Capitalism makes a difference – to life in Africa and elsewhere, to the planet as a whole, to how we imagine the world as scholars and ordinary subjects. Thus, I was delighted when I was asked to contribute to the roundtable on ‘African Capitalist Society’ at the recent African Studies Association Biannual Conference in Cambridge, from which this Briefing emerged. As I argued in previous blog post for this journal (Ouma 2016), I would have felt more at ease with a less holistic framing of the subject matter, and talking in plural terms would have been a good start to do so. What also struck me about the framing of the session (‘almost all African societies can be considered as capitalist societies’) was that it contrasts sharply with the assessment of John Saul and Colin Leys made in 1999:
after 80 years of colonial rule and almost four decades of independence, in most of it there is some capital but not a lot of capitalism. The predominant social relations are still not capitalist, nor is the prevailing logic of production. (Saul and Leys 1999)
African modernity, in sum, has always had its own trajectories, giving moral and material shape to everyday life. It has yielded diverse yet distinctive means with which to make sense of the world and to act upon it, to fashion social relations, commodities, and forms of value appropriate to contemporary circumstances – not least those sown by the uneven impact of capitalism, first colonial, then international, then global. (Comaroff and Comaroff 2013, 18)
Regardless of the position we take on the state of (global) capitalism ‘in Africa’ and what kind of ‘facts’ we mobilise to support our framing of Africa’s positionality within (global) capitalism, these debates remind us of the necessity to thoroughly engage with ‘capitalism’ as an analytical category, a globalised (yet historically specific) socio-spatial formation, and a lived praxis. This is even more imperative against a backdrop where radical analyses of the continent’s economic present and potential future have largely disappeared (for exceptions, see Moyo, Yeros and Jha 2012; Shivji 2009; Sarr 2016). In his recent book on the BRICS – the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa grouping – in Africa, Ian Taylor lamented that
in most African countries [there] is a real lack of any serious ideological debate about the type of system that will engender development and ensure broad improvement in the standard of living of the people. Intellectuals who might critically contribute to this debate are generally marginalised, whilst the political sphere is dominated by opportunists – many sourcing their funding from the West – who promote the discourse that there is no alternative to neoliberal reform. In this milieu there is minimal critique or profound economic analysis of capitalism: it is assumed as a given. (Taylor 2014, 156)
So capitalism can make a difference to our engagement with African societies/economies and their worldly entanglements. But what difference exactly?
Providing a different account than ‘the mainstream’
The first difference is analytical. Ideally, perspectives that take capitalism seriously remind us of the (social) fact that nature and labour need to be transformed in specific ways to produce capitalist value (i.e., exchange value); that the distribution of the surplus produced from such transformative activities is often contested between owners of capital and labour; that money and private property are essential to the circulation of capital; that ‘accumulation’ is a much more comprehensive concept than ‘growth’; that capitalist development is ‘naturally’ uneven; and that state power, ideology, the law and a certain moral grid are essential for inscribing and maintaining capitalist relations. Historically, primitive accumulation – the often violent process during which people were separated from their means of production and turned into wage labourers – was key to the development of capitalism in many parts of Europe, but the material wealth and industrial capacities of core economies could not have been developed without the racialised global political economy of slavery, imperialism and formal colonialism. Such a perspective is very different from schools of thought in Economics, Sociology and Political Sciences that have been influenced by rational and public choice theories. Research inspired by the latter has become fashionable as the new political economy on the block, but it often has little to say about Political Economy in more substantial terms, not to speak of capitalism more generally. One might contrast here Michael Lofchie’s 2014 book on The political economy of Tanzania with Ronald Aminzade’s Race, nation and citizenship in postcolonial Africa: the case of Tanzania (2013) and the introduction to the second edition of Andrew Coulson’s reference work A political economy of Tanzania (2013 [1982]). Lofchie’s and Aminzade’s books and Coulson’s new introduction cover similar periods in Tanzania’s last 30 years of politico-economic transition, but while the latter two ground political economy in materially entangled, power-laden and embodied social relations, taking capitalism more or less explicitly seriously as a historical social formation, Lofchie mobilises a Batesian political economy (Bates 1981) devoid of any of ‘real life stuff’. This even led one reviewer to a devastating (and probably justified) assessment:
Anybody approaching this volume with the hope that it would fill a 30-year gap on the political economy of Tanzania will be disappointed: the book is too narrowly focused on debates around policy change. It fails to provide answers to basic political economic issues, such as whether and how Tanzania was impacted by the global economic crisis of 2007/8, what has brought about the substantial changes of GDP composition in the last 20 years, and the related issue of the emergence of extractive industries and accompanying pattern of accumulation. (Greco 2015, 940)
At the same time, it is worth highlighting that the ‘founder’ of critical political economy analysis, Marx himself, never used capitalism as an analytical term. He was rather interested in capital, and capital for Marx was not a substance or a thing, but a process that was embedded in the material relations of economic and social life. In and beyond African Studies, this begs the more general question of whether we are interested in capitalism as ‘a social formation in which the process of capital circulation and accumulation are hegemonic and become dominant in providing and shaping the material, social and intellectual base of life’ (Harvey 2014, 7), or whether we ‘isolate capital circulation and accumulation from everything else that is going on’ (Ibid., 8). Do we study capitalism? Or do we study capital (and those who accumulate it – capitalists)?
The historical–material difference that capitalism makes
Capitalism also makes a difference to actually existing social and economic formations. To interrogate the historical difference that capitalism makes to the immanent relations of development was the project of a group of largely Marxist writers in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s who tried to situate the modes of, possibilities for and limits to capitalist development in Africa within the larger political economy of North–South relations. Processes of class formation, the evolution of indigenous capitalism, capitalism’s articulation with non-capitalist modes of production and the potential for the progressive development of capitalism in Africa beyond a dependent, peripheral form were popular themes back then, and sometimes would spark controversial debates! Most famous among these is probably the so-called Kenya debate, where a group of mainly British scholars fought over whether Kenyan/African capitalists were merely ‘adjuncts to, and appendages of, foreign firms, primarily facilitating the operations of the latter’ (Opoku 2008, 27), or whether they were an independent class capable of reshaping the domestic political economy by crowding out foreign capitalists (for a summary of the original and subsequent debates, see Vandenberg 2003).
Peculiar about much of this work was that it was as Marxist as it was theoretical: often, you had capitalism without real-world capitalists, and labour without real-world workers – a striking fact when considering that original critical political economy analysis emphasised that such an endeavour must begin with ‘the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men [sic!]’ (Marx 1845). Often, scholars would also arrive at conclusions on what political economy analysis in Africa ought to strive for that in retrospect appear fantastic (in the true sense of the word):
[W]e still require a full analysis of the class forces developed through capitalist penetration into pre-capitalist formations and the likely sides on which they will be ranged in the struggle for socialism. We require an analysis which looks at the specific consequences of capitalist development on the objective conditions and the consciousness of African workers and peasants, focusing on the extent to which forces for the advancement to socialism are established and growing. (Cliffe and Lawrence 1977, 6)
With the onset of what Arrighi (2002) once called the ‘African crisis’ in the 1980s, we saw a stark decline of such work. Critical political economy inside and outside Africa became discredited when ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama 1989) arrived. Intellectual hotspots of critical political economy, such as the Universities of Ibadan or Dar es Salaam, faded with the rise of the neoliberally adjusted university, where radical thought was replaced by a consultancy culture and local researchers were often reduced to field collaborators of Northern scholars (Mamdani 2007; Shivji 2006).
However, since 2000, we have seen some interesting new developments in the analysis of, broadly speaking, the capitalist penetration of African economies/societies. This happens at a time when grand theories about ‘one capitalism’ have gone out of fashion, and many scholars now prefer to speak of a world of multiple, variegated capitalisms; when it is increasingly being acknowledged that if capitalism indeed were the end of history, then this would also be the end of the planet; and when phenomena that previously had been the exclusive concern of scholars of the Global South have emerged in the North (think of informal economies, precarity as a mode of existence, urban agriculture, structural adjustment, the politics of austerity …).
In the following, I shall engage only with intellectual fields that have made new contributions to our understanding of Africa under (global) capitalism/(global) capitalism in Africa, leaving out some others, such as historical accounts of the entanglement between empire, capitalism and nation-state, works on the contentious politics of politico-economic transitions, or the growing literature on industrial policy and political settlements. Other fields such as transport and logistics, real estate, finance, the knowledge economy, or entrepreneurial churches are yet to be subjected to a perspective that puts capitalism in its various variegations under critical scrutiny.
First, we have seen a breathtaking expansion of work on global commodity chains/global value chains through which African economies are linked to global markets. Gibbon and Ponte’s book Trading down: Africa, value chains and the global economy (2005) was an important and timely contribution in this regard. However, given its origins in world-systems theory and the dependency tradition, one would expect to learn more about the classical concerns of critical political economy in this literature: the labour process, patterns of uneven development and social stratification, or questions of extraversion, income distribution, and exploited nature. Sadly, because of a number of intellectual shifts over the past 20 years, this body of work has largely failed to engage with some of the key social processes that make up capitalist landscapes as well as with the disarticulations that come along with the integration into commodity chains often dominated by lead firms from the Global North (Bair and Werner 2011; Bernstein and Campling 2006).
Second, for some time now, we have seen interesting new work being published on agrarian capitalists (less on agrarian capitalism), which has challenged the largely romanticising, homogenising and localising discussions on peasant economies. In countries such as Kenya or Ghana, the new ruralities are not only marked by capitalism from above and, to some extent, from below (see Shivji 2009 on this debate), but also by what Lindsay Whitfield (2016) calls ‘capitalism from outside’, whereby ‘capital flows into the countryside’ (Ibid.) from urban spaces. Authors such as Kojo Amanor, Sara Berry, Pauline Peters, Elisa Greco, Sam Moyo, Carlos Oya, Dzodzi Tsikata and Joseph Yaro have shown that African rural spaces are increasingly being characterised by complex patterns of social stratification, the commodification of land, land rights and labour, and conflicts connected to such processes. These debates have gained a new momentum in the context of the global land rush, prompting us to revisit the agrarian question in an age of financialised global capitalism. While there are different lineages of this question, a central concern in associated debates has been the development of the productive forces in agriculture and its contributions to primary accumulation for industrialisation (Bernstein 2004, 34). In the context of a new expansionist phase of capitalist development and the push for a more commercial agriculture – for example, Paul Collier and Stefan Dercon argue that ‘[f]or economic development to succeed in Africa in the next 50 years, African agriculture will have to change beyond recognition’ (2014, 92), which calls for ‘abandoning commitment to smallholder agriculture as the main route for growth in African agriculture and for poverty reduction’ (Ibid.) – the progressive solution to this question seems to be off the table. We seem to have entered the age of ‘surplus people’ (Peters 2013, 545), whereby people in Africa and elsewhere are expelled from agriculture without their labour being absorbed by factories or other sectors. This assessment stands in stark contrast to the structural transformation that some economists such as Justin Lin, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, envision for the continent, where catch-up industrialisation based on a comparative advantage in cheap labour and natural resources is the way to go (Lin 2015).
An important insight we can take from some of the critical work referenced above is to be cautious of using the historical experiences of capitalism in the Global North to predict the trajectories of capitalist transformation in African societies, most of which are still not characterised by national regimes of private property or free wage labour as generalised conditions of existence – two standard features in common definitions of capitalism.
The spatial difference that capitalism makes
The expansion of capitalist modernity is not just a matter of historical–material forces, which is more or less the privileged category of many African Studies scholars. It is also a matter of geography. Considering that human geographers have been theorising and researching the uneven landscapes of capitalist development for many years (see Sheppard 2015 for a superb overview), and that ‘space’ has been lately discovered in several disciplines outside Geography, including Political Sciences, History and Development Economics, we should be much more attuned to the complex socio-spatiality of (global) capitalism ‘in Africa’. While there has been some work that has linked the categories of ‘capitalism’ and ‘space’ in the analysis of African political economies, e.g., work on the historical production of national disparities and their entanglement with migrant labour systems and value extraction in countries such as Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa, more recently the spaces of capitalism in Africa seem to have become much more complicated matters.
Writing at a time when many thought Africa was excluded from globalisation, James Ferguson argued that
global capitalism has neither abandoned Africa nor swept it up in a grand process of global homogenisation and standardisation. Rather, capital ‘hops’ over ‘unusable Africa’, alighting only in mineral-rich enclaves that are starkly disconnected from their national societies. The result is not the formation of standardised national grids, but the emergence of huge areas of the continent that are effectively ‘off the grid’. These areas are indeed in many ways excluded from ‘the global economy’. (Ferguson 2005, 380)
While the foreign direct investments that Ferguson problematised have been heavily increasing across a range of sectors since 2005, and Africa is now hailed as the ‘last investment frontier’ by McKinsey and the like, the core of this diagnosis has not changed much. In a recent essay, Achille Mbembe argued that
the current African moment can be characterised as a moment of acceleration […] towards a kind of capitalism that is mostly disjointed, almost galactic in the sense that [it] consists of a seemingly random collection of disconnected enclaves […]. It is a capitalism of multiple nodal points, of scattered patterns, of spatial growth combined with neglect and decline. This form of capitalism is mostly extractive. (Mbembe 2016)
Likewise, one could say that such pessimistic framings miss the more general expansion of capitalist relations among a variety of social groups, sectors and spaces that we have seen over the past 20 years or so. Even though global capitalism as an assemblage of different global supply chains may only selectively incorporate certain people, places and sectors into global markets, capitalist orientations and relations had quite some time to expand horizontally across the continent. As Bernstein (2004, 138) notes, ‘the conditions of life in African countrysides (and towns and cities) are generally commodified […], hence fully within capitalist social relations from the dynamics of household reproduction to international divisions of labour.’ Indeed, the Facebook group Digital Farmers Kenya had a stunning 43,261 members by 22 September 2016. These can’t be ‘peasants’.
The limits to ‘capitalism’
As I have argued so far, taking capitalism seriously can help us to theorise and repoliticise concepts and empirical processes that are usually couched in less substantial terms such as ‘development’, ‘poverty’ or ‘good governance’. However, ‘capitalism’ as an analytical category is by no means unproblematic. Critical political economy accounts often imagine a world that is so dominated by capitalism that they become indifferent to economic practices and relations that co-shape or even resist capitalism; they often show a disregard for other theoretical approaches that are said to lack revolutionary potential or fail to understand the basic laws of capitalism; and they tend to universalise insights and concepts derived from particular historical contexts and apply them comfortably to other places. This also applies to much of the older work on ‘capitalism in Africa’, but even more recent work is not exempted from this epistemological practice. There is hardly any Africa-focused work that questions or problematises any of the central categories of critical political economy (such as ‘class’ or ‘commodification’) in terms of the historical-cum-ontological claims they make. This state of affairs is surprising and stands in sharp contrasts to the many critical works on the problematic universalisations of the categories of critical political economy in Asian contexts. Of course, critical political economy is not alone in this regard. As Zeleza (2005, 2) reckoned at a Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) meeting, ‘all the major paradigms in African history – from the imperialist and nationalist, the dependency and Marxist, postmodernist and postcolonial, feminist and environmentalist – are rooted in a Western epistemological order; they were manufactured in Euro-America and imported into Africa.’
What further surprises is that there is hardly any work that uses findings from the ‘margins’ ‘as a source of historical materialist lessons essential for understanding the class–race–gender struggles going on in the world’ (Agozino 2014, 182), as already practised by the doyen of critical political economy, Karl Marx himself, or to challenge contemporary accounts of capitalism written in epistemic centres such as North America or Europe. Of course, provincialising capitalism as a theoretical lens and socio-spatial formation and ‘theorizing back’ (Yeung and Lin 2003, 109) do not mean that we should limit ourselves to writing highly regionalised accounts that are only of interest to a small group of ‘Africanists’. Work by authors such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Aihwa Ong, Anna Tsing and Tania Li impressively shows that one can produce thick historical or ethnographic accounts that successfully master the balancing act of maintaining a dialogue between the ‘universal history of capital’ and the ‘diverse ways of being human’ (Watts 2003, 28). It is this successful balancing act that makes such work matter to social, economic and cultural theory more generally, not just to Area Studies specialists.
My recent book Assembling export markets – the making and unmaking of global food connections in West Africa (Ouma 2015) has wrestled with these problems. Partly inspired by Gibson-Graham’s book The end of capitalism as we knew it (2006 [1996]), it is quite sceptical about treating capitalism as an abstract machine which functions according to a set of discrete laws that conveniently direct our analytical gaze. I was suspicious of using global capitalism as an explanatory device to make sense of the integration of Ghanaian smallholder farmers into global commodity chains. Rather, I treated it as something that requires explanation. Instead of taking capitalist commodity chains for granted, I was looking at how capitalist world market connections are being assembled in practice in Ghana’s horticulture sector. I was interested, as anthropologist Anna Tsing and colleagues put it, in the
generative powers of capitalism and the inequalities these powers create […] The generative aspect of the term […] is centrally concerned with the means and mechanisms – the very processes of generation – through which systems and socialities are made. (Bear, Tsing, and Yanagisako 2015)
From such a perspective, the remaking of economic subjectivities, nature, economic encounters and orders move to the forefront of critical political economy analysis. As I showed in this book, for cases in which export firms set up supply chain arrangements with farmers in northern and southern Ghana, capitalism is always locally engaged; establishing commodity relations is often a contested process; nature sometimes cannot simply be turned into a resource; marketisation often clashes or is complexly intertwined with other geographically and socio-technical situated ways of performing the economy; and projects of economy-making often have unintended side-effects that may bounce back in incalculable ways. I also employ this generative (some would say practice-centred) approach in more recent projects on the politics and securitisation of port infrastructures in West Africa and the financialisation of farmland in Tanzania.
Conclusion
The goal of this Briefing was not to debunk critical political economy perspectives, but to weigh in carefully on their respective merits and limits in African Studies (and beyond). Responding to the recent ROAPE discussion on ‘Capitalism in Africa’, this piece makes a case for ontological and theoretical modesty. Rather than taking African capitalist societies for granted as social entities, we should unpack through which means and mechanisms particular socialities are being made: ‘The economy is not a logic, nor is capitalism its [exclusive] vehicle’ (Bear, Tsing, and Yanagisako 2015). Often, much more goes into society- and economy-making than just capitalism. Indeed, capital has displayed a remarkable ability to operate with non-capitalist forms of labour, property, and social relations more generally (Mafeje 1981). While some argue that this fact points to a world that is economically diverse, urging us to account for and to politicise the difference that lies beyond the world of capitalist subjectivities, organisational forms, relations and practices (Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy 2013), others would argue that capitalism generates heterogeneity in order to sustain its logic of accumulation. As Sanyal puts it, ‘capitalist development in the third world inevitably produces non-capitalist sites of production’ (2007, 70). So, in the end, we need to make a difficult choice: how much transformative power, ontic pervasiveness and analytical value do we ascribe to capitalism?