Editorial: the Politics of Capital

Review of African Political Economy No. 116:179-183 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2008 Editorial: The Politics of Capital Reginald Cline-Cole & Graham Harrison [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 well- being. 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 ISSN 0305-6244 Print/1740-1720 Online/08/020179-05 DOI: 10.1080/03056240802193762 180 Review of African Political Economy 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 neo- liberal 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 Editorial: The Politics of Capital 181 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

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