Anti-capitalism in Africa

On anti-capitalism in Africa (a tentative argument) 
 
Re: article for HM(Here's a genuinely exploratory piece, no dogma 
intended...)
  Cultivating African anti-capitalism

  January 2003

  (very rough draft, comments welcome at pbond@sn.apc.org)


  When it comes to identifying potential futures for anti-capitalist 
resistance, the most economically-marginalised sites are amongst the 
most interesting. This is not because the greatest number of militant 
activists and allied intellectuals are out in force--but thanks to the 
trials and tribulations they overcome along the way, and the 
consciousness they express, which teach us all 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, and because of the 
difficulty in applying historical materialist analysis under conditions 
in which radical African scholarship has been in understandable retreat, 
the going is slower and more careful.

  Capitalism's legacy


  These were, after all, also sites of intense, bloody resistance to 
previous epochs of globalisation. The British, French, Belgian, 
Portuguese, German, Spanish, Italian and Afrikaner states which ran 
diverse colonies here during most of the twentieth century-
-independence was mainly won during the 1960s--were amongst 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 
destabilisation by the apartheid regime and allied forces, including 
the US. 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 melting 
pot of war and organised 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 19th century were only 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, then, of 
subsidising capitalism with an infrastructure that reproduced cheap labor, 
since schools, medical insurance and pensions for urban families were 
largely nonexistent. Against such superexploitation, Africa's rich, inter-
related 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. 

  In the sense that the imperialist stage of capitalism was a logical 
outcome of pressures building up in the early 20th century world system-
-as insisted by socialists like Lenin and Luxemburg, and conceded by 
liberals like Hobson--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-90s 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' 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 globalised resistance can be retraced? Anti-slavery 
was amongst 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-Africanist 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) organising and occasionally fighting in what was 
then Mobutu's Zaire, not all peasant societies proved ripe for the 
struggle.

  As predicted especially by Frantz Fanon, terrible disappointments 
accompanied virtually all the transitions from colonialism to neo-
colonialism 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 decolonisation'. 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 organisation across the continent, resulting 
periodically in strikes in especially the mining and railway industries. 
But at the point of production, 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 not-
withstanding 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-industrialised 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 upon 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 US$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 which 
emphasised liberalisation, 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.

  Moving to geopolitical tensions that rose inexorably under these 
circumstances, another crucial issue was the militarisation of the 
continent. This problem was associated, initially, with colonial 
resistance to change, and then to neocolonial power plays that logically 
resulted from the first wave of 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. Militarisation also 
helps explain why Africa's subsequent, oft-celebrated democratisation 
wave, from the late 1980s-early 1990s, was superficial and truncated. 
Both political and economic failure necessarily followed the imposition 
of neoliberal policies--dating to the early 1980s--whether associated 
with nationalist authoritarian regimes or post-nationalist (pseudo-)
'democratic' governments. Aside from a few special-case exceptions 
(Botswana and Mauritius), neither regime type could make neoliberalism 
work in a world economy that paid ever-declining prices for ever-
increasing African outputs, and that demanded more debt repayment than 
Africa's people could bear.

  These latter macro circumstances--closely associated with the way 
global capitalist crisis played out over the past two decades--plus 
exceptionally high capital flight by African elites, should be the 
contextual starting points of any robust structural analysis of the 
continent's economic problems. From economic hopelessness logically 
follows many of the political disasters that litter Sub-Saharan Africa. 
In sum, debt, trade, investment, wars, failed political democratisation, 
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 firmly 
invoking continental-scale and international anti-capitalist themes.


  Anti-capitalism in Africa today


  What are popular organisations actively involved in these issues 
arguing and doing? Much can be gleaned from specific social struggles 
associated with local campaigns. 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. Organised 
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 organisation 
of oppressed people, the parties that replaced the ruling elite simply 
kept the systems of oppression intact.

  Consider Zimbabwe as a case, for it is here that critics of Marxism 
are often most aggressive. A typical example is The Economist 
(30 November 2002):


  An interesting economic experiment is being conducted in Zimbabwe. To 
the foes of globalisation, President Robert Mugabe's views are 
unexceptional. He argues that 'runaway market forces' are leading a 
'vicious, all-out assault on the poor'. He decries the modern trend of 
'banishing the state from the public sphere for the benefit of big 
business.' What sets him apart from other anti-globalisers, however, is 
that he has been able to put his ideas into practice.


  The reality is far different, as many anti-capitalist activists 
(especially members of the International Socialist Organisation and the 
extraordinary new leftist teachers union) in Zimbabwe can attest, having 
been subjected to proto-fascist brutality in recent years. Objectively, 
once president Robert Mugabe dropped his socialist rhetoric (1988), 
ended the one-party state fetish (1989), temporarily lifted Rhodesian-
era policing legislation (1990) and fully embraced globalisation by 
lifting trade and financial controls and shrinking the state (1991), 
there followed a period of fast-declining economic performance. The 
World Bank gave Zimbabwe's structural adjustment its highest-possible 
rating ('highly satisfactory') in 1995, although massive de-
industrialisation, job loss and the crash of living standards since 1991 
were all by then very much in evidence. The repercussions included 
various types of popular uprisings against the neoliberalism and under-
development that followed Mugabe's westward turn: student demonstrations 
(1989 and repeatedly thereafter), urban IMF Riots (1993, 1995, 1998), 
mass civil service strikes (1996-97), genuine insurgent peasant land 
invasions (1996-97), war-veteran demonstrations (1997), several 
successful general strikes (1997-2001), the rise of a labour-backed 
opposition party (1999-present) and a first-ever electoral defeat for 
the ruling party (2000). Mugabe turned not only to intense repression 
(1998-present), but also embraced a desperate, zig-zagging dirigism, 
including tightened foreign exchange controls, negative real interest 
rates (-150% in early 2003), price controls, and mandatory state 
acquisition of land with threats of nationalised industries and mines.

  As capitalist crisis deepens in Zimbabwe, none of these state-ownership 
symptoms or dirigiste half-measures fool ordinary workers, who when 
confronted with Mugabe's rehashed bogus-socialist and anti-white rhetoric, 
repeatedly vote for the opposition party by a vast majority. As in Zambia 
during the 1980s and South Africa after its liberation, the 'Talk Left-
Act Right' tendency of populist nationalism represents the most banal 
and ultimately untenable mode of political trickery. While there may not 
be alternative electoral options due to the balance of forces, 
progressive Africans typically identify the contemporary causality of
misery running from neoliberalism to authoritarianism. Indeed, Zimbabwe 
is refreshing because once one digs below superficial accounts in the 
mainstream press, there are excellent indications of a post-nationalist 
and post-neoliberal consciousness in mass-based civil society 
organisations. The options they promote--e.g., in the 1999 National 
Working People's Convention (the main civil society reflection on 
development policy), Crisis in Zimbabwe, the National Constitutional 
Assembly, the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (a Jubilee 
chapter), the Civic Alliance for Social and Economic Progress--generally 
require a more robust popular democracy aimed at meeting basic needs. 
Such options would, necessarily, entail a break with imperialism. The 
radical, working-class-based social-movement agenda far transcends the 
limited boundaries offered in the stale multi-party terrain of bourgeois-
electoral politics.

  Just as interesting as country case studies--and there are many that 
inspire admiration for anti-capitalist activism and analysis--are specific 
struggles that draw to the world's attention local injustices. For example, 
in mid-2000, when the US 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% of the US 
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 
Organisation to reluctantly confront the power of patent protections in 
the World Trade Organisation. 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 with greater implications than are immediately 
visible 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 fifteen 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 follows well-publicised 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 organisations 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 Sierra 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 lie behind the international solidarity 
networks. Likewise, movements against privatisation 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 commercialisation. Similar community-based protests in Durban and 
Cape Town against disconnections, evictions and landlessness have won 
international recognition. These are covered thoroughly on the South African 
Indymedia website, which is one of several--Nigeria and Zimbabwe were also 
active by the end of 2002, with more planned for 2003--that periodically 
report on anti-capitalist activism.

  African networks that build these campaigns are evolving continually, 
and several are worth citing at this juncture. The 'Lusaka Declaration' 
was signed in May 1999 by the leading African social movement and church 
organisations 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 1998-99. 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 organisations 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 US 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 Organisation 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 thinktanks, 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.

  Where will these initiatives coalesce? To some extent they do so through 
more generalised campaigning, as in when the Jubilee Africa and South 
Africa chapters helped to catalyse the international World Bank Bonds 
Boycott initiative in April 2000, aiming for an anti-apartheid style 
commitment by investors--pension funds, municipal accounts, church 
investments and university endowments--not to buy Bank bonds. The bottom-
up defunding strategy is inspired by the desire to abolish, not reform, 
the Bretton Woods Institutions.

  But there are also more formal organisational procedures in train. 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).

  Between the big gatherings, African groups began networking more 
purposively 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, economic 
justice practitioners in churches, 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 synthesising 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 Organisations 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 hand. 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 civilised, tamed and channeled.

  In this context, geopolitical manoeuvres 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 civil 
society organisations in Africa have repeatedly expressed skepticism 
about:


  . privatisation, 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 neo-
liberal 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; and

  . South Africa's self-mandate for peacekeeping gives no peace of mind, 
in the wake of Pretoria's ongoing purchase of US$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 privatisation, 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 mobilise grassroots protests through the 
Malawi Economic Justice Network. And in Zambia, the Bank and IMF continue 
to insist that the Poverty Reduction Strategy Programme must include the
privatisation of the only bank which offers black Zambians reasonable
service, a mistake that has provided leftist critics of neoliberalism a 
fresh organising handle on a silver platter.

  Nepad's solution to the foreign investment drought is consistent with 
international rhetoric about Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in 
privatised 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-specialised 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, privatisation of infrastructure usually prevents cross-
subsidisation to enhance affordability for poor consumers.

  In all these respects, Nepad's core arguments reflect residual neo-
liberalism. 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 simply 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 African 
Recovery, include:

  (a) the neoliberal economic policy framework at the heart of the plan, 
and which repeats the structural adjustment policy packages of the 
preceding two decades and overlooks the disastrous effects of those 
policies;

  (b) 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;

  (c) notwithstanding its stated concerns for social and gender equity, 
it adopts the social and economic measures that have contributed to the 
marginalisation of women...


  The result of such critiques has been to revitalise 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 three 
centuries and, forty years ago, 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 
alongside others associated with the World Social Forum, and whose anti-
capitalist cadres are as determined as those to be found anywhere. But what, 
in conclusion, is the relationship of these growing anti-capitalist 
potentials to the production of historical materialist knowledge, and how 
might the two processes better interrelate?


  The role of historical materialist analysis


  My own sense is that African intellectuals--such as those associated 
with the Council for Development and Social Science Research in Africa 
and Third World Network-Africa--are hungry once again for each others' 
contributions to a more open (deStalinised) Marxism. Such a revival 
would be, as ever, grounded in classical theories of commodity-form and 
value, accumulation and overaccumulation, spatio-temporal crisis and 
crisis displacement, and the untenable rise of finance/commerce, 
augmented to better incorporate the reproductive aspects and gender 
dynamics of capitalism, systemic environmental degradation, aspects of 
social resistance, and many other ethnic and cultural factors that 
have been used by critics to illegitimately denounce Marxism. This re-
emerging hunger for historical materialism--for explanation and for 
political-strategic guidance--is evident in even the relatively mild-
mannered report cited above:

  The meeting noted that the challenges confronting Africa's development 
come from two inter-related sources: (a) constraints imposed by the 
hostile international economic and political order within which our 
economies operate; and (b) domestic weaknesses deriving from socio-
economic and political structures and neoliberal structural adjustment 
policies.

  The main elements of the hostile global order include, first, the 
fact that African economies are integrated into the global economy as 
exporters of primary commodities and importers of manufactured products, 
leading to terms of trade losses. Reinforcing this, secondly, have been 
the policies of liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation as well 
as an unsound package of macro-economic policies imposed through 
structural adjustment conditionality by the World Bank and the IMF. 
These have now been institutionalised within the WTO through rules, 
agreements and procedures, which are biased against our countries. 
Finally, the just mentioned external and internal policies and 
structures have combined to generate unsustainable and unjustifiable 
debt burden which has crippled Africa's economies and undermined the 
capacity of Africa's ownership of strategies for development.

  The external difficulties have exacerbated the internal structural 
imbalances of our economies, and, together with neoliberal structural 
adjustment policies, inequitable socio-economic and political structures, 
have led the to disintegration of our economies and increased social and 
gender inequity. In particular, our manufacturing industries have been 
destroyed; agricultural production (for food and other domestic needs is 
in crisis; public services have been severely weakened; and the capacity 
of states and governments in Africa to make and implement policies in 
support of balanced and equitable national development emasculated. The 
costs associated with these have fallen disproportionately on 
marginalised and subordinated groups of our societies, including workers, 
peasants, small producers. The impact has been excessively severe on 
women and children.

  Indeed, the developments noted above have reversed policies and 
programmes and have dismantled institutions in place since independence 
to create and expand integrated production across and between our 
economies in agriculture, industry, commerce, finance, and social 
services. These were programmes and institutions which have, in spite of 
their limitations, sought to address the problems of weak internal 
markets and fragmented production structures as well as economic 
imbalances and social inequities within and between nations inherited 
from colonialism, and to redress the inappropriate integration of our 
economies in the global order. The associated social and economic gains, 
generated over this period have been destroyed.


  In a section on 'The challenge for African scholars and activist 
intellectuals,' the Codesria/TWN-Africa conference resolution called 
upon 'Africa's scholars and activist intellectuals within African and 
in the Diaspora, to join forces with social groups whose interests and
needs are central to the development of Africa'. There is a great 
tradition upon which to draw. In several decades' worth of organic 
African scholarship and polemic, a good many applied anti-imperialists 
and left-nationalists have made profound contributions to these problems 
of governance and capital accumulation. Names of the post-independence 
era's leading African progressive and sometimes revolutionary writers 
and thinkers--Ake, Amin, Biko, Campbell, Cabral, Fanon, First, Lumumba, 
Machel, Mafeje, Magubane, Mamdani, Nabudere, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Odinga, 
Onimode, Rodney, Sankara, Shivji, Soyinka--still grace political reading 
lists and book clubs ranging from the world's great universities to 
political clubs deep in African shantytowns. Various periodicals continue 
the traditions of Marxist analyst, and there are influential thinktanks 
in some African centres--e.g., Johannesburg, Cape Town, Dakar and Accra-
-that maintain radical orientations.

  Suffice to say, imperialism in its current form--overaccumulation 
crisis, displacement via hyperactive financial and trade circuits, 
intensified destruction of the environment, reduction of the social 
wage and community, the shift of the burden of failed states 
especially to women, the rise of dubious NGO activities, and the 
accompanying geopolitical re-arrangements (especially the rescaling of 
many political-economic responsibilities to world-state institutions 
overly influenced by gun-toting, neoliberal US administrations)--cannot 
be reversed in the near future. Suffice to say, neither can much 
progress be anticipated from capitalism's most recent project: emanating 
from Pretoria and Abuja with guiding hands in Washington and applause 
from Davos, a homegrown and only slightly modified neoliberalism that 
looks suspiciously like subimperialism.

  It is here that The Economist is helpful, namely in pointing to the 
high ideological stakes associated with the interpretation of Mugabe's 
failure. That is why, it is becoming ever more clear, African anti-
capitalism must not be merely about rejecting the international 
character of neoliberalism, but moreover must confront its local 
champions, its state agents no matter how much they confuse matters by 
Talking Left Acting Right, and its internal logic. No matter the 
continual reversals, momentum to take up these challenges is now greater 
than at any time in memory.