoisie but the population more generally to become “entrepreneurs of themselves”; and making social support conditional on the correct attitudes and aspirations’. The correct attitudes and aspirations involve those of the responsible citizen/paying consumer, and nowhere has the latter been more contentious than in the provision of basic household utilities.
Since the 1990s the ANC has promoted payment for basic services as part of the process of citizens contributing to building the new South Africa, under the banner of Masakhane (We Are Building). A variety of ‘cost-recovery’ measures have been implemented, even in the poorest areas. Prishani Naidoo in this Issue examines struggles which are arising as result of the very direct, concrete social effects of the ANC's commitment to market reforms, providing a detailed account of the efforts of the urban poor to resist the commodification of the basic means of life. This has involved imposing water metering, and charging households for water and electricity consumption. Naidoo describes how, after the initial efforts to resist the imposition of user-charges through payment boycotts, the suppliers have adopted more subtle strategies to compel households to accept the logic of payment, through installation of prepaid meters: ‘with cut-offs, one is punished for non-payment after receiving a service, whilst with the prepaid meter, you have to pay before you receive a service’.
The shift from the radical commitments of the 1970s and 1980s liberation struggle to the current neo-liberal dispensation of the post-apartheid era is taken up again by Salim Vally in the third of the conference essays, in relation to the question of education. Vally describes the prominence of education within the broader liberation struggle and the ways in which the need for education was addressed in a radical manner, as an integral component of the workers' movement. The practice of People's Education developed within the labour movement in the 1980s and served to further raise the consciousness of those involved. However, from the 1990s education has become subordinate to the over-arching goal of market-based economic growth. Even within the trade union movement, values have changed. Experienced and educated trade union leaders find their skills help them to move into management or government positions. The bold promise of education for all has not been realised; on the contrary, user-fees and lack of funding produce major inequalities in access to education.
While these articles address distinct issues in Zimbabwe and South Africa, a number of cross-cutting themes and contrasts emerge. First, there is the question of radical political struggle and its social base. In Zimbabwe, Moyo and Yeros argue that while the relationship between ZANU-PF and the War Veteran's association remains sustained by the War Veterans' organic links with the countryside, one of the key weaknesses of ZANU-PF has been its failure to expand its social base, above all among workers in the urban population. Urban discontent has been mobilised by the opposition MDC, whose trade-union origins, they argue, have become subordinated through its alliance with and influence from Western capitalist forces. This has not led to mobilisation on a working-class platform but to the emergence of ethnic mobilisation and factionalism. In South Africa Thomas highlights that a crucial weakness of the South African Communist Party is its failure to retain and expand its social base among the urban and rural poor. In its loyalty to the ANC it has neglected ‘the task of building a mass base of support opposed to neoliberalism’.
Second is the related question of political consciousness, organisation and strategy. In arguing for a ‘New Left’ rooted in social movements outside of formal political parties, with a social base in the urban and rural working classes, Moyo and Yeros emphasise clearly the strategic imperatives which require the development of clear political consciousness and ‘a new level of ideological clarity’, in order to avoid cooptation and fragmentation. Yet the question of how to promote progressive, radical consciousness among the rural and urban poor (proletariat, semi-proletariat and peasantry, working and unemployed), whose direct social conditions and lived experiences may differ widely, is by no means straight-forward. As Hart's analysis reminds us, the character of popular consciousness arising from and informing grassroots politics cannot be assumed in advance, and will reflect diverse values, memories and grievances. The necessity for consciousness-raising was recognised in the practices of People's Education described by Vally, which have disappeared in the ANC's market society. However, Vally describes how the struggles of new social movements over education are in themselves providing vehicles for raising political consciousness and organisational skills. The efforts of the SACP are constrained by basic but fundamental issues of cost and literacy, as Thomas highlights. The party's commitment to disseminating socialist ideas and understanding is hardly realised, its publications only accessible to those who understand English, and who can pay for journals or have access to the internet.
Naidoo's discussion of the spontaneous forms of resistance which have arisen among poor, dispossessed urban communities in South Africa raises further questions of consciousness and organisation but in a different way. Naidoo describes the acts of resistance and ‘direct action’ taken by poor communities against private companies and the Johannesburg City Council, centring on the very specific and immediate issue of access to water and electricity. How do the urban activists understand their condition? Here we can draw on Hart's return to the work of Wolpe, Hall and Gramsci, in highlighting the role of memory and nationalism as well as race and class in informing popular consciousness. The movements of ‘the Poors’ deliberately invoke a trans-racial identity, as Naidoo emphasises, and are fuelled by a sense of betrayal. Rent and service boycotts were part of the struggle against the apartheid state, and so ‘it was imagined that free basic services would be delivered by an ANC democratic state’. Thus the actions and demands of ‘the Poors’ uphold the importance of water as a basic necessity; in words and deeds they reject and refuse the logic of commodification, insisting on the right to free services. Yet, beyond the immediate understanding of and struggles over these basic services, to what extent do such forms of resistance entail broader forms of political organisation and consciousness? What broader forms of social change do they seek, and what sorts of alliances are seen as necessary – if any? Does the label ‘the poors’, albeit generated from the political struggles of hard-pressed urban residents, describe a historic bloc mobilised over a single issue, but actually in class terms quite diverse, with wage labourers having different though allied interests to those of street vendors or petty commodity producers and petty capitalists of the informal sector?
What is clear from the articles in this issue is that such important but abstract questions of political strategy and struggle cannot be resolved through theoretical debate but demand close, grounded research into actual conditions and struggles. It is precisely such an imperative which has informed the work of so many Southern African intellectuals-activists, including the late Guy Mhone and José Negrão whose work Patrick Bond reviews in a final tribute article. He sets their contributions within the broader context of the question of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in Africa, and underlines the continuing relevance of Harold Wolpe's contributions on articulation. Bond highlights the insights to be gained from Mhone's analysis of the ‘enclave economy’ in post-colonial Africa, drawing on the keynote address by Adebayo Olukoshi at the Durban conference, and points to the impact which dysfunctionality within the enclaves has had on industrialisation in Africa, reinforced by SAPs. The essential links here between rural accumulation and urban growth are followed through in his summary of Negrão's important work on the social reproduction, and potential, of the rural economy, with an underlying philosophy summarised by Negrão himself as ‘the need to understand the historical roots of African rurality, where decision-making processes governing the allocation of labour, land and capital involve economic units where production, consumption and distribution are inseparable functions, and thus cannot be contemplated separately for analytical purposes’. Negrão's search for policy solutions to invigorate the peasantry offers a counter to the global pessimism which Brown identifies in the paper by Bernstein in his review of Historical Materialism. The section by Bond concludes with two personal recollections on the lives of Mhone and Negrão.
There is a clear line of connection between this concluding review by Bond and the opening essay by Brown, particularly in the contributions contained in Historical Materialism. As Brown points out, the nature of the arguments contained in the latter are of a more fundamental, and radical, critical character than most of those in the other two journals he reviews, where the focus is principally on a Western search for effective policy measures which will overcome African intransigence in fully embracing the supposed benefits of globalising capitalism, duly reflecting the world view of the G8 and Blair Commission. However, although many critics from the left acknowledge the need for a deeper understanding of the actual conditions of production, distribution, accumulation and class formation it becomes all too easy, especially for non-African specialists, to see Africa (and Iraq etc) only in terms of the intentions and practices of imperialism and Western capitalism, and to downplay or ignore the class forces, struggles, various forms of resistance, and indeed occasional victories, which are the concrete experience of day-to-day reality in these countries. The lack of agency allowed to local players, politics and interests can suggest that they are mere puppets in other people's stories which not only demeans their reality but fails to reflect accurately how their reality, interests and behaviours meet and interact with these global patterns. Even journals devoted to the studyof African economies, politics and society, such as this one, can be vulnerable to this tendency if the balance between the impact of international factors and their interface with local histories, cultures and power structures is not kept continually under review, with editorial decisions solidly grounded in an African reality that is defined in critical social analysis. A corollary to this is the continuing encouragement of ongoing detailed, careful and reflexive research processes which take due account of the different cultural and historical contexts which inform an African praxis. It is perhaps telling that this kind of detailed research and analysis of cases and trends is more easily accessed in South Africa than elsewhere on the continent, given the substantial advantage in resources. The range of case studies from South Africa presented here (and elsewhere) indicates a complex and nuanced pattern of social, political and economic behaviour and purpose, presenting both a challenge and a call for sustained analysis, particularly by those intellectuals and activists living in Africa who are more able to counter the increasingly dominant Western cultural and media propaganda with insights and perceptions that give due weight to local forms and variants of oppression and resistance. We welcome contributions to the Review of African Political Economy which reflect this dimension, and which thus enhance the balance which we seek.
Finally, we need to recognise that post-colonial and feminist analysis has taught us to pay far more attention to the spaces, opportunities and sources of power and how they are used by the oppressed, whether these be the self-defined ‘poor’, women, ethnic groups or all of these together (though without discarding the class element), than many Western influenced academic thinkers and analytical paradigms have previously allowed. Much of this has been addressed in the World Social Forums, the latest of which is being held in Nairobi as this Editorial is being written. Here we have a unique forum with numbers approaching 60,000 and panels that document the struggles, challenges and achievements of most of the important social movements in Africa today. Campaigners for small scale micro-credit, self-help, AIDS and disability groups, slum dwellers, farmers and pastoralists protesting land rights, trade unionists and gay rights coalitions rub shoulders with those challenging key international processes such as US militarisation, the big pharmaceuticals hold over access to anti-retrovirals, the Monsanto GM debate in both South Africa and Kenya; blood diamonds, the rights of indigenous peoples, resource conflict over the Chad/Cameroon pipeline and in the Niger Delta, in a way which highlights connectivity across issues and demands recognition of local, and even domestic resistance to exploitation. We hope to report fully on the WSF in the next issue.