Volume 31 2004 Issue

Volume 31 2004 Issue

Review of African Political Economy No.102:557-569 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2004 Agendas, Past & Future Janet Bujra, Lionel Cliffe & Morris Szeftel with Rita Abrahamsen & Tunde Zack-Williams This issue marks the 30th anniversary of the birth of The Review of African Political Economy in 1974. At the time, its founders were unsure if it would get off the ground and they certainly never thought it would last thirty years! Apart from debate about what its role would be, there were doubts about their own stamina, and about whether successor generations would emerge to take it on. The challenge was set out by Anderson in relation to another Left Review: … political journals have no choice: to be true to themselves, they must aim to extend their real life beyond the conditions or generations that gave rise to them (Anderson, New Left Review, 2000). Our first editorial expressed the hope that ROAPE might ‘return’ to an African base. The founding editors were a disparate group (as Gavin Williams’ article spells out). One distinct element had been in Tanzania in its heyday of socialist debate. Others shared a similar ‘radical’ perspective and had experience in West or Southern Africa. Several, like Ruth First, were simultaneously scholars and activists from those regions. Ideologically diverse on many issues, we were all committed to the project of an overtly political journal of the left. We were amateurs in running and editing a journal but were determined not to be beholden to grant bodies or commercial publishers and were wedded to the ‘self-help’ philosophy of the 60s. Thus the Editorial Working Group, as it insisted on calling itself, did its own pasting up of page-proofs to cut down printing bills (this shows in the crude layout of the first issues) and hand-wrote envelopes to subscribers. That we survived this phase owes much to the support of two left publishers Merlin Press (producers of The Socialist Register), who gave us a home and an address, and the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and its partner Russell Press. Over thirty years the technology and organisation of production of the journal has been transformed, whilst the pitch and agenda of ROAPE have evolved. Having reached this milestone there is a need to reassess our position in the light of a vastly different global and continental context from that of the 1970s. In Africa, the changes since 1974 have been profound. The primary objectives of the liberation struggle were achieved with the end of apartheid. Yet the realisation of democratic sovereignty and sustained development seem as distant as ever. Several independ- ent states have ‘collapsed’ or become broken-backed; almost all have succumbed to the economic prescriptions of the Washington Consensus. Internationally, ‘imperi- alism’ has become ‘globalisation’, whilst capital accumulation processes and the ISSN 0305-6244 Print/1740-1720 Online/04/040557-13 DOI: 10.1080/0305624042000327741 558 Review of African Political Economy new technologies incorporated in them have generated further ‘globalisation’. The Cold War has ended, but instead of ushering in peace, new types of major conflict have ensued. The option (such as it was) and the support offered by ‘actually existing socialism’ have not been removed. Now the sole superpower, no longer content to be the first among equals, is bent on a brutal restructuring of the international system in its own interests. The main purpose of this anniversary issue is to signal areas of debate, the better to understand this current conjuncture and what it implies for Africa’s prospects, to question the thinking about basic issues that has appeared in the Review and in current writings on the left, to ask what it means to be true to ROAPE’s original aims in a vastly changed world and what this implies for the practice of political ‘solidarity’ as one of the explicit original aims of this journal. The contributions included here reflect some of the key issues in a changed agenda. Building on the first article, in which one of the founding editors reflects on the nature of ‘political economy’ and the role of ROAPE itself, this editorial attempts to provide some ideas which might be the starting point for our ‘renewal’. The current African predicament, which we believe to be as worrying as any during the last fifty years, also offers opportunities to chart a different course from decades of intellectual dependency on western orthodox views. We agree with Williams’ rejection of a priori theorising and his assertion of the need to draw on a variety of analytical perspectives – those which offer explanations in terms not only of interests and economic forces but also in terms of agency and contingency – and not just of power-holders, African or imperialist, promoting their policy agendas, but of ordinary people struggling to survive. This requires us to prioritise certain issues that should top a radical agenda, a task that must start from an examination of the changing context and determining what matters most in it.1 For the editors of this issue, the current African conjuncture and the international disorder in which it is set, suggests five dominant themes in this agenda: ‘Globalised capitalism’. An increasingly interlinked and privatised global economy is emerging, marked by massive inequalities, orchestrated by the Washington Consensus, but with outcomes not always as intended. The model of liberalisation sparking foreign, private and productive investment has passed Africa by. Most of the continent is locked into patterns of primitive accumulation, to be discussed below. US Militarism and Unilateralism. The unparalleled military supremacy of a single super-power is being used to redefine the international political system: The US state gives itself the right to intervene anywhere, to change regimes, construct contemporary forms of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ rule, secure bases and assemble ad hoc military alliances The Reproduction of Labour and Society. The continued reproduction of primitive accumulation in Africa has shaped the forms of labour and social formations. Most marked are the processes of de-peasantisation without full proletarianisation, the multiplicity of livelihood sources and distinctive forms of stratification. Profound changes in social structure have been in turn deeply affected by war, AIDS, famine and donor interventions. The changing form Agendas, Past & Future 559 and role of class and gender struggles, of worker and peasant associations and new social movements in resisting or coping with these processes, is evident. States, State Failure and Conflict. ‘Development states’ are largely a thing of the past; adjustment policies and privatisation are increasingly forced on those that still have some capacity. Many states have lost effectiveness and legitimacy, and face increasing challenges to their authority. Violent conflict, in various forms, affects about a third of African countries and associated phenomena of ethnic cleansing, genocide, warlords and militias are the new agenda of politics to be critically understood. Resistance and ‘Solidarity’ Today. There are new terrains of struggle. A movement for Global Justice confronting globalising capitalism has generated protests in Africa. So too has global resistance to US imperialism from anti-war movements, and from the fight-back against invasions and interventions. Africa has also been the site of civil society protests. A number of these themes are explored in the articles and briefings assembled here, some in detail, others in a preliminary way. For the rest, we hope that this editorial will offer a coherent agenda and stimulate critical debate for future issues. We include here several contributions on US militarism and unilateralism, on problems of social reproduction and a review of solidarity struggles. An agenda for future issues of ROAPE must include further explorations on the nature of ‘class’ in Africa, and of class and other social formations under prevailing conditions of primitive accumulation. Theoretical and analytical elaboration of the nature of the contempo- rary African state, a theme covered in these pages in the past, and of the diverse and devastating conflicts that have beset the continent in the last decade, is urgently required. Equally, analyses of the tap-roots of current US strategies towards Africa, of the basic global strategy of which they are part, and the underlying political economy which drives the particular policies of the US state, need to be pursued. The Continued Relevance of Political Economy The first article in this anniversary issue provides a reminder of some of the main themes tackled in the first years of the journal, highlighting some of the areas where our contributors pushed debates forward – and some key issues that we overlooked. If ROAPE could be said to have made any lasting input, it has been in helping to chart a particular approach to thinking about Africa’s circumstances and challenges. Williams’ piece sets the scene for a set of contributions which in diverse ways seek to apply a ‘political economy approach’ to contemporary African issues. More basically Williams offers a restatement and reconsideration of the key ideas of a ‘political economy’ approach that we take as our defining intellectual starting point, and addresses their relevance in the current intellectual climate. Williams calls not for Africa-wide generalisations, but detailed, inter-disciplinary study of specific African realities. He proposes a different stance on the relation between study and practice from that which initially motivated the Review, namely to study Africa in order to change it. He questions our original aim of informing policy through identifying a correct development path, remembering that the failures of the national, import-substituting formulae of the first generation of nationalist govern- ments gave way to even more disastrously inappropriate structural adjustment policies. His answer to the acute dilemma facing radical intellectuals is to lay bare 560 Review of African Political Economy actually existing development policies and their actual outcomes; to criticise not the policies espoused or the motives behind them, but their consequences.

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