Volume 34 2007 Issue

Review of African Political Economy No.111:5-11 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2007 Another World is Possible Branwen Gruffydd Jones with Janet Bujra & Roy Love As 2007 opens, the world’s attention is predominantly focused on the worsening crisis and imperialist violence in Iraq and now, too, Somalia. In both cases, the current context has roots in the contradictions of the Cold War, when the Western powers supported and armed authoritarian regimes (including, during the 1980s, those of Siyad Barre in Somalia and Saddam Hussain in Iraq) and proxy forces (including the CIA-recruited Islamist ‘mujahideen’ which later formed the basis for al -Qaida) in the name of ‘containment’. Now in the era of the ‘War on Terrorism’ the same imperial logics are reproduced, as imperialist intervention reinforces and arms reactionary, sectarian and authoritarian forces. This may be seen as the other side of a coin on which the face value is the long-term promotion of neo-liberal ‘freedoms’ across the globe. The immediate nature of the crisis in the Horn of Africa, particularly in Sudan and Somalia, has distracted attention from this underlying agenda in which the condition of Africa had acquired a more prominent place in public discourse in the West, especially after the campaigns and debates surrounding Blair’s Commission for Africa and the G8 summit meeting in Scotland in 2005. These events had prompted considerable public debate in Western media which was reflected in a series of articles about Africa published in non-Africanist journals in politics and international relations. One outcome for critical observers from the left was the need for greater analytical input and the encouragement for more work that seeks to understand the interplay between the political economies of specific African contexts and global intentions more deeply than these widely publicised events portrayed, and especially to allow scope for a greater degree of agency for social movements, politicians, organised workers and producers and activists in all those countries which are, or are likely to be, the object of Western attention. We begin this Issue therefore with the opportunity which these events of 2005 provide, and their reflection of a perspective which is still contemporary, to conduct a critical review of some of the contours of debate and analysis as found in a sample of non-Africanist journals, taking as examples International Affairs, Global Dialogue and Historical Materialism. In our opening essay William Brown highlights some key differences between commentators who broadly accept the framework of Western policy towards Africa, but criticise the detail; and those who offer a more critical, wider perspective, situating conditions in Africa in the context of global capitalism and the legacies of colonialism. He sees three themes emerging across all three journals, to serve as a framework for his review: recent policy responses to Africa’s development challenge; broader understandings of the development of capitalism in Africa; and the specific debates around the South Africa/southern African conjuncture. ISSN 0305-6244 Print/1740-1720 Online/07/010005-6 DOI: 10.1080/03056240701340167 6 Review of African Political Economy Although the first two of these resonate widely across the continent we pick up the third in the remainder of this Issue by focussing on two countries in Southern Africa, Zimbabwe and South Africa, with similar, related histories but with increasingly divergent approaches to the struggles and contradictions of capitalism and neo- colonialism. Here the relationship between the struggles waged during the Cold War and those present is of a different nature to that of Somalia and Iraq (though not necessarily in the neighbouring states of Angola and Mozambique). In both Zimbabwe and South Africa, radical struggles were waged against white rule and settler colonialism. Today, both societies are ruled by capitalist classes yet remain strongly conditioned by the historical legacy of nationalist liberation struggles as well as by international forces. In South Africa, the ANC has embraced the strategy and values of neo-liberal reform in its GEAR policy. In Zimbabwe the government has rejected neoliberal orthodoxy in pursuit of a heterodox policy and remains committed, although not always unequivocally or uniformly, to radical land reform. Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros make an important intervention raising central themes for the left about the current conjuncture in Zimbabwe. They acknowledge the authoritarian and coercive character of the current regime, manifest in particular in the violent mass evictions of irregular urban settlements in 2005, in which thousands of urban poor lost their homes (the actual number remains contested). However, they argue that dwelling on such violations of human rights in isolation from the social relations and contradictions of Zimbabwe’s current condition and the logic of imperial sanctions concedes too much to the liberal mainstream. Their central point is that, notwithstanding its authoritarian character, the state in Zimbabwe has become radicalised in a ‘fundamentally progressive’ manner, although they concede that these developments have allowed for the emergence of a class of African capitalist farmers who have been able to manipulate the redistribution process of European-owned land. They argue that the progressive and radical nature of the current conjuncture must be furthered through the development of radical social movements outside the realm of formal political parties and combining urban and rural class and social forces. The remaining articles address different dimensions of contemporary policies to transform the character of the apartheid inheritance in neighbouring South Africa. In contrast to Zimbabwe, the ANC government has embraced a neoliberal commitment to market reforms, and seeks to redress the fundamental racial inequalities of the past through the creation of a black capitalist class. The focus of Roger Southall’s article is the ANC’s policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). Rather than considering struggles for radical alternatives, Southall emphasises the significance of structural dimensions of South Africa’s economy and the nature of the political settlement of 1994 in explaining the character of the ANC’s capitalist economic strategy. The severe extent of white control of the economy inherited by the ANC government in 1994 made it politically necessary for the ANC to use state power to redress the predominantly white ownership and control of the economy. Southall takes issue with the widely accepted view that the BEE process is creating a narrow ‘empowerment elite’, arguing that, while the process has led to the enrichment of a number of prominent, powerful figures within the ANC, the process has been more widespread than is generally acknowledged. In the context of ANC policies which have led inexorably to the commitment of creating an African bourgeoisie, David Thomas examines the fate of the South African Communist Party. The nature and direction of the ANC’s policies, described by Southall, are a clear departure from the historical commitment to socialism which Editorial: Another World is Possible 7 was central to the anti-apartheid liberation struggle. Thomas details the efforts of the SACP to articulate explicit criticism of ANC policies, yet confronts the limitations of these very efforts. The constraints faced by the SACP arise from the historical relationship of solidarity and shared purpose between the SACP and ANC, which is manifest more directly in the over-lapping membership of the two parties. The SACP’s written and practical efforts to contest the bourgeois character of ANC policy are blunted by retaining an insistent loyalty to the ANC. Does the ANC’s project of Black Economic Empowerment represent the logical unfolding of historical imperatives, as Southall suggests, or, in Hart’s words, the ‘consolidation of conservative forces bent on working in alliance with white corporate capital to create a black bourgeoisie’? We are happy to publish in this Issue three essays which arose out of the Colloquium on Economy, Society and Nature Conference, organised by the Centre for Civil Society at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa, in March 2006. Gillian Hart, in the first of these essays, confronts the changing stakes of the ever-present relation between race, class and nationalism in South African society, through a reflection on the intense struggles within the ANC and its Alliance partners and the phenomenon of popular support for Vice-President Jacob Zuma, a politician who has been accused (but acquitted) of corruption and sexual violence. While many commentators understand this in terms of ‘false consciousness’, Hart argues for a more sophisticated and historically informed appreciation of the relationship between political consciousness, nationalism and deep historical memories of the liberation struggle. In order to develop this analysis she returns to earlier debates within marxism centring on the notion of articulation. She traces an important development in Harold Wolpe’s understand- ing of articulation, which shifted from centring on relations in the economic base to an analysis of the cultural mediation of class, influenced by Gramsci through the work of Stuart Hall. This informs Hart’s analysis of the way in which the ANC has articulated meanings associated with the National Democratic Revolution to its hegemonic capitalist project. GEAR represents not

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