ACAS BULLETIN
Fall 2005, No. 71
Critiques of Live 8, Debt Reduction, and African Development Initiatives

“The mainstream of Development Studies has increasingly become, probably unwittingly, an ideological legitimation for the practices of neo-liberal reordering of capital accumulation in the latest phase of imperialism.  This is why it is urgent that we renew the historical materialist critique of bourgeois thought in its current manifestations, and return to examine modern forms of imperialist domination of Africa.”

-- Branwen Gruffydd-Jones (2003: 43)

The impasse and tragedy debates that characterized African studies in the 1980 and 1990s have, as Gruffydd-Jones alludes, given way to a narrowing of the methodological scope of the field.  “Development” is increasingly conceived in neoliberal terms of trade liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and good governance, and capitalist globalization is increasingly accepted as the context for development.  To be deemed “realistic,” development is presented in ways that do not fundamentally challenge the predominance of neoliberal globalization.  Consequently, potential progressive contributions to the field have been silenced.  Critical “political economy,” in Saul’s (2001) terms, has been circumscribed by a neoliberal “political science” that both undermines the potential transformative role of the state and limits the possibility of progressive political agency (Saul, 2001).

The December 2004 special issue of Historical Materialism, subtitled “Marxism and African Realities,” presents a powerful alternative to the mainstream conception of development and represents precisely the type of scholarship for which Griffydd-Jones is calling; a progressive scholarship which is also at the heart of ACAS’ agenda.  In rejecting both the Afropessimism presented in mainstream accounts of the African tragedy and ahistorical models based in neoclassical economics and neoliberal politics, the symposium attempts instead to reinvigorate historical materialism as a methodological framework for understanding contemporary Africa.  Collectively, the contributions seek to “demonstrate the strengths of historical materialism in unraveling the negative forces and processes structuring African realities” while simultaneously highlighting the progressive challenges to capitalism and imperialism in contemporary Africa (Campling, 2004: 52). 

Methodologically, the historical materialist approach utilized in various forms by the contributors to the symposium presents three distinct advantages.  First, it emphasizes the importance of Africa’s colonial past in conditioning contemporary problems.  The fundamental weakness of many analyses of the African tragedy centers on the portrayal of Africa abstracted from its colonial history—a portrayal that both naturalizes and dehistoricizes Africa’s present malaise.  The historical materialist methodology utilized in the symposium permits a deeper analysis of contemporary African political economy by tracing the historical evolution of the continent’s uneven integration into the global political economy—an integration premised on and conditioned by processes of uneven exchange and primitive accumulation.  Idahosa and Shenton’s analysis of the “compromised modernity” of the African state, a function of the precolonial and colonial political economy of governance, builds on precisely such an understanding.  Outside the settler colonies of Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, where relatively strong states were established to reinforce racialized systems of rule, elsewhere in Africa the colonial state sought to order society only insofar as such an ordering was a precondition for the insertion of African primary commodity production into international markets.  Taxes, conquest, and legal systems which drew on artificial and highly romanticized notions of ‘custom,’ ‘tradition,’ and ‘tribe’ were all structured to achieve this goal rather than genuine national development and broader state building.  The compromised modernity of the post-independence state, rooted in the colonial project, thus presented a central paradox for strategies of national development, namely, assuming a state capable of guiding development where no such state actually existed.

Similarly, Bernstein’s essay on Africa’s agrarian questions firmly grounds its analysis in the historical structures and dynamics of commodification established during colonialism.  Indeed, the different historical conditions of the agrarian question in the West and the South—conditions established during the colonial era but transformed during subsequent reorganizations of global capital, particularly during globalization—lead Bernstein to conclude that the African “crisis” is reflective of contradictory forms of “actually existing” capitalism rather than the failure of capitalism per se.

Second, the historical materialist methodology employed in the symposium highlights Africa’s uneven integration into the global political economy.  Africa is, on the one hand, largely peripheral to the global political economy—it is neither the beneficiary of significant quantities of foreign direct investment nor home to extensive industrial production.  On the other hand, the global capital perhaps more dramatically disciplines the African political economy than almost any other in the world.  International capital markets and structural adjustment programs force African states to abide by market dictates, yet Africa reaps little from the purported benefits of capitalist economic development.

Bond’s contribution on the economic and ecological failures of capitalist development in Africa exemplifies precisely this point.  Indeed, as Bond demonstrates, capitalism demonstrates little capacity to establish the conditions for economic stability (let alone economic growth) on the continent.  Rather, the destructive logic of capitalism, particularly in its current neoliberal form, continues to undermine Africa’s future. 

Nunn and Price echo this contention in their analysis of neoliberalism, employing a Neo-Gramscian framework based explicitly on Stephen Gill’s new constitutionalism to examine relations between Africa and the European Union.  In particular, they highlight the shift from redistributive and interventionist approaches towards approaches based in free trade and neoliberal orthodoxy entrenched through international agreements.  Unlike previous EU-African agreements, which decommodified aspects of their relations through price supports, grant aid, technology transfer, and preferential market access, the Cotonou Agreement moves towards the minimal state prescribed by neoliberalism.

Third, despite retaining a focus squarely on the interplay of Africa in the global political economy, the symposium manages to pay close attention to the specific and diverse social forces at play at the local level.  Several of the contributions speak to the constellation of progressive social forces challenging the predominant framework for economic and political organization embodied in neoliberalism.  Colás, for example, uses Marx’s analysis of populism to understand the influence of Islamism as a political and social movement in the Maghreb, especially as reaction to uneven reproduction of global capitalism.  Stressing the need to consider the ways in which political and social authority acts as a mediating structure conditioning the development of local social forces, he emphasizes understanding of the waves of Islamist politics as a historically specific reaction to the uneven development and expansion of global capitalism.  For him, therefore, historical materialism permits us to move beyond purely cultural explanations of Islamicism so prevalent today, while simultaneously cautioning Marxism to take “populism” more seriously.

Raftopolous and Phimster’s analysis of the “Zimbabwe crisis” highlights the breakdown of the liberation consensus and considers the way in which that breakdown has divided African radicals.  In particular, debates over the relative importance of the historical need for redistributive economic policies, especially with respect to land distribution in the rural countryside, and the ideological commitment to human rights and constitutionalism, have divided interpretations of the post-colonial Zimbabwean legacy.  While explicitly rejecting the former, they caution that both sides have tended to underestimate the centrality of state violence and repression in contemporary Zimbabwe.  Instead, they advocate the need for a deeper understanding of the postcolonial state and processes of accumulation in the articulation of progressive resistance to global neoliberalism. 

Moore’s intervention makes a similar point regarding the “two Lefts” of Zimbabwean politics, which he labels “patriotic agrarianists” and “global critical cosmopolitans.”  For Moore, although debates among the Left over contemporary Zimbabwe undermine unity, “Those Marxists who prefer deliberative debate and the consensual pursuit of hegemony, rather than the fantastical ideologies and authoritarian closure when discussion comes close to the bone…know what choices to make.  Simple principles and light theory win the day over compromise and convolution” (Moore, 2004: 421).

Barchesi’s problematizing of progressive social agency in post-Apartheid South Africa also fits into this vein.  For him, urban social movements centering in particular on the breakdown of wage employment in South Africa, have facilitated the development and articulation of “grassroots subjectivities” as alternatives to the failing progressive agenda of the ANC.  Although the persistence and success of such informal movements remains unclear, Barchesi’s analysis nevertheless points to a vibrant and creative social force in need of greater analysis.

For all the strengths of the symposium’s contributions, there are two weaknesses in the volume.  First, as acknowledged by Campling in the introduction to the special issue, the volume presents a “non-comprehensive diversity” that is, to some degree, undermined by the lack of black African contributions to the issue.  Indeed, as Campling acknowledges, the problem is hardly unique to the special issue, but reflects the socio-economic and political realities of contemporary African studies and the historically weak links between African and Western scholarship and activism. 

Second, although unified by a common methodological concern based in historical materialist analysis, the articles themselves cover a dizzying range of topics.  While Campling’s introduction goes some way to drawing out the common themes and elements, a concluding essay which revisited the theoretical models in greater detail might have provided greater unity to the symposium.  Absent such an essay, the volume is of interest to specialists but probably too advanced for undergraduate classroom use.

Despite these relatively minor flaws, this remains both a timely and fascinating volume, speaking to the debate over the scope and nature of African Studies, and in particular to the utility of historical materialism in analyzing contemporary Africa and in overcoming the impasse in development studies.  In the last five years, the literature on Africa has witnessed the beginning of a transformation.  References to the African crisis, the impasse of development theory, and the lost decades of the 1980s and 1990s, have begun to give way to an “African renaissance.”  The renaissance, championed by Thabo Mbeki as part of South Africa’s vision of a new Africa, includes a number of elements: overcoming internal social divisions, establishing democracy, achieving economic growth and development, and ending corruption and misrule.  But critics of Mbeki’s vision of an African renaissance caution that, at best, it is a utopian daydream of what might be rather than a coherent or realistic program to address current problems. At worst, the program represents a reformulation of Washington Consensus policies and the expression of South Africa’s neo-colonial ambitions on the continent (Cheru, 2002).  In either case, the special issue of Historical Materialism presents the strengths of critical political economy in analyzing contemporary Africa. 

Works Cited

Barchesi, Franco.  2004.  “The Ambiguities of ‘Liberation’ in Left Analysis of the South-African Democratic Transition.”  Historical Materialism.  12(4): 327-54.

Bernstein, Henry.  2004.  “Considering Africa’s Agrarian Questions.”  Historical Materialism.  12(4): 115-44.

Bond, Patrick.  2004.  “Bankrupt Africa: Imperialism, Sub-Imperialism and the Politics of Finance.”  Historical Materialism.  12(4): 145-72.

Bush, Ray.  2004.  “Undermining Africa.”  Historical Materialism.  12(4): 173-202.

Campling, Liam.  2004.  “Editorial Introduction to the Symposium on Marxism and African Realities.”  Historical Materialism.  12(4): 51-66.

Cheru, Fantu.  2002.  African Renaissance: Roadmaps to the Challenge of Globalization.  (London: Zed).

Colas, Alejandro. 2004.  “The Re-Invention of Populism: Islamist Responses to Capitalist Development in the Contemporary Maghreb.”  Historical Materialism.  12(4): 231-60.

Desai, Ashwin.  2004.  “Magic, Realism and the State in Post-Apartheid South Africa.”  Historical Materialism.  12(4): 383-404.

Idahosa, Pablo LE and Bob Shenton.  2004.  “The Africanist’s ‘New’ Cloths.”  Historical Materialism.  12(4): 67-113.

Moore, David.  2004.  “Marxism and Marxist Intellectuals in Schizophrenic Zimbabwe: How Many Rights for Zimbabwe’s Left?  A Comment.”  Historical Materialism.  12(4): 405-26.

Nunn, Alex and Sophia Price.  2004.  “Managing Development: EU and African Relations through the Evolution of the Lomé and Cotonou Agreements.”  Historical Materialism.  12(4): 203-30.

Oya, Carlos.  2004.  “The Empirical Investigation of Rural Class Formation: Methodological Issues in a Study of Large- and Mid-Scale Farmers in Senegal.”  Historical Materialism.  12(4): 289-326.

Raftopolous, Brian and Ian Phimister.  2004.  “Zimbabwe Now: The Political Economy of Crisis and Coercion.”  Historical Materialism.  12(4): 355-82.

Saul, John. 2001. Millennial Africa: Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy. (Trenton: Africa World Press).

Wise, Christopher.  2004.  “Marxism, Geo-Thematics, and Orality-Literacy Studies in the Sahel.”  Historical Materialism.  12(4): 261-88.

To the ACAS Homepage

To ACAS Membership Form