Africa's Development Impasse: Rethinking the Political Economy of Transformation
272
Africa's Development Impasse: Rethinking the Political Economy of Transformation
272Hardcover
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Overview
In Africa's Development Impasse, Stefan Andreasson analyses this failure and explores the potential for post-development alternatives. Examining the post-independence trajectories of Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa, the book shows three different examples of this failure to overcome a debilitating colonial legacy. Andreasson then argues that it is now time to resuscitate post-development theory's challenge to conventional development. In doing this, he claims, we face the enormous challenge of translating post-development into actual politics for a socially and politically sustainable future and using it as a dialogue about what the aims and aspirations of post-colonial societies might become.
This important fusion of theory with empirical case studies will be essential reading for students of development politics and Africa.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781842779712 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 02/11/2010 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Stefan Andreasson is Lecturer in Comparative Politics in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen's University Belfast. His research has appeared in jourbanals including, among others, Jourbanal of Contemporary African Studies, Third World Quarterly, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Political Studies, Democratization, and Business and Society.
Read an Excerpt
Africa's Development Impasse
Rethinking the Political Economy of Transformation
By Stefan Andreasson
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2010 Stefan AndreassonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84277-972-9
CHAPTER 1
Foundations for development in southern Africa
Capitalism is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous – and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed. – John Maynard Keynes
Capitalism and development
As anticipated by Keynes, writing in the Yale Review in 1933 on the eve of Europe's descent into a second phase of the collective madness initiated by the First World War (during which time Lenin wrote his influential pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism), capitalism remains the central organizing principle of economic and often also social activity worldwide. Having weathered the storm of fascist and Stalinist challenges, global capitalism seemed to be shrugging off the persistence of poverty and inequality affecting a large majority of the world's population ever since. But the question raised by Keynes about capitalism not delivering the goods remains central to the most marginalized people of the global South, who see few benefits of global wealth creation accruing to them. Moreover, the currently unfolding global economic crisis that might become a new Great Depression has not produced a rejection of the market as a core element of contemporary societies, but merely a populist backlash against the neoliberal vision dominant in recent decades. Attempting to understand how poor people's aspirations for a better life clash with capitalist imperatives of accumulation and profit, this chapter examines how capitalism in southern Africa has shaped and in turn been shaped by the region's political transitions over the last several decades. It does so by considering general post-liberation trajectories in Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa in a historical context. The aim is to understand how capitalism in southern Africa impacts struggles to transform the region's social and economic relations in the pursuit of broad-based and sustained improvements in well-being.
The core assumption here is that an unreconstructed or blandly reformed kind of capitalism will merely entrench southern Africa's inequalities and unacceptable levels of underdevelopment, and that this is essentially the only kind of vision on offer by the region's political leaders – although what, precisely, is 'on offer' in Zimbabwe is presently not very clear at all. Despite heady liberation rhetoric, the region's post-liberation governments have, with the notable exception of Zimbabwe in recent years, remained largely accommodating to the demands by international and local capital for continuity in relations and the protection of business interests from excessively redistributive politics. Consequently, the renewed integration of a southern African region characterized by uneven development into the global world economy as currently constituted along neoliberal lines is likely to exacerbate its severe social and economic problems (Andreasson 2003). This is not simply a process of 'betrayal' on the part of post-liberation governments, since long-established and well-entrenched (economic) forces work against the many social and economic changes that those leading these liberation struggles thought, perhaps in earnest, that they would be able to bring about. Southern Africa therefore constitutes a particularly good case study for understanding both the destructive aspects, economically as well as socially and culturally, of global capitalism and the difficulties in organizing alternatives to the current system in which these problems originate.
Consequently, this chapter addresses the fundamental 'developmental dilemma' in southern Africa: how generations of uneven development, symptomatic of the region's historical evolution and political economy (the regional apartheid system in which the logic of a race-based and exploitative settler colonialism shaped regional developments far beyond the national borders of South Africa within which the actual policy of apartheid emerged), combined with the increasingly competitive global economy and its attendant strictures of neoliberal economic reform to produce converging pressures on states and peoples to accept the market (and haute finance) and its harsh demands as the sine qua non of any feasible socio-economic system. These pressures make it very difficult for the so-called 'targets' of development to formulate and implement independent strategies suited to their own particular needs. Such an environment does not encourage serious consideration of issues ranging from social harmony and belonging, what is in the African context usually encompassed by the concept of ubuntu, to sustainability and other aspects of acceptable living conditions not easily incorporated into orthodox economistic accounts of development. Continued social, political and economic marginalization of peoples, and of indigenous sources of knowledge and legitimacy, explains why political transitions to independence and procedural democracy have not produced socio-economic transformation.
Reform or revolution? For genuine socio-economic transformation to be possible, capitalism must itself be transformed and, in terms of it being a core organizing principle and signifier of life, eventually transcended. Any such development should be considered entirely open-ended in terms of how it may unfold and cannot be dependent on the Marxist understanding of how capitalism will (inevitably) collapse under the weight of its own inherent contradictions. Although a project seriously derailed by the late twentieth century, not least by the gross transgressions of those states and rulers claiming to lead the building of 'really existing socialism', struggles against exploitation remain on the agenda with the efforts of its proponents renewed in the twenty-first century and now given increasing impetus by the unfolding economic crisis originating in the central banks, financial centres and housing markets of the world's core economies. Such efforts against exploitation are imagined, retold and examined in a rich vein of recent scholarly work, ranging from Saul's (2005) writings on the 'next liberation struggle' in southern Africa and Moyo and Yeros's (2005) chronicling of resurgent movements to reclaim land across the global South, to de Angelis's (2007) anthropological-economic account of contemporary social struggles against global capital and Budgen et al.'s (2007) re-examination of the 'idea' of Lenin and the potential for revolutionary thought and action in the twenty-first century.
Despite continued marvelling at economic growth rates in countries like India and China (from whence Western leaders return with tales of uncompromising competition and danger that can be met only by a ratcheting up of the pressures to conform to market forces at home) that seldom translate into sustained improvements for the poor (R. H. Wade 2004), the continued immiseration of peoples across the global South makes the hubris and arrogant triumphalism on the part of the global markets' most avid supporters seem foolhardy indeed. While Friedman (2006) comes to the startling conclusion that the world 'is flat', i.e. globalization inevitably lowers transaction costs, thereby providing new and increasing opportunities for enrichment, while playing golf in India's high-tech oasis Bangalore, tens of thousands of the nation's peasants are committing suicide owing to the stress and hopelessness of their marginal existence that is further exacerbated by pressures of globalization (Shiva 2004). From the imperialist, indeed quasi-fascist, fantasies of a future United States hegemony (including military 'full-spectrum dominance') in the neoconservative Project for a New American Century to nuclear brinkmanship in Iran, a powerful state-led and populist challenge to American dominance and entrenched capitalist power structures in Venezuela, and a re-emergence of nationalistic and militaristic authoritarianism in Russia, Fukuyama's 'end of history' (1992) never seemed more distant. These are all struggles related to an intensifying global competition for the control over natural resources and the ability to define the future of power relations in an increasingly volatile post-cold-war era (see Harvey 2003).
Yet the difficulty of challenging the received wisdom of our age should not be underestimated:
At a time when global capitalism appears as the only game in town and the liberal-democratic system as the optimal political organization of society, it has indeed become easier to imagine the end of the world than a far more modest change in the mode of production. This liberal-democratic hegemony is sustained by a kind of unwritten Denkverbot ... The 'return to ethics' in today's political philosophy shamefully exploits the horrors of the Gulag or the Holocaust as the ultimate scare tactic for blackmailing us into renouncing all serious radical commitment. In this way, the conformist liberal scoundrel can find hypocritical satisfaction in their defense of existing order: they know there is corruption, exploitation, and so forth, but they denounce every attempt to change things as ethically dangerous and unacceptable, resuscitating the ghost of totalitarianism. (Budgen et al. 2007: 1–2)
Pace Luxemburg's (1970 [1909]) argument for revolution and against reform on the question of whether capitalism can overcome its internal contradictions, the arguments put forth herein align with contemporary critiques of capitalism and the global economy by suggesting that reform is in itself not a sufficient force for transformation. Indeed, the evidence of persistent underdevelopment worldwide, most obviously manifested in mass poverty and attendant suffering and death, is not an indication of the 'failure' of global capitalism:
On the contrary, poverty is proof of the 'good health' of the capitalist system; it is the spur that stimulates new efforts and new forms of accumulation. To put it differently, economic growth – widely hailed as a prerequisite to prosperity – takes place only at the expense of either the environment or human beings. (Rist 2007: 489; cf. Seabrook 1998)
While the need for revolution rather than reform is obviously not a new idea, the question of how to think constructively about transcending the developmental dilemma posed by capitalism in southern Africa today must allow for, and facilitate, novel ways of conceptualizing and criticizing the problem of development and reconnecting with its historical origins. In doing so, it is necessary to bring the post-development critique of the concept of development itself into the analysis. On its own, the traditional Marxist critique of liberalism, where a transition to socialism results in radical redistribution of goods and the eventual dissolution of class and state, is not sufficient for bringing about a real transformation towards a sustainable future, as is now recognized by a range of contemporary neo-Marxist analyses that adopt 'red-green' perspectives on development (Andreasson 2005b: 63–5). After all,
while Marx proposed a remarkable internal critique of the Western system, he did not succeed in making a critique of the Western system. 'Development of the productive forces' was the common objective of capitalism and socialism, even if, as [Enrique Fernando] Cardoso stressed, the benefits were not distributed to the same classes ... [Hence the failure to] consider the cultural aspects of 'development,' or the possibility of models resting upon different foundations, or the ecological consequences of treating industrialization as necessary to collective well-being. (Rist 2002: 121)
One way of articulating a new way of thinking about improvements in well-being that move beyond orthodox strategies of the industrial era is by clarifying the challenges posed by southern Africa's particular capitalist formations and then by asking whether capital, when officially democratized and deracialized, becomes a potential agent of transformation, or whether deeply entrenched historical processes of accumulation prevail so that capital remains a key guarantor of perpetual elitist privilege and inequality. The latter course is by no means exceptional, as suggested by N. Alexander's (2003) analysis of post-liberation South Africa as an 'ordinary country' and by Habib and Kotze's (2004: 266) argument that 'the post-apartheid era has witnessed the "normalisation" of South African society in a neo-liberal global environment'. Similar trajectories of increasing inequality can be observed in racially divided Brazil, post-Soviet Russia and market-reforming China. These trajectories constitute the empirical manifestation of what Seers (1963) termed the 'general case' of persistent underdevelopment in the Third World which ran counter to the expectations of modernization theory. This general case stands in sharp contrast to the unique experience of broad-based development in the post-Second World War European social democracies and East Asian 'tigers' (a window of opportunity now likely closed to the poorest and most unevenly developed countries), constituting Seers's 'special case' from which neoclassical economists have been all too prone to draw conclusions about how economies work in general.
Two critiques of capitalism Two strands of contemporary critiques are relevant for assessing the nature of capitalism and prospects for development in southern Africa. The first is a critique that is Marxist in origin and which emphasizes the continuation of both primitive and capitalist forms of accumulation in southern Africa today – capital's continued capacity to 'loot' (Bond 2006). From the international looting of natural resources in the Congo to the violent reshuffling of ownership and exploitation that is a central feature of Zimbabwe's 'Third Chimurenga', the interaction between coercion, violence and accumulation remains similar to that process which Luxemburg (1951 [1913]) described at the height of an earlier era of economic globalization as a (colonial) policy of 'force, fraud, oppression, looting ... openly displayed without any attempt at concealment', therefore requiring a considerable effort 'to discover within this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process'. The key issue here is continuity into the post-liberation era of old forms of economic and social exploitation that originate in the African context with imperialism and colonial conquest, later exacerbated by grafting the harsh processes of the early Industrial Revolution in Europe on to African societies (Andreasson 2006a).
The second critique originates in post-development theory and thus poses a fundamental challenge to growth and accumulation-based orthodox theories of development, liberal and Marxist alike (Andreasson 2005b). From this point of view, the entire post-Second World War development project, the 'Era of Development', has been a failure and could not be otherwise given the unrealistic assumptions and promises of 'development for all' upon which it was based (Rist 2002; cf. Escobar 1995). According to Rist's analysis of 'development as a buzzword':
The height of absurdity was reached when the Brundtland Commission (WCED 1987) tried to reconcile the contradictory requirements to be met in order to protect the environment from pollution, deforestation, the greenhouse effect, and climatic change, and, at the same time, to ensure the pursuit of economic growth that was still considered a condition for the general happiness. (Rist 2007: 487)
The challenge, theoretically speaking, is to show how a critique of capitalism that accepts the Marxist argument regarding capitalist accumulation and exploitation can engage and combine with the post-development notion of failure of development and fundamentally unworkable assumptions about growth-led development. It is in the context of these broadly defined theoretical contexts that the reassessment of southern Africa's developmental trajectories will unfold – a rich historical process providing fertile ground for investigating Africa's developmental dilemma.
The political economy of southern Africa
Southern Africa constitutes a distinct political and economic subsystem in Africa, sharing some points of reference with colonial experiences elsewhere in Africa but also with other regions characterized by uneven development, very high levels of socio-economic inequality and racial/communal divisions (e.g. parts of Central and South America). It is, according to Bond (2001b: 31), 'probably the world's most extreme site of uneven capitalist development', and according to Lee (2003: 62) its 'most pronounced economic realities' are 'South Africa's economic hegemony and the unequal level of development among and within [its] states'. The region has been profoundly shaped by European settler colonialism from the seventeenth century onwards, and most obviously by the period of large-scale industrialization beginning with the discovery of diamonds and gold in nineteenth-century South Africa and the subsequent development of a regional apartheid system of race-based oppression and exploitation (Stadler 1987).® While recognizing that historical, economic and political developments across the region include significant national variation, it is nevertheless appropriate to speak of important developments that transcend national boundaries. Commercial farming and the 'minerals-energy complex', to use Fine and Rustomjee's (1996) description of the post-war South African political economy, constitute distinct and important influences on the region and its peoples as a whole.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Africa's Development Impasse by Stefan Andreasson. Copyright © 2010 Stefan Andreasson. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Section I: From Development to Post-Development
1 - Foundations for Development in Southern Africa
2 - The Elusive Developmental Nexus
3 - Beyond Development
Section II: Comparative Regional Trajectories
4 - Botswana: Paternalism and the Developmental State
5 - Zimbabwe: the Failing State Revisited
6 - South Africa: Normalisation of Uneven Development
Conclusion - Comparative Lessons from Southern Africa
Notes
Bibliography
Index