[T]he debate over the direction of development policy in Africa should be underscored by a historical understanding not only of the institutions that underpin the development of markets, but also of the evolution of the State itself in Africa. African countries should choose their development strategies against the background of the available institutional options and their specific historical circumstance (UNCTAD, 2007: 89).
With its references to historical context, institutional options and strategic choice, the opening quotation is a good example of the more progressive edge of international development orthodoxy. Indeed, UNCTAD is generally perceived by observers of the international development architecture as a less starkly neo‐liberal institution, when compared to the World Bank and IMF. What the UNCTAD observation shares with those emanating from the latter institutions, however, is a failure to grasp a crucial aspect of Africa’s current socio‐economic malaise: that capital is rarely equal to the challenge of forging a process of economic growth which is both stable and equitable enough to lead to a general improvement in wellbeing. And yet, this is the task that it is constantly set by mainstream development economists and the institutions they work for. That this issue is rarely interrogated is revealing of the ideological forces that dominate our times. Instead, institutions, states, social capital, infrastructure, financial/credit systems, forms of regionalism, and so on, have been pathologised in order to explain ‐ excuse ‐ ‘the market’ for its failures to offer much hope to the world’s poorest societies.
It is certainly the case that institutional form, state politics, the nature of sociability, etc., are all very important. But, so is capital. And, it is important to recognise capital itself as integral to the social relations of property, relations that can only exist economically and politically. It is in this sense that capital is as political as governments, institutions, forms of trust or anything else within the development economist’s gaze. The related notion of the market ‐ abstracted (as prices) and/or fetishised (in which ‘the market’ does things) ‐ does not bring the politics of capital into sufficiently clear focus. In an age in which the entire edifice of development is ultimately premised on expansive, efficient and socially‐beneficial ‘business’, it is vital to consider both the political practices of capital and the effects of such practices on other facets of society and state.
In the mid‐1990s, orthodox analyses of South Africa fretted about the effects of labour strikes on the post‐apartheid economy, arguing that they damaged the country’s reputation, increased risk, and discouraged foreign direct investment. Simultaneously, it was reported that both ‘big’ capital and international and industrial capital engaged in a process coined ‘capital strike’ by some journalists, and which involved responding weakly to democratisation or actually moving assets out of the country. But, while mainstream analysts wanted labour disciplined to minimise strikes, capital was not subject to the same austere control. The freedom of capital to withdraw from the South African economy was not an issue; rather, it was the disciplining of labour and the South African state that was mooted.
This vignette ‐ and the apparent paradox of such inconsistent normative thinking ‐ is suggestive. It draws our attention to the ways in which capital ‐ or, less abstractly, the social classes that own property in a variety of socio‐institutional contexts ‐ works politically to assure the existence of conditions favourable for (expanded) reproduction. In short, the fetishisation of ‘the market’ ‐ the staple of development technicians ‐ obscures the dynamic and central political projects pursued by capitalists, whether within or against the state, or to the detriment of the labouring poor.
While the politics of capital cannot be read off deterministically, there are clearly patterns that can be discerned. Especially for Africa (owing to its general history of integration into the Atlantic slave system and late colonialism), the politics of capital is about dispossession. In a variety of contexts, capital struggles to assert its property rights in spaces where the social relations of property are not based in private ownership. The assertion of property rights necessarily requires state power, not only to establish a solid legislative framework, but also to remove people from land, to crush informal and artisanal modes of mining, to secure the evacuation of resources from land, and to suppress rebellions and resistance (see ROAPE 117, September 2008).
Another facet of the politics of capital in Africa is corruption. Here we find once again an exemplar of what might be called bourgeois double standards. Just as the mainstream media vented disapproval at militant labour and gushed sympathy for militant capital, so the World Bank and others have problematised states and ignored capital in analyses of corruption. While it is certainly the case that corruption is practised widely by state officials in Africa (much as it is to varying degrees in many other parts of the world), it is also the case that international firms routinely use unofficial payments to speed up and shore up investments, to assure extremely lucrative investment contracts, or to gain advantage over competitors.
Powerful and significant as these political practices might be, it is still the case that African political economies are not defined in their entirety by the dominant social relations of private property, an ascendant capitalist class, and a ‘capitalist state’ in the sense commonly understood in the West. This means that African politics is more fluid and variegated than a framework focused solely on capitalism in the continent would allow. There are spaces of opposition, the elaboration of different ways of life (or moral economies), innovative forms of hybrid livelihood, and ‐ it has to be said ‐ spaces of mass humanitarian disaster (akin to Mark Duffield's ‘borderlands’) in which the displaced, war‐afflicted and near‐starved live on the edge of extinction.
There is also a raft of political projects which have appeared in the wake of the neoliberal drive to consolidate and expand capitalist property in Africa. That these projects are not directly connected to specific instrumentalities of accumulation should not surprise us. Over the long term, capital immanently shapes and, sometimes, directly engages ideologies and policies in the name of ‘the people’, ‘the nation’ or some other community in a bid to render societies in its image. For much of Africa ‐ under the leadership of the World Bank, but with many other multi‐lateral and bilateral donors, international NGOs, and think‐tanks involved ‐ the premise of policymaking (as well as the latter’s perceived possibilities and strengths) is that capitalism is the foundation of social progress. One can easily construct a list of major policy initiatives that have been devised and/or sponsored by this powerful international constellation of development ideologues: pro‐poor growth, poverty reduction strategies, governance, decentralisation, land reform, privatisation, regional/continental integration, MDGs, NEPAD, etc. One could evaluate each reform aspect in itself and on its own terms, but one would miss something much more striking and considerably more significant. And this would be that each reform agenda contributes to the construction of a larger project: nothing less than the externally‐sponsored social engineering of African societies into societies based on private property, competition, commodities, and monetised interactions.
In a sub‐Saharan context in which a decline in the incidence of relative poverty is matched by a countervailing increase in the total number of poor people, UNCTAD’s (2007) ‘progressive’ formulation of one particular reform agenda, poverty reduction as a Millennium Development Goal, illustrates the politics of capitalist convergence at work. The formulation aims, not only to increase ‘the volume of foreign and [particularly] domestic resources devoted to promoting overall development in general, and poverty reduction programmes in particular’ (p.1), but also to expand the ‘policy space for African countries to design and implement policies that make optimal use of available resources in a way that leads to a virtuous circle of accumulation, investment, growth and poverty reduction drawing on the model of developmental States’ (pp.4–5).
In targeting all African societies, however they might exist in the present‐day, this agenda reflects the power and reach of the politics of capital. The latter resonates, too, in poverty reduction’s self‐representation as a project for constructing a continent with political economies which converge around the neo‐liberal developmental state, the market economy and the individualised ‘rational’ citizen; in its intention to co‐opt firms within the continent with sufficient levels of asset and mobility to its cause, even while enticing international capital investment; and in its determination that the state should both underpin the development of markets and other capitalist institutions and ensure their efficient functioning. Here, then, we have the politics of convergence, manifest both as social progress and as capital working to assure the conditions for expanded reproduction.
Yet, it is not just the state and its capital(ist) ‐friendly institutions which have to be created. The individualised and rational citizen is not natural; he or she must also be created. The processes of the creation of citizens have attained a global reach and display varying degrees of compulsion and incentive. In some parts of Africa, many aspects of governance policy ‐ championed, sponsored, and monitored by the World Bank and its overseer allies ‐ are based in the creation of individual utilitarians. An important example of this process is mapped out by Arrigo Pallotti who analyses local government reform in Tanzania to identify its designs and desire to forge homo civicus ‐ a subject that might happily conform to the ongoing neoliberal agenda, currently expressed through the second Poverty Reduction Strategy.
Equally nuanced examples of the politics of capital and convergence are offered separately by Melanie Samson and Carolyn Bassett, in both cases with reference to South Africa. Through an interrogation of the debate on (sub)imperialism, Samson critiques interpretations of the role of local and international capital based in South Africa in shaping the country’s economic and political engagement with the rest of Africa. She usefully highlights the (neo)liberal communions at the heart of this engagement, and advocates the continuing interrogation of ‘the differentiated ways in which South African investment in other African social formations is affected by and contributes to a re‐articulation of local gender, race and class relations’. This is the politics of convergence at work, something which is explored further by Bassett, who describes in some detail how large South African capital has shaped and forced the country’s transition agenda. Employing Gramscian terms to explain how capital might establish a broader purchase throughout society, Bassett highlights the fragility of capital’s politics, condemned in the current political economy to an exclusivist and unstable form of accumulation that has no space for the poor labouring masses. Nevertheless, what Bassett reveals is a powerful case study of large firms practising political advocacy ‐ an important corrective to the familiar bland references to ‘business’ and ‘the market’ which render this class almost apolitical.
And, it is ‘the poors’ of South Africa that are the subject of Shannon Walsh’s honest and incisive narrative. Partly personal, partly politics, Walsh argues that progressive politics in South Africa contains within it difficult contradictions both between the social components of any political coalition and also discursively concerning how the poor, marginalised and oppressed are represented. Her argument is not a cynical one (that there is no such thing as progressive politics, or that all politics tends towards oligarchy); rather, it is a call for a recognition of these ‘uncomfortable collaborations’ within political struggle. Ashwin Desai and Patrick Bond offer rejoinders to her intervention.
Remaining with South Africa, Roger Southall provides a fascinating and worrying investigation into the use of money politics within the South African state. As in many other states throughout the world, money politics is the product of opaque and covert interactions between ruling politicians, businesspeople, and highranking state officials. What throws South Africa’s particular instantiation of this into bolder relief is its emergence on the backdrop of a popular nationalist struggle and the ongoing turbulence of its resistance politics, as well as the strong racial inflections that continue to plague a country whose transition essentially left property relations unchanged. Southall’s money politics is in essence the politics of capital, expressed within South Africa’s particular transition from apartheid to a populist neo‐liberalism.
This issue also carries two fascinating articles that concern rural societies in northeastern Africa. Wibke Crewett and Benedikt Korf describe the politics of land tenure reform in Ethiopia with particular reference to the Oromo. For Crewett and Korf, the implementation of land reform is infused with political judgement, filtered through Ethiopia’s federalism and the norms that both regional governments and communities endow on land as a social relation. The equity‐efficiency distinction plays itself out to produce a hybrid and perhaps unstable set of land tenure regulations.
A sense of instability and flux ‐ characteristic of so many marginalised African communities, both urban and rural ‐ is particularly prominent in Kennedy Mkutu’s analysis of Karamoja in Uganda. Mkutu brings us fresh evidence of a turbulent mixture of violence, accumulation, and commoditisation, partly through a focus on the ways in which gender relations have shifted as a result of the growing economy of pillage and raiding. Rather than essentialising women as a single group of victims, Mkutu shows how women have both suffered and tried to establish new spaces of authority or autonomy; or, in some cases, engaged with the intensifying commercial militarism that is imposed on young men.
UNCTAD, with which this editorial opened, asks about the ‘true meaning [of] the rhetoric of “ownership“ in macroeconomic and resource management’ (2007:4). Ownership is, of course, one of the mainstays of the post‐Washington consensus, serving to produce sensibilities of a more measured and variegated framing of development from the ‘bad old days’ of structural adjustment and shock therapy. There are now a number of convincing critiques of the ‘operationalisation’ of ownership in terms of its proceduralism, its narrowness, and its ongoing attachment to neo‐liberal fundamentals. But, beyond this, lies the question: ownership of what? If we recognise capital as a political entity, then we also open up the possibility ‐ at least intellectually ‐ of its ownership; or, more specifically, the subjection of capital to social agendas expressed through states or social groups which do not have profit as their ultimate objective, but which are driven by claims to justice and social well‐being (however these might be ‘embedded’ within cultural languages and practices).
If capital is ultimately political, it can be both disciplined and contested. Much in this Issue therefore illustrates the politics of disciplining (Pallotti, Southall, Crewett and Korf). At the same time, when taken alongside recent and/or continuing events in Kenya, Cameroon, Chad, Comoros and the Niger Delta, other contributions (Mkutu, Bassett and Samson) remind us that there remain spaces of dissent, social counter culture, collectivist and cooperative economics. Furthermore, the value of exploring the politics of dissent in such spaces of theoretical and actual opposition to the holders of capital is manifest in the illuminating exchange between Walsh, Desai and Bond. Indeed, this exchange hints at two things: the role that a radical knowledge producer and disseminator like ROAPE can play in facilitating grassroots solidarity at the political and intellectual interface; and the need for a periodic reminder that not all forms of resistance represent progressive politics. The contributions making up this Issue seek, then, to highlight the continuing centrality of capital to imperialist action in Africa, while recognising that capital‐friendly ‘social engineering’, however much it might be promoted as part of more devious agendas, can sometimes offer important progressive potential for debate and space for action.