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that also have significant contradictions with the First World;
THE MORIBUND EMPIRE AND AFRICAN BARBARIANS
By Yash Tandon - International South Group Network (ISGN)
If we look at these universal states, not as alien observers but
through the eyes of their own citizens, we shall find that these
not only desire that these earthly commonwealths of theirs
should live for ever but actually believe that the immortality of
these human institutions is assured, and this sometimes in the
teeth of contemporary events which, to an observer posted at
a different standpoint in time or space, declare beyond
question that this particular universal state is at that very
moment in its last agonies.
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History
SUMMARY
Two separate but interrelated threads run through this paper.
One is that a purely economistic analysis of the contemporary
world is not only inadequate, as a theoretical and analytical
tool, but it is also a mask that hides the reality of the division
of the world between the Empire and those outside the realm,
the barbarians. Economism, and its offshoots such as “growth
through adjustment”, are, in fact, ideologies of the Empire
justifying the conquest of the lands and resources of the
barbarians. Those who sought to reduce the phenomenon of
the expansion of Europe from circa 1492 to our present period
of Globalization to purely economic categories have missed
out important ingredients of this expansion that go beyond the
economic to matters related to culture, religion, governance
and, of course, the use of violence.
The paper looks into the four segments into which the present
world is divided – namely, the First World of US and UK, the
Anglo-Saxon world, that exercises its hegemony over the
Empire through its market and military power; the Second
World, the lower level Empire, consisting of Europe and Japan
that share the wealth of the Empire with the Anglo-Saxons but
the barbarians of the “Third World”, the former colonized
peoples of the so-called “South”; and the “Third-and-half
World” of East Europeans, who have become the new
barbarians after the collapse of the Soviet union.
The second thread that runs through the paper, mostly
developed in its latter part, is that waiting for the Capitalist
Empire to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions
may involve waiting for ever. Human agents, not impersonal
forces of the market, make history. The struggles are here and
now, and they are concrete struggles of the barbarian nations
to win their liberation from the Empire. The paper argues that
the road ahead for Africa forks into two – one marked the neo-
liberal road that is motivated by a strategy of persuading
African countries to further integrate into the global empire by
developing their export competitiveness, and by adopting the
“democratic” paradigm as laid out by the Empire. This, the
author argues, is the road to perpetual slavery. The second
road is motivated by a strategy of self-reliance, but it is not an
easy road to traverse. There are many contradictions at
different levels of barbarian societies, should they choose to
go along this route, but this is the only alternative to abiding
slavery. The paper welcomes the Sirte initiative to create an
African Union, but argues that this is a task, a mission, that
cannot be left only to the governments of Africa; it cannot be
accomplished without the active involvement of the ordinary
peoples of Africa.
I Introduction: The Bankruptcy Of Economistic
Explanations Of Africa's Poor Performance
Africa has been in decline for many years, for many decades.
Outside of overall GDP figures, contrived in recent years by
mainly mainstream economists[1] to show “positive growth”
for the sake of not appearing to be in the ranks of “Afro-
pessimists”, the reality on the ground is indeed worryingly
grave, whether one is talking about agricultural production,
food security, de-industrialization, unemployment or the AIDS
pandemic.
1
There was a time when Africa was singled out as an
“exceptional” continent, especially when compared to the
apparently more prosperous Asia and Latin America,
compared even to the Caribbean. These comparisons gave
birth to theories and theoreticians who tried to analyze the
specificity of the African experience. Lack of export
performance, deficit financing, overvalued currencies,
parastatal profligacy, backward technology and such outward
trappings of the economy were singled out to describe Africa’s
“specificity”. With innumerable economic variables to play
around, any theory could adduce enough “empirical” evidence
to “prove” its case. Mainstream economists with predilections
towards econometric models and regression analysis had field
day with Africa’s statistics, filling innumerable pages in books
and “erudite” periodicals, quoting one another and gaining
spurious authority in academic and professional circles.
None of this, however, could hide the fact that mere
economistic explanations for Africa’s difficulties were not even
touching the top of the iceberg. Starting around 1989 (when
the World Bank produced its policy paper entitled Africa: From
Crisis to Sustainable Growth), the Bretton Woods institutional
economists took refuge into “non-economic” factors for help,
bringing in factors like “good governance”, poor public
administration, and corruption – areas in which they had little
or no competence – to explain where their economistic
analyses had failed. As shown later in the paper, these were
essentially ideological covers to disguise the real fact on the
ground that their policies were failing. Some of them took
refuge in the time excuse, arguing that “sufficient time” had
not been allowed the implementation of Structural Adjustment
Programmes (SAPs) for these to show results, that judgments
on SAPs were premature. [2] But when star performers like
Ghana (under IMF stabilization programmes and SAP for nearly
two decades) began to drop out of the World Bank list of
“models” for emulation, the mainstream economists had
nowhere to hide. Worse still, after the currency crisis in
Thailand in August 1997 spread to most of the rest of East
Asia, throwing economy and society in turmoil (from which
they have yet to recover), the mainline economists could no
longer hold these countries as models either. Ironically, many
of them begrudgingly admitted that Malaysia under the
maverick Mahathir, who defied IMF/WB logic and managed,
barely, to protect his country from some of the worst effects of
the East Asian debacle, might have been more on the right
course than they were.
The truth of the matter is that these economists were hiding
more than the failure of their “adjustment” policies in Africa.
They were actually hiding the fact that the real object of their
policies in Africa (as with the rest of the third world) was not to
develop Africa but to open up Africa even further to
exploitation of global capital. Were they deliberately saying
one thing and doing another? No, it was part of the premise of
their ideological baggage that if Africa opened itself to foreign
capital it would be their best course to achieve economic
growth. What their theory missed out was the fact that, in the
absence of state intervention (such as anti-trust policies at the
national level) there is an inherent tendency within capitalism
to concentrate wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands
and, by the same logic, create poverty at the other pole. Since
no redistributive or reallocative mechanism exists at the
international level, and since there is no equivalent of anti-
trust bodies at the global level, these economists should not
have been surprised at the increasing polarization of wealth
and poverty on the global scale. Globalization, as the UNDP=s
Human Development Report of 1996 testifies, has created a
vast chasm between the north and the south. AThe gap in per
capita income between the industrial and developing worlds
tripled, from $5,700 in 1960 to $15,400 in 1993.” [3] Africa,
says the Report, is the hardest hit. Twenty countries in Africa
have a per capita income lower today than 20 years ago. Two-
thirds of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are in Africa. A
food-surplus continent 20 years ago, Africa is now food-deficit.
In fact, what the economists were hiding was more than the
failure of their policies in Africa. They were hiding the truth
about the fact that, like in all past ages, the contemporary
world was divided between the Empire and the Barbarians,
and that the barbarians of the third world were having a rough
deal at the hands of the Empire.
2
II The Empire And The Barbarians
Encounters between civilizations
All past history is one of encounters between civilizations. Our
present period is no exception. Talk about “globalization” and
“the global village” deludes the reality that people and groups
of people have different cultures and values, and encounters
between them (positive as well as negative) is the stuff of
which history is made. Keen Western observers, such as
Samuel Huntington, wary of the threat to the West from the
resurgence of non-Western civilizations, are shrewder
observers of contemporary history than naïve visionaries lost
in self-created delusions about “the global village”. They
cannot read the signs of the time even when they daily see on
their TV screens the street battles between stone-throwing
Palestinian children and mortar-throwing Jewish soldiers.[4]
In the story of the encounters between civilizations,
throughout global history, those in the centers of power
constitute the “Empire” and those outside the realm are the
“Barbarians”, those who are subjected to various forms of
tributes for the further enrichment and empowerment of the
Empire. The British historian, Arnold Toynbee, painstakingly
recorded the history of encounters between different
civilizations. [5] He recorded the encounters between, among
others, post and pre-Alexandrine Hellenic civilizations;
between the Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christendom;
between the West and various other civilizations including
Russia, orthodox Christendom, Hindu, Islam, Jews, Africa, and
indigenous Americans. In the Encylopedia of Invasions and
Conquests: From Ancient Times to the Present (ABC-CLIO,
1996), Paul K. Davis has recorded that all history of empires is
one of invasions and conquests.
Both Toynbee and Davis talk about the dehumanizing aspects
of the encounters between civilizations. Most imperial
conquests are characterized by what Toynbee called
“Zealotism, Herodianism and Evangelism”, as well as that
special hubris of empires that, he says, creates “the Mirage of
Immortality”, a description that surely applies to our
contemporary empire, the Anglo-Saxon Empire.
Marxist literature, in focusing often too narrowly on the
capitalist epoch, and in reducing all recorded history to one of
class struggles, has often lost sight of, or diminished the
significance of, other aspects of the movement of history –
such as culture and the spiritual medium, for example – that
are important ingredients of History. One African Marxist
historian, in reviewing his own previous work, has now
recorded that Capitalism had its genesis not in economics but
in Christian crusades.
The chapter attempted to trace the origins of the process
of capitalist development as having been laid within the
Christian crusade to universalise its faith throughout the
world. This crusade had both spiritual and economic
objectives in its inception because the spread of
Christianity very much depended on the containment of
Islam, which was seen as the main threat to the spread of
Christianity. This implied a struggle against Islam and the
conquest of its trade routes and outposts. These historical
roots of Western civilisation, the chapter points out, should
not be lost sight of when we analyse the economic and
political one. These processes manifest themselves in a
dialectical way.[6]
Contemporary Empire and Barbarians
All history is a history of the “included” and the “excluded”,
those inside the realm and those outside. Today, Mexican
youth trying to scale the walls surrounding the Rio Grande are
the excluded, as also the Moroccans and Algerians trying to
enter France, and the Asian desperados risking life and limb to
surreptitiously enter Europe by boat or refrigerator trucks.[7]
The Euro-American imperial realm is in constant fear of the
barbarians knocking on their gates. More than a nuclear war,
this is their biggest fear.
3
Capitalism, as it established itself in Europe encouraged,
among other things, by the Protestant ethic,[8] issued forth
from Christian realms of imperial Europe to conquer the rest of
the world. The capitalist empire developed by stages, and not
without wars, violence and conquests as well as trade,
investment and improvements in science and technology. It
developed from its early mercantile period (circa 1492 to
1650s), to free trade imperialism with England in the lead,
especially after 1760s, to capital-export led imperialism and
colonial conquest of Africa beginning in the 1880s, to the
“open door” imperialism led by the United States following the
Second World War, to our own period of Globalisation, the final
phase of the conquest of whatever is still left in the hands of
the barbarians (bio-diversity, local markets, local knowledge,
etc.). [9]
All this is part of the recorded history of the last 500 years. We
come now to the contemporary, i.e. post-cold war, period. In
our own time, the world divides into roughly four segments:
1. The First World Empire under the Anglo-Saxon hegemony
2. The Second Level Empire of Europe and Japan
3. The barbarians of the Third World (the so-called “south”),
and
4. The barbarians of the Third and half World (the former
Soviet empire).
The First and Second World Empires are united when it comes
to imposing an imperial order over the barbarians, but there
are also significant contradictions among them. These
contradictions are by-products of history and cultures,
vestiges from previous inter-imperialist rivalries for the
conquest of the world, and continuing conflicts to salvage or
conquer the remaining assets of the world of the barbarians.
Measured by almost any index one cares to mention (military
power, market share in the global economy, consumption of
energy, number of persons in foreign embassies, number of
daily flights, civilian or military), it is evident that the US
occupies a position of global hegemony that is unequalled in
the annals of human history. The current US military doctrine
is based on developing and sustaining the military and
industrial capacity to wage and win two global-scale wars
simultaneously in any quarter of the world. US corporate and
military power structures are mutually supportive and
reinforcing; one structure of power cannot exist without the
other. Hence the US tries to maintain, not always successfully
(for reasons that we cannot go into now), a firm control over
the movement of arms technology as well as of corporate
capital. As Alejandro Bendana says, the US Empire is neither
colonial nor neo-colonial in the old sense. It permeates all
strata of society, and not just governments. And the US
Empire shares benefits with all elite constituents wherever the
Empire has established its controls, and imposes sanctions
against those who threaten to challenge the imperial order.
[10]
US hegemony is shared vicariously as well as participatively
by the United Kingdom. The British state occupies a special
position in the imperial order. It is neither a part of Europe nor
apart from it. On military and strategic matters it is closer to
the US than to Europe. It is the only major power outside of
the US that comes out unquestioningly in support of US
military action (such as in Iraq and Kosovo), indeed even more
belligerently than the US imperial power itself.[11] The other
two Anglo-Saxon dominated countries, Canada and Australia,
also tend to support of the United States. In economic matters
Britain would want to be part of Europe but not at the cost of
its “special” relationship with the US state. This relationship is
cemented by shared language, shared Anglo-Saxon culture, a
history of two major wars against European fascist regimes
and against communism, and interlocking corporate interests.
[12] The British state is thus very much part of the First World
global imperial order.
Europe and Japan constitute the Second Order Imperial states.
They join forces with the Anglo-Saxon dominated order when it
comes to keeping the barbarians in place – i.e. outside the
imperial realm, and in firm control over global economic and
strategic matters. They are, after all, part of the G7 group of
countries that regularly meet to discuss the health of the
imperial realm. But the Europeans and the Japanese also have
contradictions with the Anglo-Saxon imperial order. In
4
December 1991, for example, when France and Germany
announced joint military structures, the US squashed the idea
with characteristic vehemence. The US and Europe have
regular turf battles over Africa and the rest of the barbarian
world. The US overtures to Africa with its “Africa Growth and
Opportunities Act” during 2000-01 must be seen in the context
of the renewed linkage between the European Union and the
African, Caribbean, Pacific States (ACP countries) in the
Cotonou Agreement that replaced the earlier Lome
Convention. The US and Europe have head on collisions in the
World Trade Organization (the WTO) on a number of issues –
such as on the banana regime, the hormone-treated beef
exports from the US, and the quarrel over the genetically
modified organisms (GMOs). On issues related to the
environment and climate change, the US hubris can
sometimes throw the Europeans in fits of anger against the
“arrogant Americans”.
In these matters, the British state either takes no side or tends
to lean towards the Americans. Their common corporate
culture and their real politik approach to international relations
have marked difference from the culture of the Europeans. For
example, the takeover of the German company Mannesmann
by the British company Vodafone in 2000 was a victory of the
shareholder concept that is dominant in the Anglo-American
corporate culture over the stakeholder concept closer to the
European experience. What we are witnessing these days in
the global merger and acquisitions activity is the globalisation
of the Anglo-American shareholder corporatism. Here we are
not just talking economics; we are talking about social and
cultural values. The social gains that the working and other
lower classes gained in the continent of Europe over decades
of struggle are getting seriously eroded by the
Thatcher/Reagan initiated privatization and deregulation. The
internal class struggles within the continent of Europe in such
matters is much more intense and street-wise than in the US
or the UK.
The Japanese Second-level imperialism, similarly, has
contradictions with the Anglo-Saxon order. Japan, though a
global economic player, is a military midget in comparison to
the US and the UK, and plays second fiddle in regional security
arrangement in East Asia and the Pacific.[13] The Japanese
would want to link with the rest of Asia, but is afraid of the
USA. When Japan tried to distance itself from the US in 1991,
the US smartly brought it under heel with the administration of
Super 301.[14] During the Asian financial crisis in August 1997
– March 1998, early effort by Japan to fly the kite of regional
fund to bale out the distressed states was quickly brought to
the ground by the US. The US did (does) not want Japan to
take independent initiatives in the Asian-Pacific region.
The Third World and Third and half World Barbarians
Different regions of the world were integrated into the Empire
at different times in the long movement that started from
Europe circa 1492 to our own present day. From the time of
Columbus to that of Thatcher/Reagan, the barbarians have
been conquered, sometimes liquidated, often assimilated, but
at all times the Empire has sought to establish increasing
control over the human and natural resources in the
hinterlands of the Empire. The expansion of the Empire has
never been without resistance. It is this contradictory process
of integration and resistance that characterize the relations
between the Empire and the barbarians.
However, because of the timing and processes by which
different regions of the world got conquered and integrated
into the Capitalist system, there are differences in the manner
in which productive forces and social relations developed
among the countries in the hinterlands of the Empire. These
differences notwithstanding, as we approach our own times of
“globalization”, the final onslaught of Capital to conquer
whatever is left in the hands of the barbarians (a kind of
“mopping up operations”), the condition of the barbarians of
the so-called “third world” is becoming more and more similar.
There is the small elite that hold power in the name of the
people, but exercise it for the Empire (for the Empire removes
from power, or isolates, those who would not come under its
discipline), and vast numbers of people who look the same (in
the condition of their poverty) whether they are in the slums of
Rio, Nairobi or Calcutta.
5
This last phase in the development of Capitalism –
Globalization – is a totalizing phase. It is the creation of a
single space for the free movement of capital without borders
and national encumbrances. The active agent of this process
is transnationalized capital in the hands of transnational
corporations, whose power is extended to fill all the left-over
vacuums of the earlier periods -- backed by the military power
of the Empire.
The only major regions that escaped, for a while, this
onslaught of capital was that which, after the Russian
revolution in 1917, created a parallel, and opposing, system of
organizing society and production, and China. After 1990, the
Soviet part of that world too collapsed under the weight of an
unbearable arms race that deprived the Soviet economy of the
resources that could have been employed for more useful
purposes, the massive propaganda of the “free world”, and, of
course, internal contradictions that developed within the
bureaucratic class structure of the Soviet Union and its own
empire in Eastern Europe. [15]
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the peoples of the
region have become, in the words of the Russian writer, Boris
Kagarlitsky, the “new barbarians” of our times. The shock
therapies administered to the economies of these countries by
“experts” from the IMF and the World Bank quickly dismantled
whatever economic and social structures that were there from
an already crumbling empire, and the societies came under
the control of the speculative capitalists from the Empire, with
kleptocratic indigenous capitalists, who look no different from
the kleptocrats of the other barbarian nations. [16]
As Kagarlitsky says, barbarians cannot develop independently;
they can only imitate, plunder and destroy, and reproduce
caricatures of the institutions of civilization, such as
democracy and the rule of law. If Western Europeans and
North Americans are the new Romans, he says, the rest of us
must be the new barbarians. Along with Asians, Africans and
Latin Americans, the new barbarians, too, are knocking on the
doors of the golden gates of the Empire that has divided the
world between the included and the excluded, those inside
and those outside the pale of modern civilization.
The Paraphernalia of Imperial Governance and its
paradox
In his A Study of History, Toynbee lists the following “imperial
institutions”:
• Communications
• Garrisons and colonies
• Provinces
• Capital cities
• Official Languages and Scripts
• Law
• Calendars; Weights and Measures; Money
• Standing Armies
• Civil Services
• Citizenships
A fuller paper would have gone into a description of each of
these in some detail as it exercises imperial functions in the
Anglo-Saxon dominated contemporary world. Read through
each of the above again, and the stamp of the Anglo-Saxon
authority is unmistakable, with, at second layer of the imperial
order, the stamp of continental Europe and Japan.
“Communications,” says Toynbee, “head the list because they
are the master institution on which the universal state
depends for its very existence. They are the instrument not
only of its military command over its dominions but also of its
political control.” [17]
But while these institutions are created to ensure an imperial
order, they are also usable by the “internal proletariats or
external proletariat of the moribund society or some alien
civilization”, says Toynbee.[18] Thus, in our own times, for
example, the electronic-mail may have been the product of
the US military genius to ensure strategic communications,
but it is also used by grassroots movements and NGOs to
challenge the might of the Empire (as at the Seattle meeting
6
of the WTO in 1999), and by “computer hackers” to get into
the secret vaults of corporate banks and military secrets of the
Pentagon. This, Toynbee says, is the “paradoxical position” of
universal empires. Sic vos vobis mellificatis, apes. (Thus you
bees make honey but not only for yourselves). “These
imposing polities,” says Toynbee, “are the last works of
dominant minorities in the disintegrating bodies social of
moribund civilizations….Their conscious purpose is to preserve
themselves… This purpose is never in the long run fulfilled…
They serve others when they fail to save themselves.” [19]
Instruments of Global Governance
At the end of the Second World War, the victorious Western
powers (the Soviet Union was also victorious, but it set out to
create its own system) created two sets of institutions. One
set related to economic matters. These were the IMF and the
World Bank, together known as the Bretton Woods Institutions
(BWIs). Here the major debate was not between Europeans
and the Anglo-Saxons, but within the camp of the latter.
Ultimately, and inevitably because of the changed balance of
power, the US concept prevailed.[20] Today, looking back, the
neo-Keynesians regret that the more liberal approach
suggested by the British, Maynard Keynes, had not won the
day. The neo-Kenyesians are crying crocodile tears, but we
have no space here to explain why.[21] Created initially to
help the war-torn European nations to rehabilitate their
economies and to help with short-term balance of payments
difficulties, the BWIs have become veritable instruments of
global control of the barbarian economies. In the name of
“structural adjustment”, and with their power over the market
and the credit system, the BWIs have powerful control over
the destinies of the barbarians.
On the trade side, it was proposed in 1949 to set up
International Trade Organisation, whose instruments were
enshrined in the Havana Charter. The US Senate, however, did
not ratify the Charter, and only one aspect of it survived,
which constituted the third leg of the economic infrastructure,
called General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). Over
time, GATT became an unsatisfactory instrument of global
governance from the US imperial perspective, partly because
its scope was too limited, and partly because GATT had weak
disputes settling mechanism and practically no teeth. In the
1980s the USA initiated a broad round of trade negotiations
(the Uruguay Round) that gave birth to the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) whose scope is comprehensive, and
perpetually expanding, and whose disputes settlement
mechanism has powerful sanctions apparatus.
Thus, finally, as we approach the present period of
Globalization, the trinity of the World Bank, the IMF and the
WTO complete the set of powerful instruments of global
economic governance in control of the Empire.
The second set of instruments of global governance created at
the end of the Second World War consisted of the United
Nations and its related agencies. These represented the more
"visionary" aspects of global infrastructure, dealing with
disputes settlement, health, welfare, labour, culture,
education, trusteeship, and other such matters. The visionary
part of the UN also paid lip service to the idea of "We, the
people…" as against "We, the Governments …". Hnhb
However, when it came to matters of peace and security, the
UN system congealed power in the hands of the two Empires
(Western and Soviet) by providing them a veto over decisions
taken in the Security Council of the UN.
Over the decades, the vision and authority of the UN has
diminished and the power and control of the Bretton Woods
institutions have increased. But, as Toynbee never ceased to
remind us, that which is created by the Empire is also usable
by the “internal proletariats or external proletariat of the
moribund society or some alien civilization”. And so the United
Nations has become a terrain of struggle between the
moribund Empire and the sections of the global civil society,
the former trying hard to keep the imperial order, and the
latter raising issues of justice for the barbarians.
The Ideology of the Modern day Empire
7
No empire sustains itself by means of only force. Force is used
first to create a new order, as when the Europeans used force
to conquer Africa. After the new imperial order is created,
force is deployed when everything else fails, almost as a last
resort. Short of military force is the use of economic sanctions
(as, presently, against Zimbabwe’s barbarian Government).
Both force and economic sanctions can be costly, however,
even for the Empire. Also, they provoke resistance from the
barbarians. The most economical, and the most effective,
means of control is through the use of ideology, especially if
the barbarians can be made to swallow it as a “natural” order
of things.
The ideology of the contemporary Empire is the ideology of
the free market. Of course, nothing like that exists in reality,
has never existed, nor will it ever. It is a pure fantasy. But that
does not matter; it is enough that people should believe that it
exists, or even that it should exist.[22]
What the “free market” ideology does for the Empire are three
things. First, it masks the reality of the Empire. Engagement
with the ideologists of the Empire based on evidence that
shows, for example, how the G7 countries systematically plan
and control the global economy immediately elicits the charge
that one is engaged in “conspiracy theories.” There is no
argument that enfeebles one’s case more than being told that
one is engaged in “conspiracy theories.” That is an argument
that ends all arguments. So once the existence of the empire
is denied as a fictional creation of conspiracy theorists, there
is no case against it. It simply “does not exist”. Like magic, the
Empire simply vanishes from the imagination of not only the
rulers but also the ruled. If ever there was a profound
evidence of “mind over matter”, it is this global mind-bending
that has simply evaporated the material reality of the Empire.
The second function that the ideology of the free market does
is to mask the real causes of the periodic crises to which the
Capitalist system is prone. Crisis, as Marx showed, is
dialectically embedded within the very system of capitalist
production and appropriation of value. But for the market
ideologists, every crisis is either a “cyclic crisis” and therefore
temporary, or a “market failure” and hence remediable by a
few “policy adjustments” here and there. It is never a
“systemic crisis”. To talk about “systemic crisis” is to draw
attention to the reality of what Toynbee calls the “agonies” of
the moribund Empire. If this realization becomes part of the
consciousness of the rulers, and the petty agents of the
Empire in the barbarian states, then they would not know how
to rule, they would lose faith in themselves. And if it becomes
part of the consciousness of the ruled, the barbarians, then
they would wake up to the moribund character of the imperial
order, and hence to the possibility of a transformative change
of the system. Once the ideology is in peril, it is not far that
the Empire too should be in peril.
The third function of the free market ideology is that it
transfers blame on those that “interfere” with the market.
Never mind the fact that there was never a time when the
Imperial state left the market to function on its own. There has
always been state “interference” in the market ever since
capitalism was born. As Karl Polanyi demonstrated, in a work
that is often quoted by scholars these days, the market cannot
exist without conscious, and often violent, intervention by
political forces.[23] However, it has become one of the policy
planks of BWI economists to argue that the crisis in Africa is
authored by its own rulers. Once the victims are blamed as
authors of their own misery, the guilt is transferred from the
rulers to the ruled, and the latter can be brought to
“discipline” so that they do not make mistakes again, on pain
of sanctions, or worse, isolation and banishment from the
order of “civilized” communities.
It does not need the genius of a Karl Popper to know that the
ideology of the free market, which he himself espoused, is, in
his own famous word, “unfalsifiable”. [24]
The practical implications of all this are clear. When, for
example, an economy of an African state gets into crisis, a
number of things follow. One, Africa’s crisis, according to free
market ideologists (especially of the World Bank and the IMF)
has little to do with “external” factors, and if they do, these
external factors are purely conjunctural - such as temporary,
8
or cyclical, fall in the price of the commodities, or natural
calamities such as drought. Second, African governments are
themselves to blame for the crisis; the real causes of the crisis
are “internal” to the states in crisis. These used to be “wrong
macro-economic policies”, but these days they are these, plus
“bad governance”, “corruption”, etc. And, finally, the solution
lies with correcting these policies along lines suggested by the
“experts’’ of the World Bank and the IMF, often bitter pills of
“adjustment” sweetened by further grants of money, and/or
technical assistance. Joseph Stiglitz, who once worked with the
World Bank, said that these “experts” are, from his
experience, “third rate minds” from first rate American or
European universities, peddling bankrupt economic theories.
[25]
III The African predicament
The root of African’s predicament lies in its extreme
vulnerability to Imperial dictation.
This, in turn, is a product of four factors:
a) The material reality of Africa;
b) The psychological architecture of African leadership, or
what Frantz Fanon called, the “pitfalls of national
consciousness”;
c) The strategic interventions of the Empire every time
Africa talks about “self reliance”; and
d) The mainstream African academia and intellectual
workers as the ideological agents of the Empire.
The material reality of Africa is captured in official statistics
poured out at the rate of a couple of million pages a year by
national, regional and global bodies that employ “experts” to
quantify what is captured even more vividly and dramatically
by TV journalists and CNN reporters. The following are some
aspects of that reality:
- AIDS endemic and the decreasing life-span of the people
of Africa
- War, conflicts and anarchy or near-anarchy situations in
some countries, and the
resulting displacement of people as internal or cross-
border refugees
- Sheer violence and brutality, and crime against the more
vulnerable sections of society, especially, women and
children
- Mono-economies that are hostages to the vagaries of the
global market
- Crippling debts owed to the IMF, the World Bank and
other agents of Western capital
- Falling commodity prices, and the inability to get out of
dependence on commodities
- Corruption, profligacy, waste
There is, of course, the more beautiful side of Africa as well.
But this comprises, on the one hand, of aspects of humanity,
love, culture, poetry, drama, and spirituality that are often not
shared with foreigners, and, on the other hand, tourist sights
and game lodges that are shared with the visitors from the
Empire. But this more beautiful reality is a small part of a
larger totality whose more negative aspects (AIDS, Debt,
conflicts, etc.) make Africa so vulnerable to imperial dictation.
As for the psychological architecture of African leadership,
what better than to quote Frantz Fanon when he described the
“pitfalls of national consciousness”, a description that not only
remains valid to this day but is reinforced by the experience of
Africa over the last forty years.[26]
Fanon wrote:
The national middle class which takes over power at the
end of the colonial regime is an underdeveloped middle
class. It has practically no economic power, and in any
case it is in no way commensurate with the bourgeoisie of
the mother country which it hopes to replace. In its willful
narcissism, the national middle class is easily convinced
that it can advantageously replace the middle class of the
mother country. But that same independence which
literally drives it into a corner will give rise within its ranks
to catastrophic reactions, and will oblige it to send out
9
 frenzied appeals for help to the former mother country.
The university and merchant classes which make up the
most enlightened section of the new state are in fact
characterized by the smallness of their number and their
being concentrated in the capital, and the type of activities
in which they are engaged: business, agriculture, and the
liberal professions. Neither financiers nor industrial
magnates are to be found within this national middle class.
The national bourgeoisie of underdeveloped countries is
not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor in
building, nor labor; it is completely canalised into activities
of the intermediary type. Its inner most vocation seems to
be to keep in the running and to be part of the racket. The
psychology of the national bourgeoisie is that of the
businessman, not that of a captain of industry; and it is
only too true that the greed of the settlers and the system
of embargoes set up by colonialism has hardly left them
any other choice.[27]
What more does one need to say? May be only one thing
more. It is that out of frustration at their inability to join the
ranks of the bourgeoisie of the mother country, they fall back
on “nationalism”. This could be a genuine sentiment against
the Empire, but it could also be a means of blackmailing the
Empire to release more “development” aid for their countries,
or give concessions or preferential treatment, or outright
charity. And this gives rise to the third aspect of the African
predicament. It is this that every time Africa is in crisis and its
leadership, in desperation, talks about “self-reliance”, there is
immediate intervention by the Empire to ward them off from
that road, mischievously described by the Empire, as trying to
seek “autarchy”.[28] Once, the Empire reassures them that
they will be assisted with money and “experts” to guide them
back “to the right track”, the political leadership is back to
square one. The African intellectuals, Thandika Mkandawire
and Charles C. Soludo have put it thus:
The tragedy of Africa’s policy-making and policy
implementation in the last several years is the complete
surrender of national policies to the ever-changing ideas of
international experts. Africans have lacked the confidence
to consciously and vigorously craft and will a future for
themselves. The first attempts that Africans made at
articulating a framework for their development were in the
Lagos Plan of Action, the Final Act of Lagos, and UNECA’s
African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment
Programs. Most African governments signed the
documents and, to date, none of these governments has
publicly dissociated itself from the ideas espoused in them.
But the World Bank virulently attacked those documents,
and every African government that wished to have
successful debt rescheduling or aid negotiations distanced
itself from the principles in them.[29]
In 1979, African governments met in Lagos, Nigeria, to
consider the deteriorating situation in Africa. From a food self-
sufficient continent, Africa, following a prolonged drought
between 1968 and 1973 that hit the Sahel at its worst, had
become a net food importing country. Despite two decades of
donor assistance, growth in Africa had more or less stopped,
and the social conditions in most countries in Africa were
worsening. African leaders, in this context, considered that the
only way left to them was to pull themselves out of their
predicament through their own efforts, and that whatever
assistance came from outside in the form of donor funds, must
be regarded as secondary to these efforts at self-reliance. The
leaders meeting in Lagos set the year 2000 for achieving an
‘African Economic Community so as to ensure the economic,
social and cultural integration of our continent.’ A Nigerian
economist, Bade Onimode, summarised the main elements of
the Lagos Plan of Action thus:[30]
• Achievement of regional food self-sufficiency through
domestic food production - not just food security that
can be achieved through volatile food aid and food
imports;
• satisfaction of critical needs for food, safe drinking
water, clothing, housing, health care, education and
transport;
• elimination or alleviation of poverty; and
• achievement of effective regional integration through
national and collective self-reliance.
10
Soon afterwards the World Bank came out with its famous
‘Berg Report’. [31] It presented an alternative scenario to the
Lagos Plan of Action. Africa, the Berg Report argued, need not
despair about aid from outside. More would come provided
African governments were to make the necessary economic
and policy adjustments. They had neglected the agricultural
sector in preference to industries, that must be rectified. They
had provided excessive subsidies to urban dwellers, those
must go. They had excessively intervened in the economy;
they must give more free space to market forces. They had
concentrated far too much on the internal market; they must
go for export-led growth. And so on and so forth. It was this
Berg Report that first laid the basis for what was to follow,
namely, the Structural Adjustment Programmes that have
been the bane of African societies since then. The remarkable
thing is that it was the World Bank itself that was the principal
author of the very policies that it was now criticizing. But of
self-criticism there was not one word in the Berg Report. [32]
The promised ‘accelerated development’ of Berg and company
never came. In the meantime, African governments forgot
about the Lagos Plan of Action. One by one they rushed to the
World Bank with aid bowls promising to bring about a
structural adjustment of their economies. In return for
imposing the will of the Empire on an unwilling and long
suffering population, they did get some capital from the donor
community, but by the end of 1980s a new problem arose -
the debt burden. In 1980 the debt of the sub-Saharan
countries constituted 21% of the GNP, by 1988 it had risen to
88%. In 1980, debt service ratio in relation to exports of goods
and services was 9%, by 1988, it had risen to 25%. [33]
In 1983-85, Africa was hit by another drought, more severe
than the Sahelian drought of 1968-73. By 1984, twenty African
countries had become candidates for emergency food aid. And
so, once again in the face of crisis, African governments got
together and asked the United Nations to hold a special
session of the General Assembly to consider Africa’s serious
situation. The UN obliged, and at a Special Session in 1986, it
adopted the UN Programme of Action for African Economic
Recovery and Development, 1986-90 (UNPAAERD). No earth-
shaking document, UNPAAERD was a mere salve to the
bleeding wounds of Africa.
In 1989, the World Bank, with its ‘accelerated growth”
scenario in ashes, came with yet another document - Sub-
Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth. [34] In it,
for the first time, the WB introduced the concept of ‘good
governance’, a clear departure from its usual economistic
inclinations. After setting out for Africa what it called ‘A
strategic agenda for the 1990s’, which basically boiled down
to measures of structural adjustments, the document went on
to say:
None of these measures will go far, nor will much external aid
be forthcoming, unless governance in Africa improves. Leaders
must become more accountable to their peoples.
Transactions must become more transparent, and funds must
be seen to be properly administered, with audit reports made
public and procurement procedures overhauled.[1]
The Report went on to suggest a ‘Global Coalition for Africa’
(GCA). It would be a forum in which African leaders (not just
from the public sector, but also from private business, the
professions, the universities and other NGOs) could meet with
their key partners - the bilateral and multilateral agencies and
major foreign NGOs - to agree on general strategies that would
then provide broad guidance for the design of individual
country programmes.[2] The Report called this ‘a new
international compact for Africa’.
That was 1990. Ten years down the line, the situation, if
anything, has worsened. The Empire has increased its grip
over Africa by a plethora of “conditionalities” that they now
attach to their money, and these have disempowered African
governments of practically all initiative. All this is within the
dual framework of the Structural Adjustment Programme and
‘good governance’. Under debt “relief” measures (such as the
Heavily Indebted Poor Countries – HIPC), the “qualified”
African countries have been practically recolonized with the
11
Empire micro-managing their economies, as in the case of
Mozambique where the Government was forced to reduce
tariffs on cashew nuts imports from 20% to 14% thus bringing
instant ruin to the local peasant producers as well as
processors. All this is done in the name of “adjustment”. [35]
In 1994, at Marrakesh, African governments signed the
Uruguay Treaty that has now replaced GATT. Very few African
leaders had read the document, let alone analysed it, before
signing it. In a new thrust of reasserting imperial hegemony,
Uruguay essentially seeks to level out the playing fields of
trade, investment and intellectual property rights in order to
clear the way for petty nationalistic obstacles that appear to
be standing in the way of the Transnationals. Whatever had
hitherto checked the onslaught of the TNCs in Africa are about
to be cleared away, and Africa faces the grim prospect of
losing national control over the little that they had built over
the last thirty years since most of them got political
independence. [36]
Such, indeed, are the “pitfalls of national consciousness”.
And the fourth predicament of the continent is that its
mainstream academia and theoreticians are conscious or
unconscious ideological agents of the Empire. With the demise
of the Soviet Union and the virtual collapse of the socialist
alternative, the African intellectual workers have only one
place to go to get their professional degrees and academic
legitimacy – the universities of the Universal Empire, or local
ones linked to them. To gain legitimacy, and professional
recognition and career development, they have to place their
intellectual works in journals and publications authenticated
by the “assessors” (called “peer reviewers”) of the Imperial
academia who act, often unwittingly than wittingly, as
ideological gateposts of the Empire. Some of these
intellectuals are then directly recruited in the institutions of
global governance (principally, the World Bank, the IMF and
the WTO), and others return home and try to
make a living as best as they can, including periodic
“consultancies” with the same institutions of global
governance, as a means of supplementing their meager
official
salaries. It is no wonder that African universities are dying!
Having said that it is necessary to add that they too are often
caught up in the same kind of pitfalls as the political
leadership. Frustrations of working within the framework of the
Empire, and persistent material poverty of their countries,
often drive them to expressions of nationalism and anger at
the Empire, but as soon as they are pacified with bigger
salaries or other accouterments of the Imperial regime, they
are back to square one.
III Struggle Beyond Neo-Liberalism – Struggle for
Utopia
It should be obvious from the above that Africa has no chance
of redemption under the Capitalist Empire. So what options
does Africa have? Indeed, what options do the barbarians of
the Third and the Third-and-half have in the face of increasing
control of the Empire, paradoxically, at the very time when the
Empire is itself in a paroxysm of crisis? Perhaps it is not a
paradox after all, for it may be precisely because the Empire is
internally in crisis, and in a moribund state (to use Toynbee’s
expression once again) that it needs to control and exploit
whatever resources remain in the lands of the barbarians.
Even as the barbarians are demanding a “fair share” of the
global wealth and a levelling of the of the presently unfair
playing fields, the Empire, in order for it to survive, needs to
appropriate larger and larger portion of this wealth in a highly
asymmetrical world that is getting increasingly asymmetrical.
Some analysts have argued from a moral standpoint, namely,
that it is the over-consumption and the profligate life styles of
the citizens of the Empire that is the real problem. And there
may be some merit in this argument. But a closer analysis
would indicate that the problem lies primarily not in over-
12
consumption but in over supply of commodities for which
there is just not enough of a market in the Empire itself. Hence
its need to capture all the market in the barbarian lands to
offload its excessive goods and excessive capital. In other
words, the problem is overproduction of goods and capital and
not over-consumption. That is the reason that the moral
argument against the Capitalist Empire has no effect on the
life-styles of its citizens. They are daily bombarded with
billboards and TV commercials to persuade them to consume
more and more, or else their economies would simply collapse
for lack of markets for their excessive production. Beyond its
own markets, the Empire needs the market of the barbarians
even more than the barbarians realize.
And it is not just market for goods. The Empire also needs
channels to invest their excess capital. Much of this capital is
not even invested in productive activity; indeed very little of it
is. Most of it, may be even 90 per cent of it, is invested in
speculative activities – such as in foreign exchange and
interest rate dealings. To use the old Marxist terminology, the
M – C – M1 is now replaced by simply M-M1 (where M denotes
money, C denotes Commodities, and M1 denotes money with
profits). In other words, present-day capitalist speculators do
not even have to engage in commodity production in order to
make money. They can just make money to make more
money. Eventually a big gap develops between a ballooned
money economy that has no material basis in commodity
production. In other words, profit making in the contemporary
phase of the Capitalist Empire has become substantially
“dematerialized”; it does not require material production. It is
for this reason that Capitalism goes through periodic crises
that result in wiping out billions of dollars from the stock
exchange in a partial readjustment of money values to
material values. But the problem is never resolved, and within
a few years there is yet another crisis, deeper than before.
There is now a qualitative change in how the Empire’s
ideologists see the situation. After the Asian currency crisis of
1997/98, the worried ideologists of the Empire were talking
not just about “blips” in the economy, but problems with the
very “architecture” of the global financial system.
In a short essay it is not possible to prolong this discussion to
greater depth. And so it is necessary to raise the next
question: Will the capitalist Empire collapse through its own
internal contradictions?
Some people think that it would. Within the Marxist
scholarship, there is a long tradition of thinkers who have
argued that the Capitalist system is dashing headlong to its
own final denouement. In a much discussed recent work, the
historian Robert Brenner has argued that competition for
markets is inherently destructive for capitalism and will
ultimately result in its collapse.
In this view, the fall in aggregate profitability that was
responsible for the long downturn was the result … of the
over-capacity and over-production which resulted from
intensified, horizontal inter-capitalist competition. The
intensification of inter-capitalist competition was itself the
manifestation of the introduction of lower-cost, lover price
goods into the world market, especially in manufacturing,
at the expense of already existing higher-cost, higher price
producers, their profitability and their productive capacity.
[37]
Critics of Brenner have argued that he has underplayed the
role of class struggle, and overplayed the forces of “horizontal
inter-capitalist competition”, as causes of crisis within the
Capitalist system; that, indeed, the declining rate of profit is as
much a product of the struggles of the working classes to
secure a fairer share of their labour as it is of competition
between the oligopolies. Critics have also argued that Brenner
has not adequately analysed the problem from the perspective
of Marx’s theory of value, and that he might be a latter day
Adam Smith or a Ricardo rather than a Marxist. [38]
Whatever the merits of the debate, the inevitable demise of
capitalism is not an either/or situation. All Empires eventually
die. Capitalism will come to its denouement both as a result of
contradictions within itself, and because of class struggle,
13
because in any case, they cannot be separated one from the
other; they are part of the same process.
The question, however, is can we wait for the internal
contradictions of capitalism to dissolve the Capitalist Empire?
Can something be done whilst we live under the control of the
Empire?
E Struggles Within And Against The Neo-Liberal Empire
– Struggles Against Distopia
Whether socialist, or any other, utopia will come is anybody’s
guess. How near or far we are to the end of Capitalist History
and to the beginning of a new one nobody knows. In the
meantime, the struggles of the barbarian peoples for liberation
and that of nations for self-determination will go on. The
struggle against the present Capitalist distopia will continue to
reach higher levels of collective consciousness and action.
Africa’s destiny in this respect is bound with the rest of the
global barbarian community, so it is necessary to deal with
this issue at this general level first, and ask the following three
questions.
• One, can the barbarian states challenge the Empire?
• Two, can the barbarian workers and “civil societies”
challenge the global system as well as democratize
their states?
• Three, can the barbarian states unite in a common front
against the Empire?
For reasons of brevity, and because the three questions are
connected in any case, the following provides an attempt to
answer them in an integrated manner. What we have learnt in
the last fifty years is that on their own, that is, without
pressure from their own oppressed peoples, those who govern
the barbarian states cannot challenge the fundamentals of the
Imperial order. Why? Because their objective role, given the
configuration of political and social forces nationally and
globally, is to try to “integrate” their countries in the global
economy, and try to gain for themselves as big a share of the
global wealth as they can bargain out of the Empire. This is
true whether it is Mexico we are talking about, or India, or
Malaysia or Zimbabwe. There are, of course, differences
between one barbarian state and another, depending on
internal configuration of class forces, specificities of their
history, and cultural and religious factors. Therefore, some
barbarian states may be more opposed to the Empire than
others in particular conjunctures – Arab states, for example,
when Palestine is brutalized by Israel, which is a bit of the
Empire in their geographic midst.
On the other hand, the last fifty years have also shown that
what the Empire means by “integration” in the global system
is very different from what the governing elites in the
barbarian states mean. For the latter, it means a little more
political and economic space for them to control and own their
“national” economies so that they, too, can prosper like their
imperial masters. But for the Empire, “integration” means
doing away with national markets and national sovereignties.
The Empire has no patience with petty nationalisms of
barbarian elites. At the same time, the ordinary peoples in the
countries of the South are also becoming impatient with their
continuing impoverishment and disempowerment. The
bottom-up pressure on the governing elites of the barbarian
states is intensifying.
We therefore have a paradoxical situation. The Empire seeks
to reach out to the oppressed peoples directly through the so-
called Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to try to
persuade them that their best course is to support the process
of liberalization and globalization -- one, because their
governments are corrupt, and two, because their national
companies are likely to be more oppressive of the workers
than transnational corporations (the TNCs, for example, can
pay higher wages than local companies that often engage in
sweat labour), and more destructive of the environment than
the TNCs. On the other hand, the national elites of the
barbarian states appeal to the sense of “nationalism’’ of their
workers and NGOs to try to persuade them that only in the
context of expanding national economies there is any chance
for the ordinary people to secure the protection of their life
14
and liberties, even if, in the short run, the conditions of work
may involve sweat labour and inefficient use of the
environment and natural resources.
At the present moment, it seems that, on balance, it is the
forces of nationalism that are winning the battle for the minds
of the ordinary people of the South. Why? Because the TNCs
are not accountable to the people; they could be here today
and gone tomorrow; and because they do not have the
interests of the welfare of the people at heart, focused as they
are with making profits. Thus, for example, they must make
profits out of selling retroviral drugs against HIV/AIDs in South
Africa (and other countries in the South) to recover, as they
say, their R&D costs, whereas for the governments of these
countries it is necessary to save lives than protect the profits
of the TNCs. Similarly, for the TNCs it is important to break
down the tariff walls in the barbarian states and flood their
markets with goods on the grounds, they argue, that this is
best for the consumers in these countries, and will get rid of
the “inefficient” enterprises that earn “rents” out of
“protected” markets. But this argument, too, is not winning
the minds of the people. Why? Because the removal of tariff
walls and other forms of protection kills national industry,
especially if “shock therapies” advocated by “development
experts” of the World Bank and the IMF are adopted, and
because the TNCs that take the place of dead national
enterprises cannot make good the losses in jobs and social
security that the death of local industry entails.
These paradoxes are daily played out in the debates that are
raging in, especially, the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
Debates around asymmetries of the trading system, the need
for “special and differential” treatment for the “developing”
countries and the LDCs, the argument for introducing labour
and environmental standards in the international trade regime
and a system to monitor and enforce these standards, the
argument about the protection of intellectual property under
Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), the debate
on the question of whether or not to open up “government
procurement” in the countries in the South to international
competition, the argument about the “corruption” of the ruling
elites of “third world” states – all these debates center around
the question of who, ultimately, should be responsible for the
growth of the economies in the barbarian states, the
globalized TNCs or “national” enterprises?
t is clear that we face a very complex situation, for the
challenges to all concerned are fraught. Should the elites in
the barbarian states open up their territories to transnational
capital, in the manner, for example, that Uganda appears to
have done over the last decade, or should they try the more
nationalist road to development along the lines of, for
example, Malaysia? Should “civil societies” in these countries
welcome TNCs and support the “global compact” proposed by
the Secretary-General of the UN so that the TNCs can be
monitored by the NGOs to see if they conform to labour,
environmental and human rights standards? Or should they
seek to protect their national enterprises against competition
from the TNCs, and hope they would observe these standards
whilst also providing jobs and fair wages? Should the workers
in the South welcome foreign capital and foreign TNCs
because they are likely to pay them higher wages than local
companies, or should they continue to support “inefficient”
local companies because they are likely to provide more jobs
(even if they are at lower wages) than the TNCs, and also
because they are likely to be more answerable to national
concerns than the TNCs? Should the “civil societies” in the
barbarian countries invite the Empire to take action against
their dictatorial regimes in order to open space for democracy
along the lines, for example, that the opposition party in
Zimbabwe (the Movement for Democratic Change) proposes,
or should they seek to democratize the state without the
interference of the Empire?
The point about raising these issues is that they have to be
faced in a concrete manner and on a daily basis. Waiting for
the socialist utopia, or waiting for the capitalist law of value
(based on profits) to give way to a socialist, or any other, law
of value (based, for example, on the worth of the individual) is
not going to get rid of these challenges. History is written by
historians after the fact, but it is made by those involved in
daily struggle at the concrete level.
15
Conclusion: Which road ahead for Africa?
As we move along the new millennium, the road ahead forks
two ways. One road indicates the “neo-liberal route”, and
those guiding Africa in that direction, both from within Africa
and from the “experts” from the Empire, argue that making
Africa “competitive” in the global market is its only salvation.
To this end, they argue, Africa must open up to global capital
(not necessarily on a “fast track” but in a “phased” and
“sequential” steps) so that Africa acquires the necessary
technology and skills to diversify their exports and to capture
“niche” markets in the global market place, and thus develop
their economies.
This writer is of the view that Africa is not in a position to
compete in the global arena in the manner suggested by the
neo-liberal strategists because the dice is too loaded against
it. The experience of the last fifty years has shown that instead
of increasing its share in the growing wealth of the world,
Africa is getting less and less of it. And the reason for this is
not far to seek. It has to do with the centralizing forces of
Capitalism whose inherent tendency is to concentrate wealth
and power in the Empire at the cost of the welfare and
livelihoods of the barbarians. Even such Asian countries as
South Korea and Thailand that only yesterday were held as
“models” of the neo-liberal strategy are today groaning under
the effects of the 1997/98 crisis. It was not just a “currency
crisis” as described by neo-liberal economists. The seeming
crisis was part of the movement of centralization of capital,
and the Empire’s action to take control of the markets that
were in the hands of the barbarians. Today, the Korean and
Thai economies are increasingly getting in the control of TNCs
and transnational capital. The efforts, especially those of the
people of Korea, to build strong national economies since the
end of the Korean war, have been negated in a matter of a
couple of years. This is a pointer, if one was needed at the
empirical level, that the Empire cannot brook the emergence
of “national” economies amongst the barbarian communities,
why? because that would be the beginning of the end of the
Empire.
Therefore, it is argued in this paper, the route for the
barbarians is to struggle against the centralizing tendencies of
the Empire, and to develop as much of a national economy as
is practical under circumstances of daily struggles as
described earlier. The debate about whether this constitutes
“autarchy” or not is a red herring; it must not be allowed to
detract the daily struggles of barbarian communities to secure
political and economic space outside of the control and
dictation of the Empire. It must be recognized, at the same
time, that these struggles against the might and power of the
Empire are almost impossible to wage as fragmented national
struggles. They can succeed only if the barbarians unite in a
common struggle. There are likely to be many contradictions
in trying to unite into a common struggle, and for many
reasons. Some of these are given above, for example, in
quoting Fanon on the “pitfalls of national consciousness”, or
differences amongst the barbarians on the question of
whether it is better to invite TNCs to protect labour standards
and the environment in the barbarian economies or to pursue
the national line. This paper is aimed at trying to build a
consensus that handing over the control of whatever is left of
national resources and patrimony over to the agents of the
Empire is not the way to go.
In conclusion, finally, a word about the Sirte initiative to
transform the Organisation of African Unity into an African
Union. One must recall that every past effort by Africa to seek
the road to self-reliance has met with strong opposition from
the Empire. On every occasion the Empire succeeded, through
using carrots and stick, to win back the political leadership of
Africa back on to the neo-liberal track. The Sirte initiative,
judging from past experience, is going to face the opposition
of powerful forces from the Empire that has its own agents in
Africa. The challenge is to stay united, this time, and not
crumble under pressure from the Empire. It is a challenge that
governments in Africa can face only if the ordinary people are
mobilized to make effective the realization of the unity of
Africa. Governments alone cannot do it.
16
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World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable
Growth, A Long Term Perspective, 1989, p. 15
Ibid, p. 194
__________________________________
[1] These are mainly professional economists employed by the
Bretton Woods institutions and the Universities that serve
them.
[2] Collier & Gunning, 1997, p.18.
[3] UNDP Human Development Report, 1996, p.2
[4] . S. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order, New York, Simon & Schuster,
1996.
[5] A. Toynbee, A Study of History, 10 Volumes, Royal Institute
of International Affairs and Oxford University Press, 1955
[6] Dani W. Nabudere, “Globalzation, the African Post-colonial
State, Post-traditionalism and the New World Order in
Nabudere (ed.),Globalization and the Post-Colonial African
State, AAPS Books, 2000, p. 52
[7] This refers to the incident in the year 2000 when 58 people
of Chinese decent were found frozen to death in a
refrigerator truck in England. See also “The west wants the
free movement of capital, but not of labour. It is illogical
and immoral”, Special report: refugees in Britain, by Gary
Younge, The Guardian March 19, 2001
[8] See R.H.Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism,
Penguin, 1973
[9] The colonial conquest of Africa was the quintessence of
Europe extending its empire to conquer the barbarians
who were deemed not to be part of the “civilized world”.
The lands of the barbarians were regarded as “terra
nullius”, and the people who lived off these lands and the
resources above and below them were deemed not to
possess any “property rights”. Property was as defined by
the Empire, and imposed on the barbarians.
[10] Alejandro Bendana, Power Lines: US Domination in the
New Global Order, 1996
[11] It is an observed fact that when two dogs bark at a
perceived threat, the smaller one barks the louder.
[12] See John Scott, Corporations, Classes and Capitalism,
Hutchinson, 1985, ch.4: “Finance Capital in America and
Britain”.
[13] See Walden Bello, People and Power in the Pacific:
Struggle for the Post Cold War Order, Pluto, 1992
[14] Super 301 are provisions in the US Omnibus Trade Acts
that empower the US state to impose unilateral sanctions
on countries that are perceived to have committed unfair
trade practices against US commercial interests.
[15] See Bettleheim,
[16] Boris Kagarlitsky,New realism New Barbarism: Socialist
Theory in the era of Globalization, Pluto, 1999.
[17] Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgements of
Volumes VII – X, OUP for RIIA, 1957, p.22
[18] Ibid, p.11
[19] Ibid, p.11
[20] See R.N. Gardner, The Sterling Dollar Diplomacy, New
York, McGraw Hill, 1969
17
[21] However, see Y. Tandon, “The Keynesian State & its
Limitations”. Paper presented at Conference organised by
the Focus on Global South, Bangkok, October 2000.
[22] Free market ideologists, like those who work for the BWIs
and who teach an abstract subject (non-subject) called
“Economics” in Western and Western-oriented universities,
may know that the free market does not exist, but they
argue that it should exist. Those who know that a free
market cannot ever exist but still peddle the idea that it
should exist are deliberate agents of deception; those who
believe, as a matter of blind faith, that “one day” free
market will come, sadly for them, they chase a pure
illusion, a fantasy. Well-known and respected academics,
like Jagdish Bhagawati who is a good friend of the author,
fall into the second category.
[23] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: Political and
Economic Origins of our Time, Boston: Beacon Press, 1944
[24] See Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery,
Hutchinson. 1959
[25] See Joseph Stiglitz, “What I learned at the world economic
crisis”, The Insider, The New Republic, 17 April, 2000
[26] As a testimony to the continuing relevance of Fanon,
President Thabo Mbeki quoted Fanon at length in his
speech to the NIEP Second Oliver Tambo Lecture in
Johannesburg on 11 August, 2000.
[27] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press,
Inc, 1963
[28] African intellectuals like Samir Amin had to take pains to
explain to his detractors that when he talks about
“delinking” he does not mean “autarchy”.
[29] Thandika Mkandawire & Charles C. Soludo, African
Perspectives on Structural Adjustment: Our Continent, Our
Future, CODESRIA, 1999, pp. 138-9
[30] Bade Onimode, A Future for Africa: Beyond the Politics of
Adjustment, Earthscan, 1992, p.54
[31] World Bank, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan
Africa: An Agenda for Action, Washington, 1981
[32] For what still remains the best critique of the Berg Report,
see Samir Amin, “A Critique of the World Bank Report
entitled ‘Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa,’
“, Africa Development, Dakar, Volume VII (1982)
[33] See UNCTAD, Handbook of International Trade and
Development Statistics, 1993.
[34] World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to
Sustainable Growth, A Long Term Perspective, 1989
[35] See Joseph Hanlon, "Power Without Responsibility: the
World Bank and Mozambican Cashew Nuts," the Review of
African Political Economy, # 83, March 2000
[36] For a critique of Uruguay in relation to Africa, see: Y.
Tandon, “Recolonizing the Subject Peoples’” Alternatives
19 (1994) pp. 173-183.
[37] Robert Brenner, “The Economics of Global Turbulence”,
New Left Review, 229, 1998, pp 8-9
[38] The entire issue of Historical Materialism, Vol 5, Winter
1999, was devoted to analyzing and critiquing Brenner,
such is the importance of this work in opening afresh
issues that have remained dormant ever since the end of
the cold war.
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