Introduction by Lionel Cliffe
The paper below has been written by John Saul, and is couched in his distinctive style. But it also represents a piece of collective work, integrating, as it does, a series of working papers by Saul on a set of related themes, and discussions around them. These papers were produced originally for a conference in Toronto to mark Saul's retirement. The conference was attended by many ‘scholar-activists’, as he calls his target group, from Africa, Canada and Europe, including some members of ROAPE's Editorial Working Group.
Apart from representing the product of a significant occasion, it is appropriate to reproduce this compilation in these pages for another reason. The discussion in the original papers, at the conference and in the article that follows, revolved around a selection of topics deliberately chosen as issues that matter to those who look at African realities from a left perspective. As such it offers a companion piece to the ‘Agenda’ that was served up in ROAPE's 30th anniversary Issue (No. 102), one which broadens out the agenda and in some ways poses related but distinct challenges. Although there is some overlap, one distinction is that the themes around which the article below is organised are considerations about future prospects for possible action to bring social and political change, whereas the Agenda in ROAPE 102's Editorial were more to do with headings for analysis and investigation. Thus, the latter put emphasis on the need to understand both the economic and current military character of imperialism and, by implication, contemporary capitalism; whereas the piece here is more concerned with challenging that world order.
We hope readers will read and dwell on this new offer of a radical agenda, and perhaps compare it with that in No. 102, and that some will be moved to enter these kinds of debates about Africa's future and the future of ‘scholar-activism’. A couple of examples can be offered of where the differences in the two contributions might spark further debate. The discussion below of ‘class’ – a focus which has been central to left discourse – is juxtaposed to other bases for ‘identity’ such as race, gender and ethnic – a fair point. But No. 102 poses a different challenge to earlier forms of class analysis: the one posed by the common present-day patterns of social reproduction that place so many individuals and households in not a single unambiguous ‘class location’ but several. The implications for this, for the strategies and prospects of the struggles listed below, need to be worked out; they are scarcely recognised. Here, the phenomenon is mentioned in contributions in No. 102 but the implications for a range of actions are not worked out there, either.
Another example of a topic that No. 102 recognised as a central concern but which figures but little below is the prevalence of various forms of internal war and violent conflict in many parts of Africa. Perhaps this omission is related to the fact that many of the instances mentioned below are from southern and to some extent East Africa. It is the case that other regions are more susceptible to violent politics – although what about Angola and not so long ago Mozambique? But a focus on southern Africa in a comparative framework might suggest the question as to why it seems that region may be overcoming major internal wars. More generally, neither ‘agenda’ poses the vital issue as to where does ‘peace’ fit in a programme for radical activism.
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This essay integrates several ‘working papers’ written for the purpose of encouraging the ongoing intellectual and activist undertakings of committed scholars and practitioners in both the ‘South’ and the ‘North’ and they may serve here to focus our attention on a number of crucial development-related themes, especially as regards the African reality. This latter empirical focus is chosen because the chief ground of my own developmentalist praxis has been Africa, but also because these papers were originally prepared for a Workshop at York University in Canada on the theme, ‘Africa: The Next Liberation Struggle: Socialism, Democracy, Activism’. 1 Nonetheless, they were designed not merely to promote further discussion of the African case there, but also to draw from participants more general reflections and debate and to encourage a level of understanding and action better able to comprehend the realities of the contemporary world and to support the actions of the marginalised and exploited everywhere.
Liberation & democracy
The first working paper sought to focus the theme of ‘liberation and democracy’. It noted that the languages of both ‘liberation’ and ‘democracy’ have been particularly potent over recent decades in Africa. Thus, ‘liberation’ (generally cast, in the first instance, in terms of ‘national liberation’) helped drive the dramatic process of emancipation from white minority rule in southern Africa, while ‘democracy’ has been amongst the most salient of claims advanced by activists and intellectuals contesting the authoritarian states that have blanketed so much of Africa since independence.
In fact, however, there are few more contested concepts on the terrains of either political science or political practice than these two. For example, while few would deny the importance of the demand for more ‘democracy’ in Africa (or, for that matter, of the often parallel demand for ‘human rights’), the precise meaning and resonance to be attached to such demands is much debated. Particularly suggestive in this respect is a key differentiation made some years ago by Issa Shivji when he distinguished between ‘liberal’ and ‘popular’ democracy (Shivji, 1991: 255). In so doing, he in effect linked his critique of ‘liberal democracy’ to those who have similarly seen that ‘thin’ form as exemplifying ‘polyarchy’ (Dahl and Robinson), ‘democratic elitism’ (Schumpeter), ‘low intensity democracy’ (Gills, Rocamora and Wilson) and ‘pseudo-democracy’ (Phillip Green). And he suggests his preferred alternative – ‘popular democracy’ – to be characterised positively by a much more vibrant form of popular mobilisation and empowerment and by ‘its position on imperialism, state and class, class struggle, etc.’
A more widespread realisation of even a primarily procedural democracy might represent a step forward in Africa, of course. It could provide fresh space for disciplining from below various all too prevalent authoritarian tendencies and, in the pursuit of the goal of unity, could also assist in the discovery of acceptable mechanisms for reconciling differences, especially those that are ‘communally defined’ by ethnicity, regionalism and religion. For the left, it could also provide some relatively open political ground upon which to build its own institutions of long-run resistance and transformation. It is no wonder that demands for the formal guarantees of ‘bourgeois democracy’ in Africa have been prominent on the agenda not merely of the IFIs, international donors and some sectors of the African middle class but also of many popularly-based organisations.
Yet it has proven notoriously difficult to realise even a relatively vibrant liberal democracy in Africa. A situation of extreme scarcity renders the intra-elite struggle over spoils particularly intense. Meanwhile, global pressures to adapt to neoliberalism narrow the range of options that can easily be articulated by newly ‘democratic’ governments and thus competed over in elections; popular cynicism and indifference are often the result. Worse, under such conditions, quasi-democratic competition can easily become reduced to the lowest common denominator of religious and regional infighting. Moreover, the pull towards renewed authoritarianism under such circumstances is very strong.
The possibility that democratic competition might merely increase fissiparous tendencies in Africa at the expense of national unity and national purpose is what led Nyerere in his time and Uganda's Museveni more recently to argue for one-party/one movement regimes (albeit these were men driven by quite different agendas of national purpose: ‘African socialism’ on the one hand; neo-liberal policies on the other). Analysts have often suggested this kind of cure to be far worse than the disease, however. In Tanzania, it sanctioned TANU's drive not only to sideline ethnic politics but also to undermine – in the name of unity – the potential for more progressive, popularly-based expressions from independent organisations of workers, women, youth and communities (Saul, 2005, ch. 7). And in Uganda it helped rationalise Museveni's project of harbouring power to himself and his chosen associates. Indeed, in light of African experience, it is difficult to think that even quasi-benign intentions can overcome the costs to radical politics of the failure to secure an open terrain for the expression of oppositional politics. Moreover, the intentions behind the propensity on the part of leaders for political closure are often far more malign than those of a Nyerere or a Museveni.
Such questions become even more salient in light of the experience of those ‘successful’ movements for liberation that have achieved power in southern Africa. The demand for anti-colonial liberation, as directed against white rule, was an implicitly democratic one, although one that, in practice, often led to more authoritarian practices than any convincing definition of democracy would readily countenance. True, one could see, however briefly, some promise of a ‘radical nationalism’ guaranteeing both a socialist programme and a process of mass empowerment. In Mozambique, revolutionary elites did attempt, at least for a time, to realise policies and programmes designed to better the lot of the masses. But even in such a ‘best-case scenario,’ the vanguardist failure to really open up the political arena to the potential messiness but also long-term promise of mass politics helped undercut the revolutionary potential of the regime as surely as did the cruel acts of destabilisation inflicted upon an independent Mozambique by apartheid South Africa. There more formally democratic institutions, when they came, did help contain some of the internal contradictions that had sustained a cruel civil war but they also produced a polity that, in other ways, drew the population away from any consciousness of shared public purpose that the socialist project had once seemed to promise in that country.
And elsewhere the region witnessed liberations that were even more unambiguously compromised from the outset: Angola, where the increasingly corrupt rule of the MPLA in Angola bent (like Mozambique) under the weight of South African and US destabilisation but also under the weight of its own neo-stalinist preferences; Namibia, where the appearance of a liberal-democratic outcome masked a SWAPO dominance that still reflected the autocratic character of that movement's existence in exile; and Zimbabwe, where a combination of arrogant leadership and neo-liberal pressure led both to an upsurge of popular democratic resistance to the debased rule of Mugabe and his colleagues but also to the reinforcement of the latter's ruthless attempt to retain their control (Saul, 2005, chapters 4, 5 and 6).
In South Africa the realisation, in the early-1990s, of a liberal democracy seemed to many a most positive outcome to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Yet as the ANC embraced ever more uncritically a neo-liberal economic strategy and a narrowly electoral definition of mass politics, the costs of that party's overarching legitimacy (as the chief agent of liberation!) began to become more evident. In the event, the immense popular energies that many felt would carry over from the struggle into a mass politics of transformation in post-apartheid South Africa were contained, even effectively demobilised, by the ANC leadership. The bulk of the population, although now more impoverished than ever, apparently was expected to rest content with being little more than spectators at the intra-elite politicking that swirled above them.
Nonetheless, one of the most promising signals in contemporary Africa is the emergence of popular movements on the ground in South Africa that are increasingly inclined to resist the ANC, its policies and its politics (Saul, 2005, Section 3). From the authoritarian degeneration of liberation movements once in power, the left can perhaps learn, for Africa, a lesson that is also increasingly clear from historical experience elsewhere. Self-proclaimed vanguards – whether they be acting in the name of national unity or socialism – are more threat than promise to the grounding of a process of popularly-based, socialist politics. Of course, a simple assertion of the virtues of democracy or a tacit assumption of the likelihood of mass radical spontaneity are not enough. Organisation and ideology will remain crucial revolutionary tools, with the coordination of local resistances helping resultant movements to add up to become much more than the sum of their parts. There will also be a role for leadership to shape mass action even as that leadership must itself be held true to its task by pressure from below. The question of how to build and sustain a transformative politics, both in order to achieve power and to use it effectively once power is achieved, remains a daunting one.
From the assertion of claims to democracy that has begun to occur recently throughout the continent, the left in Africa can also learn lessons germane to its long-term project. Democratic demands have resonance certainly: the domestic authoritarianism which is rampant sees to that and so too, increasingly, may the self-evidently undemocratic global power system that dictates so many outcomes to Africa. There is a language here to be appropriated, albeit a language that is (as suggested above) also subject to abuse and self-interested manipulation both by local and international players. How best, then, to mould the project of democratisation into a truly popular weapon, rather than having it continue to be used, at least as often, as a tool of the elite? Is ‘popular democracy’ enough of a marker to distinguish the broader claims for socio-economic as well as political transformation that must be advanced in its name? If not, how overtly and self-consciously must it blend with the attendant projects of ‘anti-capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ in order to guarantee the seriousness of the project that it seeks to encapsulate?
Finally, the question of how local, national, even continental assertions in Africa – for popular democracy, for socialism – plug into global struggles for the transformation of capitalism and of the hierarchies of imperialist power is an especially daunting one. For, self-evidently, it will be difficult for any individual African local community or state to so democratise global capitalism and/or the American imperium as to find sufficient freedom from the pressures such structures assert in order to self-confidently and successfully launch their own transformative projects. The dilemma of how popular democratic struggles can come to be mounted at the various sites of possible contestation – local, state, regional, continental, global – in such a way as to begin to tilt the balance of global power is at least as dauntingfor Africans as it is for people elsewhere – and perhaps, given the extreme vulnerability of the continent, even more so.
Class & identity
A second working paper encouraged the workshop to focus on many of the same complex issues evoked elsewhere (see also Saul, 2006, ch. 3), seeking to introduce for discussion the theme of ‘class’ and ‘identity’ (gender, race, ethnie).’ It proceeded as follows: Defining Africa's major challenge with central reference to the negative manner of the continent's insertion into the global capitalist system also implies the granting of a certain analytical centrality to the fact of social class, as both globally and domestically structured. It is true that, however crucial to the discussion of the gross inequalities that scar the continent, any such class analysis is complicated in its own terms. Thus, the relative lack of saliency of any domestic bourgeoisie shifts much of the burden of local class domination to the shoulders of various bureaucratic and political elites. Moreover, the relative weakness of any African proletariat in many countries highlights the importance, in terms of stratification, both of highly differentiated peasantries and a diverse range of urban dwellers who live alongside those more formally employed and organised as workers – many of them more ‘marginalised’ and ‘excluded’ by capitalism than ‘exploited’ in any straightforward marxist sense. As Post and Wright have written:
The working out of capitalism in parts of the periphery prepares not only the minority working class but peasants and other working people, women, youth and minorities for a socialist solution, even though the political manifestation of this may not initially take the form of a socialist movement. In the case of those who are not wage labourers (the classical class associated with that new order) capitalism has still so permeated the social relations which determine their existences, even though it may not have followed the western European pattern of ‘freeing’ their labour power, that to be liberated from it is their only salvation … The objective need for socialism of these elements can be no less than that of the worker imprisoned in the factory and disciplined by the whip of unemployment. These prices are paid in even the most ‘successful’ of the underdeveloped countries, and others additionally experience mass destitution. Finding another path has … become a desperate necessity if the alternative of continuing, if not increasing, barbarism is to be escaped (Post and Wright, 1989).
Of course, developing a class politics that can underpin revolutionary practices and implicate revolutionary goals has proven to be a far from straightforward matter even in much more developed regions of the world than Africa, and has given rise, over the past century, to a range of highly contested debates about the nature and promise of proletarian politics. Such debates are germane here, in particular the challenges posed by the existence of lines of identity and markers of diverse oppressions at play in Africa and elsewhere, that cut across class structures at any number of oblique angles. Bannerji has underscored the ‘absurdity’ of attempting to see ‘identity and difference as historical forms of consciousness unconnected to class formation, development of capital and class politics.’ But in so doing, she also emphasises the impossibility of considering class itself outside the gendering and ‘race-ing’ that so often significantly characterise it in the concrete (Bannerji, 1995: 30-1).
This is most obvious with respect, precisely, to the fact of gender. The burden of patriarchy (borne across a broad spectrum of violence directed against women, for example, and highlighted by differential structures of opportunity) are visible enough. Nor can there be any doubt that capitalist-induced exploitation and marginalisation are uneven in their gender impact, generally producing patterns that reinforce the higher price of such realities that is exacted from women (witness in Africa, for example, the differential import of structural adjustment programmes). On the other hand, the mobilisation and activism of women has grounded a struggle that is important in its own right on the continent, however much it may often intersect with simultaneous expressions of class struggle. In sum, the terms of gendering both class analysis and class politics is a work-in-progress in Africa as elsewhere.
Whether, terminologically, gender is a fact of ‘identity’ may be disputed, of course. Generally deemed to fall even more clearly under this rubric are the more ‘imagined’ markers of differentiation of race, religion, region, nation and sub-nation (‘ethnic groups’, ‘tribe’). Not that the term ‘imagined’ should be taken to imply that the embrace of such categories to identify either a manifestation of oppression or a practice of resistance makes the phenomenon they refer to any less real and tangible. In Africa each of these variables has had pertinent effects with racism both defining and rationalising the subordination of Africa right up to the present day, and racial consciousness, emanating from the continent itself, having had countervailing emancipatory effects (albeit sometimes rather ambiguous ones) when it has emerged in such forms as Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness. And since race is still one marker of social privilege in a country like post-apartheid South Africa, the ramifications of that fact can scarcely be expected to disappear very quickly.
Globally, too, the racism underpinning the workings of imperialism and contemporary capitalism's worldwide reach has been cited as helping rationalise the West's continued outward thrust. It is also a factor which, alongside potentially diverse material interests, has made the forging of alliances between subordinate classes, North and South, more difficult to achieve than might otherwise be the case. Meanwhile, reaction from below to such racism has helped encourage a vogue for ‘post-colonial’ studies and other less academic expressions of a racially-conscious sensibility that can occasionally serve to illuminate, sometimes to obscure, the workings of the present global system and the promise of a more universalistic emancipation.
National assertions, albeit most often ones defined with reference to the territorial boundaries inherited from colonialism have, in Africa as elsewhere, also had meaning – although as often as not rationalising the domination of new elites (Fanon's ‘pitfalls of national consciousness’) as focusing ongoing processes of popular emancipation. Nonetheless, Munck writes,
the critique of nationalist discourse should not blind us to the popular struggles it has [also] fostered and animated … The struggles of the subaltern may take many forms – nationalist, ethnic, regional and religious amongst others – and a marxism that seeks to have global influence needs to understand these and not just struggle to ‘demystify’ and reassert a ‘true’ class struggle (Munck, 2000: 133).
The distinction between national consciousness on the one hand, and ethnic (subnational) consciousness on the other, is not an absolutely clear one and is, in any case, generally made more demagogically than with any real precision. It is also the case that ethnic sentiment, like nationalism more strictly defined, is too often merely mobilised and manipulated by self-serving elites. Still, even Soyinka acknowledges the possible wisdom, when all else has failed, of some ordinary Africans finding solace and sanctuary (of language, kin and territorial affinity) in the most proximate of (ethnic) self-definitions. If the latter tend not to find much in the way of long-term emancipation by choosing such a survival strategy, it is surely the failure of both capitalism and socialism to yet deliver on their promises of a genuinely humane ‘developmentalism’ that must be seen as providing a significant part of the explanation for the vacuum into which these and other far more ‘pathological deformations’ of consciousness enter (Milband, 1994).
For we exist in a world not only of global capitalism but also of exploding fundamentalisms – in which leaders like Bush and Sharon and many Muslim and Hindu protagonists not only wrap themselves in the flag for purposes of advancing their own schemes of domination but also blur the lines between their national claims and their religious ones. Not that there is any very convincing reason for marxists to reject, on first principles, the religious impulse that does help many to cope with questions of death, evil and spirituality. Too often socialists in power (in Mozambique for example) have declared war on religion and other identities, rather than find ways to acknowledge the latter's claims to be heard, albeit possibly transformed, within the broader emanicipatory project. Moreover, with regard to their implications for revolutionary aspirations, institutionalised expressions of organised religion has proven to be a potent force for both good (one thinks of ‘liberation theology’ in Latin America, for example) and also substantial ill (cf. Mamdani, 2005).
Leo Panitch has recently written that ‘class, as we are so often reminded, is not everything.’ ‘But nor’, he continues, ‘is it nothing, and the costs of the marginalisation of class in the intellectual and political arena are becoming increasingly severe’ (Panitch, 2000: 367). If this is so, on the religious front as on other fronts we need to understand a great deal more about the ways in which class analysis and class struggle can be articulated – non-reductively, non-economistically, non-Eurocentrically, but centrally – with other markers of social differentiation, both analytically and practically (Saul, 2006, ch. 3).
Socialism & development
What, then, of those ‘imaginaries’ in terms of which people might be expected to mobilise themselves in order to realise more humane and expansive alternatives to the present status quo of existent global capitalism? What, in particular, of socialism in this regard? A third background paper sought, therefore, to introduce this theme of ‘Socialism and Development’ into the Workshop's deliberations, proceeding as follows: The Third World in the 1960s and early-1970s was marked by the growing saliency of ‘socialism’ as an alternative socio-economic system to the capitalism that had underpinned European colonialism and that now drove the United States towards the role of presumptive global hegemon. While by no means the dominant premise throughout the continent of Africa, there was, here as elsewhere, a sense that such an alternative was available, perhaps in particular as an outgrowth of the success of national liberation movements in southern Africa. Alongside these developments in the ‘real world’, the world of scholarship also saw significant commitments to such a prospect both within Africanist circles but also more broadly. By the turn of the century, however, much less was heard of the once-presumed ‘necessity’ of socialist solutions to the problems of underdevelopment that stalked the globe and – perhaps most dramatically – Africa itself.
There is a paradox here. Capitalism as a global system is ever more ascendant in the wake both of the collapse of the decadent ‘state socialism’ of the Eastern bloc and the aggressive assertion of both its own inherent globalising tendencies and the political actions of its main protagonist – the United States military machine. And yet the system continues to produce the grossest of inequalities and, for an increasing number, the direst of poverties. The situation might seem, therefore, to cry out more strongly than ever before for the intensified articulation of both a socialist political/economic practice and a socialist-inspired scholarship. The fact that this has not generally been the case, and the implications of that fact, defines one of the key subjects to be explored under this rubric.
Of course, disillusion with the claims to be made on behalf of socialism has had much to do with its failure and/or defeat, both North and South, in the twentieth century. Certainly in most of the global South, and especially in Africa, there has been a strong push (in ‘the age of structural adjustment,’ as Bill Freund once termed the waning years of the twentieth century) towards the acceptance of a global framework that seems, nonetheless, merely to deliver growing inequality and ever crueler forms of marginalisation and exclusion to most inhabitants of the global South. Now, where there are signs of deep-seated resistance to this system, they are cast at least as often in terms of religious fundamentalism as in terms of the goal of mounting a socialist alternative. For many others, the apparent strength of the global capitalist system seems to dictate the judgment that, at best, it can merely be reformed at the margins (e.g., the Oxfam turn, the Mbeki project) or, perhaps, waited out until the ripening of the system's own internal contradictions place the possible struggle for alternatives to capitalism more realistically on the political agenda. The potentially unsettling nature of China's growing presence in the global economy is sometimes cited in this respect, as is, more generally, the possibility of a global realisation crisis.
Any such disillusion with the socialism project, as indeed with the notion of ‘development’ itself, has been reinforced by the rise of ‘post-modernist’ preoccupations that question fundamentally the status of such ‘grand narratives’ in the name of what are said to be more diverse and localised ‘truths’ and less ‘Eurocentric’ preoccupations. As Bob Sutcliffe has argued, however, the merits of the goal of development – ‘the material, economic, productive basis of whatever satisfactory utopia can be imagined and democratically negotiated among the inhabitants of the earth’ – must not be lost to a ‘nostalgic, conservative post-developmentalism’ (Sutcliffe, 1999: 150-2). Of course, Sutcliffe would be amongst the first to argue that the material goals of such a ‘left-developmentalism’ must be realised in ways that are equitably distributed, environmentally responsible and democratically defined, but his point stands. A similarly commonsensical claim can also be made for the theoretical validity of conceiving a socialist alternative to actually existing capitalism (this latter being, at once ‘contingent, imbalanced, exploitative and replaceable,’ in Albo's phrase [Albo, 1997]).
In consequence, we will concentrate less on the ontological foundations of socialist preoccupations – and of their link to a drive for meaningful ‘development’ in both material and human terms – than on their practical viability, and this at a number of levels. Even in their own terms, for example, socialist experiments have not found entirely convincing ways to realise long term economic transformation: such is the record in Africa as elsewhere. Perhaps unduly influenced by the Soviet model, these experiments have often been disproportionally focused on high-tech, big project models and on ‘solutions’ to the rural problem that have fetishised collectivism at the expense of genuine local empowerment and planning. Short of seeking to realise an unlikely autarky on a state or regional basis, finding effective ways to negotiate the choppy waters of the global economy even while working with others to transform its grim logic, and discovering convincing means of blending, domestically, planning and market mechanisms so as to sustain ongoing transformation poses challenges; there is much to be discussed here regarding the manner, once again in Albo's terms, of
re-embedding financial capital and productive relations in democratically organised national and local democratic spaces sustained through international solidarity and fora of democratic cooperation.
Perhaps, then, there are lessons to be learned from prior practice for next time, if and when power is once again attained by socialists. For the moment, however, it is the means – under contemporary conditions and in the wake of such failures – of building movements to win such power that must be at the centre of our discussion. The political critique presented in the preceding paragraph has relevance here: how to avoid the perils of vanguardism and narrow-mindedness in seeking to focus popular energies bubbling up from below. For, despite the residue of disillusion and defeat referred to above, there are such energies, reflected in the stirring of multifaceted responses to the workings of global capitalism and spawning resistances that have stretched from the global streets of Seattle, Quebec and Genoa, to the national campaigns for political and socio-economic rights, and to the quotidien fight-back of many local communities, groups and trade unions against the inequities they face in trying to build decent lives for themselves and their children.
One suspects that these energies will continue to find expression in the contesting (i) of the deepening exploitation of workers; (ii) of the marginalisation and exclusion of vast numbers of people both urban and rural (those who are especially affected by the increasingly Draconian neo-liberal commodification of a wide array of the necessities of life: water, electricity, health, education, housing and the like); and (iii) of the inequitable burden of costs borne in the sphere of social reproduction, not least by women and those racially discriminated against. But how best to conceive the means of pooling such energies at appropriate sites of struggle – local, national, regional, global - and of creating the effective tools (of both organisation and ideology) to generate an effective, democratic, counter-hegemonic force to capitalist dictate? Gindin, in this regard (Gindin, 1998: 15), has spoken of the ‘structured movement’ (‘something transitional that is more than a coalition and less than a party’) as a possible step towards what is needed, and a range of voices, stretching from anarchist to vanguardist, have also been heard from. For there can be little doubt that further developing the theory and practice of a politics of real, not merely notional, revolutionary challenge to the status quo stands as a central task.
And just what kind of counter-hegemony might this political alternative be articulating? The discrediting of socialism as a plausible practice has led to the increased saliency of other imaginaries for grounding the global struggle against inequality. ‘Radical democracy’ is one such alternative that is offered (by Laclau and Mouffe, for example) as a way of acknowledging the multiple fronts upon which that struggle might proceed. It is, however, a language that blunts unduly the focus on capitalism and class struggle that seems necessary. A problematic centered on the claims of ‘social justice’ has more to offer perhaps, as does the imaginary of ‘anticapitalism,’ this latter much evoked in books and political discourses these days. But just where does that leave the socialist imaginary? Is it a battle-flag too soiled by history to still attract support? Too bad if so, since the socialist tradition is one that, for all its flaws, encourages us to move most efficaciously from a searching critique of capitalism to a potential programme for building its alternative. Does it not seem worth fighting to revive it if this is indeed the case?
True, even if the goal of a revolutionary socialism (‘realistic socialism’ as distinct from ‘utopian capitalism,’ in Albo's terms) should continue to be seen as providing the most effective foundation upon which to build a real challenge to global capitalism, it is crucial that this imperative not be reduced to mere rhetorical bombast. If ‘mere reformism’ holds no answer, then neither does a jejune ‘ultrarevolutionism’. Instead, we might find instruction in the kinds of revolutionary realism favoured by the early Gorz and by Kagarlitzky, amongst others. Such authors have deployed the notion of ‘structural reform’ to evoke the kind of struggles to realise intermediate victories that, even when pursued and won, keep the long-term goal of ever broader transformation in sight and also further empower the popular classes, organisationally and ideologically, to pursue it. (See Saul, 1993, chs. 4 and 5) Other related formulations are possible, of course, but on this front, where considerations of strategy and tactics meet the articulation of long-term goals, we also need creative thinking.
Scholar activism
What then, finally, of the link between intellectual work and anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist activism? A fourth background paper argued as follows: Africa has been a regional site where the link between scholarship and activism has been a particularly strong one (Amin, 1990; Cabral, 1969). Many Africanist scholars from beyond the continent were first drawn to its study by periods of work there and/or by an association with the drama of national liberation struggles, especially those directed against the most calcified examples of white-minority rule in southern Africa. Such scholars often sought to blend their professional work with their activist work around African struggles (the anti-apartheid movement, for example). And much the same could be said, in terms of the impact on a younger generation, of the continuing drama of, and challenges presented by, the African post-colonial crisis – whether this be measured in terms of the dismal economics of structural adjustment, the politics of domestic conflagration, or the grim toll of the AIDS. Not surprisingly, such challenges have been even more important in eliciting the political commitments of a significant section of the African academy as well (see, amongst other examples that might be cited, Alexander, 2002; Ake, 2000; Cheru, 1989; Desai, 2002; Hyslop, 1999; Mamdani, 1996, 2001; Nzongola-Ntalaja and Lee, 1997; Olukoshi, 1998; Othman, 2000; Raftopoulos and Sachikonye, 2001; Sachikonye, 1995).
Africa is not alone in this respect, of course. In most settings there are pulls on scholars, particularly those working in the social sciences, to bring their scholarship self-consciously into creative interaction with their political commitments and practices. Indeed, many such scholars will argue that not only is this the only morally appropriate stance that they can adopt, it is also a crucial underpinning of the most effective kind of scientific practice in the social sciences. Some such starting point allows the exploration of the possibilities and paradoxes inherent in attempting to bring academic undertakings and meaningful political work together, both generally and in terms of the conditions that presently define the situation of the African continent (and other continents of the ‘global South’), of Canada and other advanced capitalist countries, and of the global capitalist system taken as a whole.
We should not underestimate, nor apologise for, the extent to which the business of scholars who are also dedicated to activism is, in fact, scholarship. Thus scholars (the reference is primarily to scholars of the academy, with the word ‘intellectual’, as Gramsci has reminded us, having a much more expansive connotation) can have the space and time to research, to debate, to raise in a particular (somewhat more leisured, at least in some Western settings) way that does not come easily to others more immediately and ‘practically’ engaged. In consequence, they can hope to make a distinctive contribution to the task of discerning a line of march and revealing various problems, possibilities and complexities – always assuming that they sustain a critical self-consciousness about the inevitable limitations of their own perspectives and remain open to as wide a range of voices and experiences as possible. Just what the most appropriate kinds of contribution to struggle that a scholarship cast in these terms might seek to make is, of course, a matter for further discussion.
But if, at least in principle, scholarship has a contribution to make to revolutionary theory and practice, activism (as anticipated above) has an essential contribution to make, in turn, to scholarship … and to science. For, as Hugh Stretton argued some years ago (Stretton, 1969: 141), ‘neutral scientific rules’ cannot replace ‘values as selectors’ in the framing of the questions. Moreover, the ‘scientistic’ dream of developing an internally coherent, self-sustaining and (potentially) exhaustive model of society is not only misguided but dangerous – dangerous in the sense of encouraging a blunting of debate regarding the diverse ‘political and moral valuations’ that necessarily shape both the questions we pose, as scholars, about society and the explanations that contest for our attention regarding social phenomena. Hence his argument for the self-conscious embrace of what he terms a (necessarily) ‘moralising [social] science.’
We might wish to add that once the questions have been posed, social scientists can still be judged by their peers in terms of the data adduced in the attempt to answer them, and in terms of the coherence of the arguments presented in doing so. There are scientific canons of evidence and logic of presentation against which explanations can, up to a point, be judged and evaluated at least somewhat objectively. But as for the questions themselves, and the importance attached to finding answers to one particular set of questions rather than another, this will be determined by choices – by judgements as to appropriate emphasis and focus – of quite another kind. Nor is this realisation of the subjective (and inevitably, political) dimension of effective social scientific inquiry something that marxists should feel uncomfortable with. It is, at one level, what the unity of theory and practice (with, in Kitching's words, its attendant ‘rationally motivated willingness to act to transform capitalism’ [Kitching, 1994]) is all about: theories grounded in radical commitments shape our scholarly undertakings and encourage us to discover things scientifically that more conventional, establishment theories merely serve to hide from sight.
Of course, there are dangers attendant upon the activist scholarship that embrace of a ‘moralising science’ valorises, including the obvious temptation to shape findings and quasi-scholarly assertions to fit the apparent imperatives of more immediately pressing political loyalties and goals. This can lead the researcher to self-deception, to wilful distortion, or, more subtly, to a distinct temptation to mask advocacy in the language of scientific justification. All scholar-activists will have been accused of such sins at one time or another and, in truth, these failings are difficult to avoid. Here the facilitating of open, critical but comradely debate within a broader left-scholarly community can act as some safeguard. Moreover, since the proposed alternative of some sternly objective, ‘scientistic,’ social science is largely a will of the wisp, at best naïve and trivialising, at worst highly ideological in its own right, honestly confronting such complexities involved in realising an effective scholar-activism remains a challenge for left-academics.
Such issues need further exploration, of course. But even if we arrive at a position which confirms that scholars can unapologetically assert strong reasons, both moral/political and scientific, to blend their particular professional skills with activism, and where activists can be encouraged to draw on the findings of appropriate scholarship to advance their cause, the larger question remains: just where, within the current neo-liberal conjuncture and in a world dominated by global capital, US imperialism and quasi-religious fundamentalism, can the progressive activist, including the scholar-activist, find the best entry-points for radical intervention (Bond, 2002, 2003).
The struggle continues
Such questions will continue to have to be canvassed, questions that turn around issues of site, agency and imaginary (see Saul, 2006, ch. 2). There is, to begin with, the question of the appropriate site for both analysis and action, with claims for the privileging of the local, the national/regional/continental, and the global all being widely trumpeted. Even more challenging for the scholar activist of radical persuasion is the issue of agency, for here real divisions of emphasis, often visible in the political realm, have also penetrated the academy. Thus, against claims made on behalf of class analysis (and a range of variants of marxist scholarship) one will sometimes find a congeries of oppositional post-modernism, identity politics and an advocacy of local, even spontaneist, initiatives challenging marxism's erstwhile hegemony on the left, both within the academy and beyond.
Developing a class analysis sufficiently flexible to keep issues of exploitation, marginalisation and exclusion at the centre of our preoccupations while acknowledging the range of other oppressions that can both interpenetrate with class and give rise, as ‘militant particularisms’, to resistances in their own right presents us with a challenge (as discussed earlier). So, too, does the complex issue of arbitrating (and, where possible, blending) the claims of diverse organisational expressions that left impulses can take: the local community vs. the (national) state vs. ‘global civil society’; the political party vs. the trade union vs. the ‘social movement’ (whether this be premised primarily on considerations of gender, community or identity).
Finally, there is the question of the appropriate imaginary in terms of which we can best advance both left ‘theoretical practice’ in the academy and left practical activism beyond it. There is, for example, the question of the status of marxism as core analytical framework versus the range of post-marxisms, neo-marxisms and anti-marxisms that contest that status. Even closer to the coal-face of the struggle itself, and as also discussed above, radical democracy, social justice concerns, anticapitalism (including the sub-sets of anti-capitalist globalisation and anti-imperialism), and socialism all stake their claims to primacy, and each has its advocates on the left.
As suggested above, the main focus of the workshop which the background papers integrated into the argument above sought to help guide was ‘Africa: The Next Liberation Struggle?’ an essay on this topic having first appeared in the pages of ROAPE, while its republication also serves to focus another, more Africa-centred, volume of writings recently published by the present author (Saul, 2005, ch. 11). I will therefore not seek to reproduce it here beyond noting the promise of its initial paragraph. For, in fact, it sought to bring
into focus the immediate challenges facing progressives in Africa [and in other continents of the global South] as they now seek to forge social and political initiatives that can hope to attain power and implement policies able to confront and ultimately to bend the apparent logic of global capitalism – thereby permitting more humane outcomes ….
The essay concluded with the argument that, despite its current eclipse, the language and vision of socialism will have to become part and parcel of this continuing revival of Africa's revolutionary endeavours and of its ‘next liberation struggle.’ Of course, it is no easier now than it was in 1945 to divine for the current moment the precise parameters of the likely struggle against present day domination. Or to answer the variety of questions that this moment will throw up. For, as Africans, like others elsewhere, seek to forge more effective organisations for resistance, for example, how will their new movements balance the rival claims to centrality of local, national, regional, continental and global sites of struggle in the focusing of their efforts? How will the trade-off of the relative priorities of plausible short-term reform against the necessary claims of long term structural transformation be handled? And (perhaps most importantly of all) in terms of what counter-hegemonic imaginary, or imaginaries, will this ‘post-nationalist, post-neo-liberal’ be cast?
African activists themselves, like activists elsewhere, will have to be in the front-lines in answering such questions. But the undertakings of a new generation of researchers and writers focusing critically, if also supportively, on the kinds of resistances that are necessary to a genuine liberation from capitalist globalisation will certainly have a positive role to play.