The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
South Africa miners strike following the Marikana massacre, 2012. Demotix/Jonny White. All rights reserved.We live in a racist world. Despite
the collapse of European empire and the formal adoption of a façade of
international bureaucracy, the vast majority of black Africans are still
waiting for meaningful emancipation from their perceived social inferiority.
Africans wait for emancipation in an unequal world
Now there is much talk of economic
growth in Africa. In the present decade, 7 out of the 10 fastest-growing
economies (as conventionally measured) are African. In 1900 Africa was the world’s
least densely populated and urbanized continent with 7.5% of world population.
Today it is double that, with an urban share fast approaching the global
average. According to UN projections, Africa will be home to 25% of all the
people alive in 2050, 40% in 2100 (when Asia will contribute 42% and the rest
18%). This is because Africa’s annual population growth rate is 2.5% while the
rest of the world is ageing. The Asian manufacturing countries already
recognize that Africa is the fastest-growing market in the world. This could
provide an opportunity for Africans to play a stronger hand in international
negotiations. If they succeed in standing up for themselves, it would be a
world revolution, the end of the racist world order, no less.
The movement to abolish slavery was
officially completed in the late nineteenth century. But emancipation is rarely
as simple as that. In West Africa, abolition was a disaster. The internal drive
to capture slaves continued apace and, despite a shift to their use in domestic
production, supply soon exceeded demand. The price of slaves fell drastically,
leading to their widespread abuse. Colonial empires were then justified by
disorder in West Africa and by the drive to abolish the Arab slave trade in East
Africa. Much later, when these regimes fell, Africans were offered emancipation
once more, this time through national independence. Most African economies then
regressed for a half-century. Apartheid was defeated in South Africa, but two
decades later the country is more unequal and unemployment is rampant, while
the government shoots its own people if they complain. Africans are still
waiting for equal membership of world society. But they have never encountered
more favourable conditions than now.
In
the twentieth century, a population explosion was accompanied by a jump in
Africa’s urban share from under 2% of the population to almost half. This urban
revolution is not just a proliferation of cities, but also involves the
installation of the whole package of pre-industrial class society: states, urban
elites, intensification of agriculture and a political economy based on extraction
of rural surpluses and the city bazaar.
The
anti-colonial revolution unleashed hopes for the transformation of an unequal
world. These have not yet been realized for most Africans. Africa’s new leaders
thought they were building modern economies, but in reality they were erecting
fragile states based on the same small-scale agriculture as before. Either machine
production would be developed in some sectors of the economy or the state would
devolve to a level compatible with its small-scale productive base. This structural weakness inevitably led them
to exchange the democratic legitimacy of the independence struggle for dependence
on foreign powers. Life support to Africa’s new ruling elites was switched off
in the early 1980s. Many governments were made bankrupt and some countries collapsed
into civil war.
The
growth of cities should normally lead to rural-urban exchange, as farmers supply
food to city-dwellers and in turn buy the latter’s manufactures and services.
But this progressive division of labour requires a measure of protection from
the world market and it was stifled at birth in post-colonial Africa by the
dumping of subsidized food from the tax-rich West and later of cheap Asian
manufactures. ‘Structural adjustment programmes’ imposed by the World Bank and
IMF meant that Africa’s fledgling national economies had no protection. Tax
collection in Africa was never as regular as in Eurasia; and governments still
rely on whatever they can extract from mineral royalties and the import-export
trade. Rents secured by political privilege are the chief source of wealth. This constitutes an Old Regime ripe for
liberal revolution.
African development in the twenty-first
century
‘Development’ refers first to
humanity’s hectic dash from the countryside to the city since 1800. The engine
driving this economic growth is assumed to be ‘capitalism’. Development then means trying to
understand how capitalist growth is generated and how to make good the damage
it causes in repeated cycles of creation and destruction. A third meaning
refers to the developmental states of
the mid-twentieth century, the idea that governments are best placed to engineer
sustained economic growth with redistribution. The most common usage, however,
refers to the commitment of rich countries to help poor countries become
richer. This was at first real enough, even if the means chosen were often
flawed. But after the 1970s, it has faded. If the rapid growth of the world
economy encouraged a belief at first that poor countries could become rich,
from the 1980s ‘development’ has meant freeing up global monetary flows and
applying sticking plaster to the wounds inflicted. Development is the label for political relations between rich
and poor countries after colonial empire.
There
are two pressing features of our world: the unprecedented expansion of markets
since the Second World War and massive economic inequality between (and within)
nations. Becoming closer and more unequal at the same time is a recipe for
disaster. Africa, with a seventh of the world’s population, had 2% of global
purchasing power around the millennium. What could Africa’s new urban populations produce for the world economy?
Apart from exporting raw materials, when they could, the world market for food
and other agricultural products is skewed by western farm subsidies. Manufacturing
as an alternative faces intense competition from Asia. African countries should
argue collectively in the councils of world trade for some protection from
international dumping, so that their farmers and infant industries might supply
their own populations first.
Exchange
between cities and their hinterlands has been frustrated for a post-colonial
Africa whose international bargaining position is undermined by being
fragmented into 54 states. The fastest-growing sector of world trade is the
production of culture: entertainment, education, media, sports, software and information
services. The terrain is less rigidly mapped out here than in agriculture and
manufacture and Africans are well-placed to compete in this field because of the
proven global preference for their music, films and plastic arts.
Classes for and against a liberal revolution
Mineworkers and Construction Union members remember the Marikana victims, 2014. Demotix/Antonella Ragazzoni. All rights reservedThe classical
liberal revolutions were sustained by three ideas: that freedom and economic
progress require increased movement of people, goods and money in the market;
that the political framework most compatible with this is democracy; and
that social progress depends on science, the drive to know how things
really work. The energies generated by Africa’s urban revolution are already
manifested in economy, technology, religion and the arts; and they could be
harnessed to radical change if freed from the Old Regime.
Rousseau’s
condemnation of eighteenth century France rings as true for our world: “It
is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined… that a handful of
people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude
goes in want of necessities”. The
institutions of agrarian civilization are alive and well, not just in
post-colonial Africa. The greatest riches are no longer acquired through selling
products cheaper than one’s competitors; rents secured by political privilege
— such as Big Pharma’s income from patents, monopoly revenues from DVDs and CDs
or tax revenues, used to bail out the Wall Street banks – keep the superrich
afloat today.
In The
Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon provided a blueprint for a class
analysis of decadent societies ripe for revolution. Political parties and
unions were weak and conservative in late colonial Africa because they
represented only a tiny part of the population: the industrial workers, civil
servants, intellectuals and shopkeepers of the town, classes unwilling to jeopardize
their own privileges. They were hostile to and suspicious of the mass of
country people.
The latter
had customary chiefs supervised by the military and administrative officials of
the occupying power. A nationalist middle class of professionals and traders
confronted the superstition and feudalism of traditional authorities. Landless
peasants joined the urban lumpenproletariat. Eventually colonial repression
forced the nationalists to flee the towns and take refuge with the peasantry.
Only then, with the rural-urban split temporarily healed by crisis, did a mass movement
take off. Fanon’s method might help us identify the potential for another
African revolution.
Clearly,
trade and finance are not organized, in Africa or the world at large, with a view
to liberating a popular movement. A liberal revolution would need allies with
significant wealth and power. Africans will have to develop their own
transnational associations to combat the huge coalitions that would deny them self-expression.
One of the strongest political movements today is the formation of large
regional trading blocs in response to neoliberal globalization. A national
framework for development never made sense in Africa and it makes even less
sense today. The coming revolution could leapfrog many of the obstacles in its
path, but not if African societies still wear the national straitjacket they
inherited from colonial rule.
Freedom and protection in the early modern
revolutions
The
American, French and Italian revolutions all combined mass insurgency with an
extended period of warfare focused on removing fragmented sovereignty, unfair
taxes and restrictions placed on movement and trade; German unification had a
similar focus, but followed a different political trajectory. The success of
the British in establishing a global free trade regime in the nineteenth
century and the revival of that regime as economic orthodoxy today have
obscured the complex dialectic of freedom and protection whose imperatives were
laid out by Sir James Steuart in Principles
of Political Economy (1767).
Impediments
to trade caused by divided sovereignty within and between states had to be
overcome. Development under these circumstances depended on removing these
barriers to trade. At the same time, these incipient free trade areas needed a
measure of protection, so that their own agriculture and manufactures could
benefit from supplying newly consolidated home populations. The French
revolution is a striking case in point.
In 1793, the
Terror was unleashed and the Bretons raised a ‘Royal and Catholic Army’ against
which the revolutionary Republic sent out an army of its own to fight in the
War of Vendée. Nantes, France’s largest port, was heavily involved in slavery
and trade with the Caribbean. It stood out for the Republic and was besieged by
the Royalist army. The ensuing battle was decisive for the Revolution; the
shippers financed the Republican army. Why did the Nantes bourgeoisie risk so
much for the Revolution? France, although a central monarchy, was then a
patchwork of local fief-holders, each of whom exacted what they could from
people and goods moving through their territory. The Republic promised to end
all that and establish a regulated home market. The Nantes shippers wanted to
reduce the costs of moving their trade goods inland and so they allied
themselves with the Republic.
In the
United States, American and Dutch smugglers led resistance to the East India
Company’s tea monopoly and to British taxes offsetting the crown’s military
costs. The Italian Risorgimento too
was backed financially by the industrialists of Milan and Turin who wanted a
national home market freed of territorial fragments and unrestricted access to
world trade. In all three cases, the power of merchant and manufacturing capital
played a decisive part in the revolution.
Long before
the European Common Market became the European Union, the Prussian Zollverein was launched in 1818 and culminated
in the German Empire. In each case political unification was preceded by a
customs union lasting half a century. The Zollverein
was a piecemeal attempt to harmonise tariffs, measures and economic policy in
scattered territories controlled by the Prussian ruling family. The Germans attributed
their vulnerability to extreme political fragmentation (some 40 states in 1815).
Prussia’s main aim was to expand a protected zone of internal free trade from
which the Austrians were excluded. By the 1860s, most of what became Germany
had joined the customs union. Their leading economist, Friedrich List, proposed
a ‘national system’ of political economy. He emphasized the scope for
innovation within an expanded free trade area protected from the world market. Similar
proposals were espoused by Americans like Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay.
Towards greater integration of African trade
President Mbeki’s idea of an
‘African renaissance’ expressed the belief that a black majority government in South
Africa might be a catalyst for an African economic revival based on greater
political coordination between what had before been easy pickings for the
world’s great powers. His initiative was aimed exclusively at the very
political class that has failed Africa so often since independence. He did not
factor civil society movements into his plans.
Africa
currently consists of a labyrinthine confusion of regional associations which
do little to strengthen their members’ bargaining power in world markets. On
the ground, however, African peoples maintain patterns of long-distance
movement and exchange developed over centuries despite their rulers’ attempts
to force economy and society into national cages.
This
is one major reason why so much of the African economy is held to be
‘informal’: state regulations are routinely ignored, with the result that half
the population and most economic activity are criminalized and an absurd public
effort is wasted on trying to apply unenforceable rules. Classical liberalism
offers an answer to this chaos — the widest area possible of free trade and
movement, with minimal regulation by the authorities. Neoliberal globalization has done much to
discredit this recipe, since political initiatives, even in pursuit of free
trade, are anathema. Yet the policy conclusion is inescapable: the boundaries
of free commerce and of state
intervention should be pushed beyond the limits of existing sovereignties.
China
occupied a similar slot to Africa in western consciousness not so long ago. In
the 1930s, people often spoke of the Chinese as they do of Africa today. China
was then crippled by the violence of warlords, its peasants mired in the worst
poverty imaginable. Today the country is an economic superpower. This profound
shift in power from West to East does not guarantee that Africa will escape soon
from the stigma of inferiority, but the structures of North Atlantic dominance
that once seemed inevitable are perceptibly on the move; and that makes it
easier to envisage change. Humanity is entering a new era of social possibility.
Africans’ drive for emancipation from an unequal world society affects all of
us. In that sense an African revolution would be a world revolution.
How to cite:
Hart K. (2015) «Waiting for emancipation: the prospects for liberal revolution in Africa», Open Democracy / ISA RC-47: Open Movements, 26 March. https://opendemocracy.net/keith-hart/waiting-for-emancipation-prospects-for-liberal-revolution-in-africa