>My analysis is identical to Davidson's and I have made it repeatedly on the
>Marxism list. Africa's problems today stem from the fact that the colonial
>powers created states that disrespected traditional tribal jurisdictions.
>In the fight for independence, African elites accepted these borderlines
>uncritically. In the face of declining economic conditions, a process of
>Balkanization has made Africa unlivable. Davidson, who was assigned to work
>with Tito during WWII by the British army, argues that the implosion of
>various African states--including the Congo--is no different than what has
>taken place in Yugoslavia.
>
>Louis Proyect
Ideally, socialism in Africa should coincide with pan-Africanism of
the revolutionary kind, and at the level of short- to medium-term
goals, movements on the left should aspire to a regionalist program
of the kind that Samir Amin, Pat Bond, etc. have advocated. That
would go toward a solution of the Black Man's Burden that Basil
Davidson has discussed. (In the case of Albania & Yugoslavia, calls
for the Balkan Federation raised a couple of times in the early
twentieth century, if implemented, might have prevented one seed of
the present predicament from being sown.)
Here's an excerpt from an article by Pat Bond, with my comments
interspersed here and there in it:
***** Patrick Bond, "Global Economic Crisis: A View from South
Africa," _Journal of World-Systems Research_ 5.2 (Summer 1999):
413-455, at
<http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr/archive/vol5/vol5_number2/html/bond/index.html>
...From Africa's leading radical economist, Samir Amin, has come the
theme of regional delinking:
The response to the challenge of our time imposes what I have
suggested naming "delinking" ... Delinking is not synonymous with
autarky, but rather with the subordination of external relations to
the logic of internal development ... Delinking implies a "popular"
content, anti-capitalist in the sense of being in conflict with the
dominant capitalism, but permeated with the multiplicity of divergent
interests.68
As unrealistic as this appears at first blush, the recent, present
and forthcoming conditions of global economic crisis appear to both
demand and supply the material grounds for a profound change in power
relations. The ideological hegemony and financial stranglehold that
neoliberalism and its sponsors have enjoyed are discredited and could
fast disappear. Out of nowhere (East Asia!), after all, suddenly
appeared system-threatening contradictions. [Yoshie: Now, the USA
itself is about to contend with the economic fallout of neoliberalism
that it has worked hard to make globally hegemonic, if California is
a harbinger of things to come.]
And out of radical social and labour movements come, increasingly,
demands that can only be met through greater national sovereignty and
regional political-economic coherence. [Yoshie: How do we reconcile
"greater national sovereignty" with "regional political-economic
coherence"? A question that no one has answered yet, in theory and
practice.] The global scale may one day appear as a likely site of
struggle (for example, through the United Nations system which at
least conceptually could be democratised, unlike the Bretton Woods
institutions). [Yoshie: I see little hope of democratizing the U.N.,
unless movements on the left are powerful enough to abolish the
Security Council & make the General Assembly the seat of real power,
but let it slide for the moment.] But realistic "alternatives" are
probably going to have to be fought for and won at national and
regional scales.69 Such alternatives themselves need to be
contextualised in power relations that are still to be fought for,
Canadian labour radical Sam Ginden reminds us:
The real issue of "alternatives" isn't about alternative policies or
about alternative governments, but about an alternative politics.
Neither well-meaning policies nor sympathetic governments can
fundamentally alter our lives unless they are part of a fundamental
challenge to capital. That is, making alternatives possible requires
a movement that is changing political culture (the assumptions we
bring to how society should work), bringing more people into
every-day struggles (collective engagement in shaping our lives), and
deepening the understanding and organisational skills of activists
along with their commitment to radical change (developing
socialists).70
That commitment has already begun to take on international
proportions through New Social Movements, Michael Lowy suggests:
Militant trade-unionists, left-wing socialists, de-Stalinized
communists, undogmatic Trotskyists, unsectarian anarchists, are
seeking out the paths to renewal of the proletarian internationalist
tradition ... Concurrently, new internationalist feelings are
becoming visible in social movements with a global perspective, like
feminism and environmentalism, in antiracist movements, in liberation
theology, in associations devoted to human rights and to solidarity
with the third world ... It is from convergence between renewal of
the socialist, anticapitalist and anti-imperialist tradition of
proletarian internationalism -- ushered in by Marx in the Communist
Manifesto -- and the universalist, humanist, libertarian,
environmentalist, feminist, and democratic aspirations of the new
social movements that can and will arise twenty-first-century
internationalism.71
In a previous epoch -- one recent enough in the collective memory and
still bursting with the pride of authentic struggle -- not more than
a few thousand South African radical civil society activists took up
a task of similar world-scale implications. In part, the struggle
was to open up space for a developmental liberation (even if that
space was quickly closed, and unnecessarily so, we have argued). A
core component of the strategy was severing international elite
relations with (and support for) apartheid, as Arrighi et al propose
for the anti-neoliberal struggle. As impossible as the activists'
anti-apartheid mission appeared during the darkest days, they won!
Given the rapid shifts in power and the crisis of elite interests now
being played out across the world, the multifaceted campaigns against
Washington -- and against those in southern capitals who serve as its
parrots -- still rank amongst the very highest priorities of South
African progressives and their allies.
The era of an economic context in which Washington-oriented
policy-makers went unchallenged is nearing an end, it appears. It
remains for the world's various strains of progressive politics --
always in alliance with others concerned about meeting human needs
and invoking ecological values -- to more forcefully show how the
existing social and environmental programs of what we've termed New
Social Movements can become (or contribute to) the foundation of an
entirely different economic development strategy. Such efforts
should receive the solidarity of progressives across the
world-system--in activist and intellectual communities alike.
...68. Samir Amin, `Preface,' in A. Mahjoub (Ed), Adjustment or
Delinking? The African Experience, London, Zed Press, 1990,
pp.xii-xiii. See also his Delinking, London, Zed Press, 1990.
69. Alternative national- and regional-scale development policies
have been established in several places, including the UN Economic
Commission on Africa's AAF-SAP and the 1994 African National Congress
Reconstruction and Development Programme (as well as other South
African economic strategies offered by the Macroeconomic Research
Group in 1993 and the Congress of South African Trade Unions in
1996). Such broad development policies should, naturally, follow
directly from programmatic and project work being carried out by
progressives in the field, because virtually all non-reformist
reforms will run into strong opposition from economic policy-makers
who are excessively committed to fiscal discipline, deregulating
labour markets and promoting exports at all costs, and thus
grassroots ownership of alternative strategies is vital to assuring
they have popular durability under Washington Consensus duress.
70. Sam Ginden, `Rising from the Ashes: Labour in the Age of Global
Capitalism,' Monthly Review, 49, 3, July-August 1997, p.156, cited in
Moody, Workers in a Lean World, p.308.
71. Michael Lowy, `Globalization and Internationalism: How Up-to-date
is the Communist Manifesto?,' Monthly Review, November 1998,
pp.25-26. *****
The problem at present is that, on the ground in Africa (&
elsewhere), there exists, as yet, no likely movement capable of
exercising leadership & creating hegemony (in the Gramscian sense)
necessary for the politico-economic program envisioned by Amin, Bond,
etc. In the recent years, more people than before have become
politicized & radicalized about the question of the neoliberal
hegemony exercised through the Bretton Woods institutions and/or the
so-called Washington consensus. Hence the hope that Pat Bond
expresses for "New Social Movements." However, many activists
involved in "New Social Movements" have yet to figure out the nature
of today's imperialism, much less how to fight back against it (if
leftists' responses to the recent expansion & intensification of
imperial control over Iraq, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Congo, East Timor,
etc. are any indications). In some cases, members of "New Social
Movements" may be more part of problems than solutions.
There remain questions -- questions of political leadership &
anti-imperialism in particular -- that should lead leftists (who are
unsatisfied with the status quo & want to move forward) to a critical
& knowing return to Lenin & Gramsci (= appreciation of the core
insights of the two giants of what may be called the political side
of the Marxist tradition, without being trapped in the unnecessary
baggage created by various "Marxist-Leninist" parties).
Yoshie
P.S. I'm cc'ing this to Pat Bond, in case he has time to say
something about it.
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