Our first editorial expressed the hope that ROAPE might ‘return’ to an African base. The founding editors were a disparate group (as Gavin Williams' article spells out). One distinct element had been in Tanzania in its heyday of socialist debate. Others shared a similar ‘radical’ perspective and had experience in West or Southern Africa. Several, like Ruth First, were simultaneously scholars and activists from those regions. Ideologically diverse on many issues, we were all committed to the project of an overtly political journal of the left. We were amateurs in running and editing a journal but were determined not to be beholden to grant bodies or commercial publishers and were wedded to the ‘self-help’ philosophy of the 60s. Thus the Editorial Working Group, as it insisted on calling itself, did its own pasting up of page-proofs to cut down printing bills (this shows in the crude layout of the first issues) and hand-wrote envelopes to subscribers. That we survived this phase owes much to the support of two left publishers Merlin Press (producers of The Socialist Register), who gave us a home and an address, and the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and its partner Russell Press.
Over thirty years the technology and organisation of production of the journal has been transformed, whilst the pitch and agenda of ROAPE have evolved. Having reached this milestone there is a need to reassess our position in the light of a vastly different global and continental context from that of the 1970s. In Africa, the changes since 1974 have been profound. The primary objectives of the liberation struggle were achieved with the end of apartheid. Yet the realisation of democratic sovereignty and sustained development seem as distant as ever. Several independent states have ‘collapsed’ or become broken-backed; almost all have succumbed to the economic prescriptions of the Washington Consensus. Internationally, ‘imperialism’ has become ‘globalisation’, whilst capital accumulation processes and the new technologies incorporated in them have generated further ‘globalisation’. The Cold War has ended, but instead of ushering in peace, new types of major conflict have ensued. The option (such as it was) and the support offered by ‘actually existing socialism’ have not been removed. Now the sole superpower, no longer content to be the first among equals, is bent on a brutal restructuring of the international system in its own interests.
The main purpose of this anniversary issue is to signal areas of debate, the better to understand this current conjuncture and what it implies for Africa's prospects, to question the thinking about basic issues that has appeared in the Review and in current writings on the left, to ask what it means to be true to ROAPE's original aims in a vastly changed world and what this implies for the practice of political ‘solidarity’ as one of the explicit original aims of this journal.
The contributions included here reflect some of the key issues in a changed agenda. Building on the first article, in which one of the founding editors reflects on the nature of ‘political economy’ and the role of ROAPE itself, this editorial attempts to provide some ideas which might be the starting point for our ‘renewal’. The current African predicament, which we believe to be as worrying as any during the last fifty years, also offers opportunities to chart a different course from decades of intellectual dependency on western orthodox views. We agree with Williams’ rejection of a priori theorising and his assertion of the need to draw on a variety of analytical perspectives — those which offer explanations in terms not only of interests and economic forces but also in terms of agency and contingency — and not just of power-holders, African or imperialist, promoting their policy agendas, but of ordinary people struggling to survive.
This requires us to prioritise certain issues that should top a radical agenda, a task that must start from an examination of the changing context and determining what matters most in it.1 For the editors of this issue, the current African conjuncture and the international disorder in which it is set, suggests five dominant themes in this agenda:
‘Globalised capitalism’. An increasingly interlinked and privatised global economy is emerging, marked by massive inequalities, orchestrated by the Washington Consensus, but with outcomes not always as intended. The model of liberalisation sparking foreign, private and productive investment has passed Africa by. Most of the continent is locked into patterns of primitive accumulation, to be discussed below.
US Militarism and Unilateralism. The unparalleled military supremacy of a single super-power is being used to redefine the international political system: The US state gives itself the right to intervene anywhere, to change regimes, construct contemporary forms of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ rule, secure bases and assemble ad hoc military alliances
The Reproduction of Labour and Society. The continued reproduction of primitive accumulation in Africa has shaped the forms of labour and social formations. Most marked are the processes of de-peasantisation without full proletarianisation, the multiplicity of livelihood sources and distinctive forms of stratification. Profound changes in social structure have been in turn deeply affected by war, AIDS, famine and donor interventions. The changing form and role of class and gender struggles, of worker and peasant associations and new social movements in resisting or coping with these processes, is evident.
States, State Failure and Conflict. ‘Development states’ are largely a thing of the past; adjustment policies and privatisation are increasingly forced on those that still have some capacity. Many states have lost effectiveness and legitimacy, and face increasing challenges to their authority. Violent conflict, in various forms, affects about a third of African countries and associated phenomena of ethnic cleansing, genocide, warlords and militias are the new agenda of politics to be critically understood.
Resistance and ‘Solidarity’ Today. There are new terrains of struggle. A movement for Global Justice confronting globalising capitalism has generated protests in Africa. So too has global resistance to US imperialism from anti-war movements, and from the fight-back against invasions and interventions. Africa has also been the site of civil society protests.
The continued relevance of political economy
The first article in this anniversary issue provides a reminder of some of the main themes tackled in the first years of the journal, highlighting some of the areas where our contributors pushed debates forward — and some key issues that we overlooked. If ROAPE could be said to have made any lasting input, it has been in helping to chart a particular approach to thinking about Africa's circumstances and challenges. Williams' piece sets the scene for a set of contributions which in diverse ways seek to apply a ‘political economy approach’ to contemporary African issues.
More basically Williams offers a restatement and reconsideration of the key ideas of a ‘political economy’ approach that we take as our defining intellectual starting point, and addresses their relevance in the current intellectual climate. Williams calls not for Africa-wide generalisations, but detailed, inter-disciplinary study of specific African realities. He proposes a different stance on the relation between study and practice from that which initially motivated the Review, namely to study Africa in order to change it. He questions our original aim of informing policy through identifying a correct development path, remembering that the failures of the national, import-substituting formulae of the first generation of nationalist governments gave way to even more disastrously inappropriate structural adjustment policies. His answer to the acute dilemma facing radical intellectuals is to lay bare actually existing development policies and their actual outcomes; to criticise not the policies espoused or the motives behind them, but their consequences.
His recommendations are not offered as a new paradigm for ROAPE, but to stimulate debates about the practical and intellectual implications of old and new ways of thinking. Thus a priority item on our future agenda is to reconsider the link between analysis and the practice of state and political agencies and, in turn, the role of intellectuals in this dynamic. After a decade of stunned inertia, several contributions have begun to emerge that seek to refocus radical thinking. One of the contributors to this issue, Michael Burawoy, here continues some of the themes that he developed in an earlier paper (2003) in which he called for three basic — and treasured — propositions in classical Marxism to be rethought:
- 1.
Instead of the capitalist economy sowing the seeds of its own demise, capitalism creates an active civil society that contains but does not end tendencies toward crisis and contradiction.
- 2.
Instead of class struggle intensifying with the polarization of class structure, class struggle is organised on the terrain of civil society (in part through class hegemony).
- 3.
Instead of the spontaneous maturing of the conditions of socialism as a result of fetters on the development of capitalist forces of production, socialism is a political project requiring conscious and purposive action and struggle (Burawoy, 2003:213)
These views both complement and challenge Williams and go beyond political economy in an attempt to integrate sociological analysis into a reformulated Marxism.
Capitalism & imperialism in the 21st century: The implications for Africa
Patterns of accumulation are becoming even more ‘global’, but, as in previous eras, generate their own distinct and geographically varied patterns. They are premised on a fairly explicit, but not always realised, contemporary imperialist strategy for orchestrating the political economies of developing countries. But in correctly stressing this, the contradictory role of capital itself — especially finance capital and the massive illicit economy — should not be overlooked. Many countries, especially in Africa, are systematically disadvantaged and impoverished by contemporary trade regimes and other institutional arrangements, despite the anti-poverty rhetoric. These consequences have generated widespread popular resistance in Africa, and an ‘anti-globalisation’ movement across the world — the implications of which are central to our discussion of ‘solidarity’ below.
Analysis of where ‘globalisation’ is taking Africa seems to suggest that the liberalisation model of opening up the continent to direct foreign investment and trade has eluded Africa. Instead the characteristic patterns of accumulation of the continent remain those of primitive accumulation, albeit in new as well as old forms (illegal trade in arms, the looting of natural resources, speculation and criminality, trade in people and so on). Further discussion of how far that thesis fits the facts and its implications is a crucial agenda item.
US militarism & unilateralism
Under Bush the post-Cold War pattern of international politics has become clear. The unparalleled military supremacy of a single super-power is being used to redefine international structures, going beyond a hegemonic position in a multilateral system to ‘unilateralism’. Under the banner of the ‘war on terrorism’, itself a meaningless phrase, the US over-rides notions of sovereignty, constructs contemporary forms of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ rule, and creates ad hoc alliances with strategically placed countries.
Around the world two topics have dominated the discourse of those troubled by the contemporary world situation: US militarism and imperialism, and capitalist globalisation. Following the demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, several truly global and largely spontaneous protests have erupted whenever the dominant international financial institutions meet. More of a network than an old-fashioned ‘movement’, the ‘global justice movement’ is not based on any centralised political organ, nor does it have any kind of manifesto. It communicates and mobilises for specific events and purposes employing the tools of modern IT. It embraces a wide range of concerns — environmental, gender, third-world developmental — but there is a common thread of anti-globalisation and even if only implicitly, an anti-capitalist rhetoric. With the preparation for and eventual invasion of Iraq and the build-up of Bush's ‘grand coalition’ of states (a handful of them African) there has been a massive global anti-war feeling, manifested in the biggest popular protests in half a century.
Gaining strength in all continents, the two movements often intermeshed, involving the same people. In many of the recent outpourings on the two issues, they are addressed as though the international economic forces and the military strategy of the US state were in fact two aspects of the same phenomenon. In its crudest form, this often gave rise to functionalist assumptions that US militarism and unilateralism was the ‘necessary’ means to achieve a globalised economy or that US ‘protectorates’ like Iraq or Afghanistan or dependencies like Saudi Arabia or Uzbekistan were simply settings for liberalisation and privatisation. Thus in one informative collection on US militarism (Boggs, 2003), one contributor sums up ‘the logic of US intervention’ (Parenti) as follows:
In sum, US politico-corporate elites have long struggled to make the world safe for the system of transnational corporate capital accumulation … To achieve this, a global military machine is essential. The goal is to create a world populated by client states and compliant populations completely open to transnational corporate penetration…
In a very recent book, The New Imperialism, David Harvey pursues the same task of developing a theoretical perspective on these two processes, treating one as deriving from the ‘logic of capital’ (international economic forces) and the other from the ‘logic of territory’ (state-based political forces) — two dimensions that have characterised all stages of modern imperialism. This may offer a productive platform for exploring the inter-related dynamics, and we commend it to readers’ attention. We need to explore the juxtaposition of unparalleled military power with the crisisridden nature of the US economy, between its political domination of other developed states and its relative economic weakness. Is the use of military power a sign of weakness (as Wallerstein argues, 2003), or a means to a more sustained economic position, primarily by control of the world's oil supplies?
What the two logics imply for the continent, which may be quite different from what they mean for the Middle East or Latin America, can be derived from uncovering their dynamics. Is it correct to conclude, as the Abramovici Briefing and Keenan's article in ROAPE 101 emphasised, that oil is at the centre of what the US and the oil companies want from Africa's new producers — together with the geo-strategic leverage to exert control over oil from Africa, and into the Middle East and beyond? How important are other mineral resources on the shopping list? And beyond these resource and strategic objectives, is there any real interest in Africa at all? If both capital and western capitals are generally indifferent to Africa's marginalisation, how do we explain such seemingly contradictory initiatives as Blair's Commission? Is it a sign of some residual conscience, as Plaut speculates in his Briefing here, or, as Abrahamsen suggests, a shift towards a ‘securitisation’ of discourse on Africa, or as other British commentators have suggested, essentially a smoke-screen for his government's failures, notably in Iraq?
Class & the reproduction of labour & society
ROAPE's founders set out a series of issues for analysis with regard to class. This agenda had its critics (charges of ‘narodnism’ and of ignoring the prospects for socialist class struggle surfaced from time to time, for example) but, looking back, it is remarkable to what extent these questions and debates set the agenda for the left in analysing Africa.
A key area of consideration concerned the prospects and problems confronting the mass of peasants and workers on the continent. The founding editors sought to examine the extent to which the peasantry and working class might be able to develop a politics challenging colonial capitalism and neo-colonial subordination. Could development strategies be pursued which might promise the peasantry some way out of poverty and famine? Could the African working class develop a radical political agenda or was it compromised by what was perceived as its ‘labour aristocracy’ position within the post-colonial social formation? Above all, could African workers and peasants, linked together through migrant labour as workerpeasants, become a force for radical social transformation? The analysis developed in these pages and elsewhere, by Harold Wolpe (see Burawoy's tribute here) and others (Van Onselen, Burawoy himself) had shown how the process of migrantisation rather than proletarianisation of labour allowed capital to impose part of the costs of reproduction of labour on the indigenous modes of production in the rural areas and so to set wage rates below the cost of subsistence and reproduction of labour power - below the level therefore which Marx had identified as the lowest at which the working class could survive. Various contributions to the journal sought to examine how far the traditional political weakness of migrant workers and the ‘conservative’ tendencies of a ‘labour aristocracy’ might be transcended in the struggle against exploitation.
Conversely there was a sustained consideration of the role of national bourgeoisies and the possibilities, if any, that they might use the post-colonial state to challenge neo-colonial structures and pursue substantive anti-imperialist strategies. Was this class ‘nationalist’ or ‘comprador’? Was its goal the fundamental re-orientation of African economies in order to move away from the export-enclave pattern of dependent development or did it simply want to appropriate petty bourgeois forms of property for itself? Could it lead a mass democratic movement capable of weakening the dominance of imperial capital in Africa? Was its class project aimed at winning national sovereignty and promoting a sustainable bourgeois ‘revolution’ or was it more concerned with negotiating better terms and conditions for itself within global capitalism? It is to the credit of most of the founding editors of the Review that they were sceptical of the capabilities of this class from the start and expressed at best a critical support for its efforts.
Since those early years, class analysis has fallen on hard times in Africa as elsewhere in the world. So too class politics. The change reflects the changed global and intellectual environment we already noted; the same process that reshaped the capitalist world economy and the role of the imperialist state has also rendered socialist politics peripheral and largely disarmed its intellectual project. The world crisis of the 1970s and 1980s opened the door for neo-liberal economics and armed the metropolitan capitalist class in defence of its own interests. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War left this class in charge of the only global superpower and willing to use its power to try to impose its hegemony. In the face of the new assertiveness of the right came an accompanying timidity on the left, culminating in full-scale intellectual retreat. Those who had once professed themselves Marxists and anti-Stalinists now found themselves fearful of remaining Marxists in the wake of the collapse of Stalinism (Geras, 1990:32). They joined ‘the Great Moving Right Show’ (Geras, 1986:xvii). The retreat is most clearly represented in post-modernist sensibility, where class divisions and exploitation are no longer fundamental problems, replaced instead by a reformist discourse happy to subordinate itself to the rule of neo-liberalism and to assert the universality of liberal values. As Wood (1990: 60) observes:
Just when more than ever we need a … Marx to reveal the inner workings of the capitalist system, or a[n] … Engels to expose its ugly realities ‘on the ground’, what we are getting is an army of ‘post-Marxists’, one of whose principal functions is apparently to conceptualize away the problem of capitalism. The ‘post-modern’ world, we are told, is a pastiche of fragments and ‘difference’. The systemic unity of capitalism, its ‘objective structures’ and totalizing imperatives, have given way (if they ever existed) to … a pluralistic structure so diverse and flexible that it can be rearranged by discursive construction’.
In this pastiche, exploitation and class conflict are replaced by a particular conception of ‘civil society’, a loose and arbitrary collection of more or less autonomous identities, interests and associations no longer embedded in the mode of production. Thus disconnected from class struggles, the idea of ‘civil society’ can come to express everything and nothing:
…after a series of milestones in the work of Hegel, Marx and Gramsci, this versatile idea has become an all-purpose catchword for the left, embracing a wide range of emancipatory aspirations, as well … as a whole set of excuses for political retreat. However constructive its uses in defending human liberties against state oppression, or in marking out a terrain of social practices, institutions and relations neglected by the ‘old’ Marxist left, ‘civil society’ is now in danger of becoming an alibi for capitalism (Ibid.)
The same process of abandoning class analysis and substituting a notion of a disembodied ‘civil society’ naturally has its counterpart in African studies and politics. The global changes we have reviewed disrupted processes of class formation underway on the continent through much of the 20th century and undermined both the political capacity of workers and peasants to resist local and foreign capitalist interests and the struggle of the broad left in Africa against neocolonialism. In their place has been put a dialogue between benefactors and dependants with its discourse of ‘donors’, ‘stakeholders’ and ‘partners’ substituting for foreign and local classes. This shift has also had its effect on contributions to ROAPE. Despite some important work on class struggles published in these pages in recent years, the emphasis has moved inexorably towards a state and governmental rather than a class focus. The role of ‘aid donors’, the impact of restructuring and adjustment programmes imposed on African governments, and the institutional decay and disintegration which has followed in the wake of crisis, have consumed much attention. The journal has promoted an important and trenchant (and, we would suggest, unanswerable) critique of this ‘re-colonisation’ process and contributors have explored ways in which the African state might resist. But, with a few notable exceptions, there has been little class analysis in such critiques. In the wider area of African studies, too, there has been a retreat from class (either to the safety of donor-funded research on governance and reform or to explanations about how class realities are irrelevant to the conditions of Africa given their difference from the classical European form analysed by Marx).
There is a profound irony that class analysis should be neglected at a time when it can be argued such analysis is most urgent. As Glaser (2001:130) observes of South Africa, ‘the current conjuncture is a curious one for class analysis’:
The 1990s have, from one point of view, offered a profound confirmation of the importance of class. We have seen the leading politicians and dominant capitalists of the ancien regime throw overboard their loyalty to white power and … to their ethno-linguistic compatriots, in order to secure a deal that preserved capitalism and their own private property, jobs and pensions. Amongst Africans, we have seen … a burgeoning of the black bourgeoisie and professional elite, accompanied by a shamelessly individualistic jettisoning of solidarity with the black oppressed. This has occurred against the backdrop of a longer-standing deepening of inequality….
For any meaningful project of the left to be sustainable, it is important that the continued and changing salience of class relations should be a point of departure for analysing African social dynamics. For us (and it should be so for any socialist) the social categories of class, race and gender are crucial for any understanding of how people and households live and survive, of how they act socially, politically and culturally, and in so doing of how they reproduce themselves, their social formations and their livelihoods. We also believe that rooting an analysis of even such a crucial issue as the AIDS pandemic in an analysis of the reproduction of labour and of social formations, as Janet Bujra and Roy Love both do in this issue, illuminates that major issue in new ways.
What is also needed in future is to link such crises of social reproduction to the persistence of patterns of primitive accumulation on the continent, not just in their traditional forms as explored by Wolpe and others, but also in the new forms that have arisen which rest on the exploitation of ultra-cheap labour power. Contemporary patterns of the reproduction of labour have become more complex than the traditional base in rural families from which male migrants venture out to seek wages. Emerging patterns of multiple sources of livelihood, which Bryceson summarises so well in this issue, mark an enormous evolutionary change and are of central social and ultimately political importance. They are the contemporary form of ultra-cheap labour power for capital, but also the basis for expanding ‘petty commodity’ production of a massive range of goods and services. They represent the survival initiatives taken by large numbers of marginalized and excluded people who are surplus to capital's requirements and whose reproduction is not provided for by capitalist institutions or the state.
We must look again at the place of the African petty bourgeoisie in the light of the changes being imposed on Africa. Its failure to promote an autonomous development has compromised not only the continent's hopes of sovereignty but also severely curtailed its freedom of manoeuvre. Adjustment programmes have eaten into its capacity to appropriate parts of the social surplus through state office and ruined its small businesses. With the western ‘aid donors’ increasingly taking over the financial management of the African state, its political base has also been circumscribed. And with the advent of market reforms, it faces competition (political as much as economic) from new bourgeois elements more in tune with donor demands. There is a need to explore how far this class dynamic drives the spread of civil strife in Africa and, more lastingly, how western capital hopes to consolidate dependent capitalist systems when it has removed state power from its nominated ruling class.
Above all, there is urgent need to bring class back in to studies of the state, of gender and race relations and of policy debates. The articulation of class relations with other social relations and identities needs to be more fully and critically related than it was in the past and it needs to be done in ways that give centrality to social class as the expression of relations of production and distribution. It is thus important, for example, to begin to explore more clearly the ways in which class relations have a gender dimension in Africa, as it is also important to examine how gender has a class character (see, for example, Bujra, 2000). Clearly the profound transition which Africa is experiencing makes the understanding of class relations increasingly complex and multi-faceted, and the political actions of social groups less determined and predictable than traditional theory usually accepted. Perhaps Burawoy's rejection of the inevitability of an in-built tendency to polarisation of classes under capitalism and the ultimate revolutionary role of a working class is a response to these contemporary African realities? Whatever the case, the meaning and salience of class under these conditions demands further debate and considerably more prominence in a new agenda. Without it, we would suggest, there is no adequate means of assessing the contending forces which are engaged in violent conflicts throughout the continent and in the wider developing world.
The state in Africa and the political economy of conflict
These columns have seen their share of characterisations of the state. Early debates focussed on the post-colonial state, attempting to generalise about its class base, and its status with regard to imperialist powers and international capital — neo-colonial, comprador, or national democratic. More recent debates have focussed on the mechanisms that power-holders use and the economic booty they grab and compete for: the neo-patrimonial state. The validity of such models and their continued relevance are still matters for debate. So too is the issue of the role of the state as opposed to the market, its role in running a capitalist economy and in economic development, with the IFIs themselves beginning to concede that their prescriptions about the withdrawal of the state went too far. It should be conceded, however, that the prospect of a developmentalist state, to which some of the early post-colonial states aspired, disappeared in Africa decades ago — an option that was undermined by international, mainly US pressures, despite economically powerful exemplars in East and South-east Asia.
Analyses of the patrimonial state have offered a perspective on the phenomenon of the 1990s: state failure. Such approaches have not satisfactorily explained why and how such failure led in several instances to state collapse, illustrated so completely and for such a long period by Somalia. A whole literature has grown up around internal conflicts and wars which were often the result, or even the cause of failing states (e.g. Berdal & Malone, 2000) — unfortunately not represented as thoroughly in these pages as these human disasters warranted. We must critically explore the political economy of war and endemic conflict, going beyond cataloguing victims and devastations, and investigating the long term damage to livelihoods and livelihood systems.
The ‘political economy of war’ has been used as a label for a perspective on civil wars in Africa and elsewhere that challenges orthodox perspectives on the ‘causes’ of such conflicts and their dynamics and on the appropriate responses to resolve conflict or provide humanitarian relief. A number of propositions characterise this approach:
Wars and major conflicts wreak havoc on people's lives and livelihoods, but also transform social systems and political economies, in particular patterns of trade and production and reproduction suited to such conditions, often based on the use of violence (Kaldor, 1998).
Such patterns thrive on the dislocations of globalisation, and benefit from illicit or hidden globalised networks (sponsoring flows of arms, trade in drugs and minerals, laundered money and other illegal finance or the activities of diasporas and refugees). Duffield (2001) points to the need to understand the global context and its fractures, and also serves as a reminder how large a proportion of the globalised economy is invisible and ‘illegal’— e.g. the drugs trade is on the scale of the oil industry! Africa's wars have to be seen as phenomena associated with emergent patterns of capital accumulation.
Alongside the destruction and impoverishment they bring, conflicts, like famine, have clear beneficiaries, economically and politically (Keen, 1998). At international, regional and national levels, the conduct of war economy businesses and the mobilization of non-state militias is profitable. Within local communities this enrichment is seen in deepening differentiation, as people acquire land and herds that the poor are forced to abandon or sell. War situations embody changing patterns of social reproduction and class formation evident throughout Africa.
The dynamics of these political economies, the structures and interests they throw up, all in turn create conditions which should be, but rarely are, taken on board by those intervening to resolve or manage them (Cliffe & Luckham, 2000). Building peace becomes more than just addressing original causes.
Debates around this perspective are pursued vigorously among those who study war and peace; they have even been taken into account by agencies concerning themselves with humanitarian relief and post-conflict recovery. But they have received only passing mention in the columns of a Review that takes political economy as its defining focus. The substantial Briefing on Darfur included here is a welcome exception and shows the benefit of an approach that situates an analysis of the present crisis within the long-term background forces that generated it. Given the impact of war and violence in recent African history, such perspectives need to be much more mainstreamed in intellectual discourse and in development policy agendas. In the process the methodology of the political economy approach might benefit and provide even sharper insights. At the same time, we also need to analyse the difference between liberation wars in Africa (which ROAPE steadfastly supported in the past) and current civil conflicts. Few armed movements today, whether insurgent, by state security agencies or warlords, represent a benevolent force that can improve the lot of ordinary people or that deserve any form of endorsement. Our emphasis must be on promoting solidarity with popular forces to further peace with social justice — particularly initiatives deriving from the most exploited sectors of the population.
‘Solidarity’, the role of intellectuals & the political stance of ROAPE
Our inaugural editorial pledged support for both the continued liberation of Africa and the struggle against neo-colonial domination. These commitments were given expression in supportive material on liberation movements and ‘progressive’ states. Today, however, we have a transformed political and economic landscape. With the exception of the struggle for self-determination in Western Sahara, there are no longer any of the classic liberation struggles in train. Whilst we continue to support the aspirations of people in some regions to reverse their marginalisation and exclusion, few of us would unequivocally espouse their cause for statehood or even regional autonomy. The image we once had, of states led by national regimes defiantly keeping imperialist forces at bay in the interests of benefiting their people, is no longer a sustainable picture, given contemporary realities. Thus an examination and evaluation of these original positions is timely, and not merely to help reorient a particular journal. We must critically seek to understand existing conflicts and their dynamics, the problems, mechanisms and experiences of conflict resolution, the prospects for democratisation and aspirations for political and cultural ‘renaissance’ and what these mean for contemporary strategies of solidarity in pan-African and global terms.
Lloyd Sachikonye offers an entry into this kind of discussion, providing an overview of the premises and practices of the past fifty years of solidarity between African people's struggles and outside movements. Considering the possible contemporary relevance of solidarity, he argues that the issues that ought to be central are the same: poverty reduction, democracy, citizenship and human rights, migration and labour rights. He also refers to what might be termed the solidarity between the world's people, manifested in the World Social Forum and in the anti-globalisation protests. Within Africa he points to similar protests, and these will be reviewed in an article by Zeilig and Seddon on popular protest held over to the next issue. But he acknowledges their weakness thus far, with solidarity between African countries being limited to a few NGOs, some pan-African umbrella movements of trade unions and a few other interest groups. New forms of ‘solidarity’ are seen mainly at the inter-state level in bodies like NEPAD and by the new African Union.
The role of intellectuals, discussed most incisively as a ‘responsibility’ by Paul Baran in 1969, was also the subject we focussed on in our 10th Anniversary issue (No.32). The courageous stand taken by Ngugi wa Thiongo, for African intellectuals to take their cue from ordinary people, is a position more honoured in the breach than in the real world. International radical scholars took as their mantra Marx's call to study the world in order to change it. Reference was constantly made to Gramsci's notion of ‘organic intellectuals’ who situated their work in the struggles of contending classes. Gramsci's perspective seems to have been rejected by the radical Palestinian scholar, Edward Said, in the months before his recent death. He argued that intellectuals ought to steer clear from too direct an involvement with movements like PLO or the Palestinian Authority so as to retain their critical perspective. The same challenges were faced by Harold Wolpe and other South African intellectuals who were active in the national liberation movement. The challenges to those working in that context are brought out well in the three principles that Burawoy's tribute isolates. The third of these — a post-liberation stance whereby the researcher ‘takes as point of departure party priorities on the reconstruction agenda’ — was in fact a point of contention for this journal in the past. The shift in Wolpe's position in his last years to a position more critical of the reconstruction agenda in South Africa is a more tenable position from which the critical intellectual may foster debate about future goals. Burawoy extrapolates this further, arguing that it calls for a different sort of committed intellectual, the ‘interpreter’, rather than the ‘liberator’. He also poses the challenge that while Wolpe's insistence on a structuralist analysis may be a useful corrective to those who reduce the social formation to a matter of consciousness, analysis of consciousness cannot be ignored if one is to understand classes and other social groups as actors. These fundamental questions need further debate by everyone engaged in a ‘committed’ venture like ROAPE, including its readers.
For any journal that has tried to define its purpose in terms of political engagement, anniversaries offer an opportunity to redefine themselves. One notable example of redefinition was attempted in the New Left Review's editorial statement, ‘Renewals’, in its January 2000 Issue (the new issue No. 1). Its editors signalled both an intention to ‘publish articles regardless of their immediate relationship, or lack of it, to familiar radical agendas’ and to maintain a political stance relevant to what they saw as the ‘principal aspect of the past decade … the virtually uncontested consolidation, and universal diffusion, of neo-liberalism’. In these circumstances the stance would be ‘an uncompromising realism: … refusing any accommodation with the ruling system, [whilst] rejecting any piety and euphemism that would understate its power’. An alternative formulation was that of Le Monde Diplomatique, which in its 50th Anniversary issue linked the values of ‘resistance’ (a word which has great resonance in France) to contemporary concerns with ‘globalisation’ and US imperialism, whilst embracing the developing coalition of new social movements.
The debate between these different positions must concern ROAPE and its readership. ROAPE has not come up with a formulaic statement of a new political stance. The opinions here are those of the individuals who sign this editorial. However, we feel that we do speak for the EWG in restating the view that ROAPE remains a political journal, which continues to promote wide debate rather than state an editorial line The views here offer one set of themes about a possible agenda for such debates and one that is relevant to this era. Focusing our attention on the forces that determine current African realities, including the external ones, it should offer what Wolpe called ‘the continuous critique of the social order’. Petras provies an attack from the left on the New Left Review position. This does not mean staying at the level of generalised theoretical discourse; it means prioritising analysis of the devastating forces with which people in Africa have to contend, such as AIDS and violent conflict, and the often innovative ways they pursue to survive. Greater insights into these problems can derive from analyses that root the detailed particulars in a theoretical context — seeing AIDS as integrally linked with the changing patterns of social reproduction and global capitalism, viewing civil war as being shaped by the existent and emerging frames of political economy.