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Volume 30 2003 Issue 95 Review of African Political Economy No.95:5-10 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2003 ISSN 0305-6244 Africa, Imperialism & New Forms of Accumulation Sarah Bracking & Graham Harrison The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation lies unveiled before our eyes, moving from its home, where it assumes respectable form, to the colonies, where it goes naked (Karl Marx in Engels & Marx 1979). Marx’s quotation is telling and relevant. Capitalism has always acted as a global system, working across or between nation-states (Wood, 1999; Burnham, 2002). The ever-present imperative to produce profit has pushed capital from its historic heartlands in northern Europe to all societies. But, as Marx implies, the process of expansion has not been a homogenising one: the bourgeoisie has double standards, or perhaps multiple standards as it negotiates its presence in a wide variety of locations. The standards that most would define as minimally acceptable (social democracy) have been a product of specific historical and material conditions: a result of the emergence of institutionally robust and interventionist states (Polanyi, 1957) and the political demands of working classes (Rueschmeyer et al. 1992). But, these historical conditions are part of the same conditions that produced very different states and economies in sub-Saharan Africa: the colonial states of the ‘scramble’ of the late 1880s are themselves part of the same capitalism which produced the ‘civilisation’ that Marx ironically attributes to late Victorian England. The hypocrisy is that bourgeois civilisation in Europe, plus plunder, primitive accumulation and famine (Davis, 2001) in the colonial world were part of the same over-arching liberal ideals. Colonial states established the political conduits through which African societies engaged with the global political economy. In many ways, this construction can be seen as a project of simplification: reducing complex social forms to basic national templates: the ‘zoning’ of agricultural production, the reduction of varied cultures of ownership and norms of trade to ‘chieftaincy’ and the regulations of marketing boards, and the construction of local and long distance trade networks to the road and rail links from region to port, capital city, and customs office. Intrinsically authoritarian, this process could only be effected with violence and was resisted both actively and ‘passively’ to the extent that the project produced a mosaic of complex outcomes. The colonial project might not have completed its immanent desire to produce self-contained national economies malleable to the designs of international capital, but it did mark a profound historical transition which defined the historical possibilities of independence (Berman, 1998:312-313). In spite of the vibrant African political currents of the late 1950s and 1960s, statesmen inherited political and economic kingdoms that had been structured by colonialism, whether these kingdoms were inherited through negotiations or armed struggle. The post-colonial trajectories of African states leave one impressed by both the variety of change and the durability of the sinews of global capitalism in Africa. These sinews are tough but also malleable, not necessarily rigid. In the ‘developmental’ period from 6 Review of African Political Economy independence to the first oil price hike in 1973, national economic planning, large scale public investment, and foreign capital (in the form of multilateral loans or transnational direct investment) created economic growth (at least on paper). Negative real interest rates prevailed through most of the 1970s, until the second oil shock of 1979, encouraging both excessive borrowing and lending. However, 1979 also marked a radical change in global economic policy, inaugurated with the ‘Volcker Shock’ (so called after the then chairman of the US Federal Reserve) when America suddenly and dramatically raised interest rates. The sudden change of interest rate policy increased the cost of African debt dramatically, since a majority of debt stock was held in dollars. The majority of the newly independent states had been effectively delivered into twenty years of indentured labour. From that point access to finance became a key policing mechanism of African populations. Imperialism Marx never used the term imperialism, but it remains a key part of any analysis of contemporary global capitalism. The sinews of political power and accumulation that are derivative of capitalism’s birth as a global creature might have twisted and turned, but they continue to connect African societies to a complex, combined, and uneven global political economy which has hardly served the people of Africa favourably. Imperialism has almost always been a concept used to evoke critique of the global political economy: to identify the inequities of what is now called ‘globalisation’; to condemn the bullying tactics of Western states; to investigate the cultural arrogance and discursive authoritarianism of liberalism’s marriage to ‘freedom, equality, property and Bentham’ (Marx, 1867/1999:113), that is, capitalism. Imperialism has also been associated with political struggle as a device to identify oppressive forces working at an international level as a means to political action. Imperialism has come to encompass different meanings to the extent that one has to clarify what one means by imperialism before using the term. Imperialism has a much longer history than its contemporary pretender, ‘globalisation’ (Fieldhouse, 1967; Brewer, 1990), and one can discern three principal ‘angles’ that writers take with the concept. First, imperialism relates to a process of capital export from developed capitalist economies to the colonies; second, it addresses itself to the economic dominance of the ‘core’ of the world-system in the post-colonial regions of the world: the pernicious effects of transnational corporations, unequal exchange in trade and technological dominance (Sutcliffe, 2002). In this second sense inequities between states, and within the inter-state system, create opportunities for exploitation of the periphery by the core. Finally, in a modern context, imperialism refers to the predominance of the United States and its militarised bullying of so many post- colonial states since 1945. One might dub these three approaches as ‘expansive’, ‘dependency’ and ‘yanquee’ imperialism respectively. Each has a kernel of truth, but each approach in itself tends to reduce the complexities and contradictions of global capitalism to a single argument. This issue of ROAPE brings these themes together – and thus moves beyond each of these three categories – in a global political economy of capitalism to demonstrate the relevance of imperialism to Africa’s contemporary global situation. It does this by looking at actual regimes of accumulation. The three perspectives, and the political claims that they have generated, have produced much debate: is imperialism the last stage or pioneer of capitalism? Is imperialism a product of monopoly capitalism or the need for ‘peripheries’ as Luxemburg argued? And most recently, has the world reached a stage of post- imperialism, where capitalism has become sufficiently de-centred that it no longer Editorial: Africa, Imperialism & New Forms of Accumulation 7 has a ‘home address’ (Sklar, 1976; Hardt and Negri, 2000)? The notion of post- imperialism is pre-emptive. Halliday demonstrates this by making a condensed ‘constitution’ of imperialism, which hardly seems archaic, especially with respect to Africa: • The inexorable expansion of capitalism as a socio-economic system on a world scale; • The necessarily competitive, expansionist, and warlike character of developed capitalist states; • The unequal nature of capitalist expansion, and the reproduction on a world scale of socio-economic inequalities; • The creation on a world scale of structures of inequality of power and wealth not only in the economic, but also social, political, legal, and cultural spheres; • The generation through the very process of capitalist expansion, of movements of resistance, of anti-imperialism (2002:80). These five points serve to delineate the core of imperialism’s meaning. The three earlier positions are here conflated and rearranged into corollary processes within the expansion of world capitalism. The most incisive way of using the notion of imperialism is to maintain a strong sense of historical location and to understand the contours of economic and political intervention as part of that historical process. This is the couplet that makes the notion of imperialism a useful starting point to understand Africa’s global relations: structures of inequality reproduced through a capitalist system of both political and economic power. Each of the contributions in this issue contribute to an elaboration of imperialism in this vein. In doing so, they develop important arguments concerning the nature of accumulation, the persistence of indentured social beings and the inequities of capitalist expansion. They also illustrate, however, that the transplanted structures of colonialism have born their own seedlings in rapidly growing, and often rapacious, economic and political elites. The benevolent languages of liberation, development, modernisation and progress are everywhere tainted by accumulation fashioned in greed and graft. Clearly, capitalism continues its expansion and deepening across and within space, but its social forms are diverse and historically-constituted,
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