Whither Africa in the Global South?
Africa’s comprador ruling classes and educated middle class are so compromised by imperialism that they are incapable of providing the revolutionary leadership required for the continent’s true liberation. The only possible alternative is that of the working people. They need an ideology, organisation and leadership to constitute an alternative political bloc.
[Keynote address to the International Seminar on The Global South – From Bandung to the XXI Century (September 28-30, 2015), Universidade Federal Sāo Paulo.]
AFRICA IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: THE BASICS
The North-South divide is statistically well documented. I need not repeat it. It is necessary, however, to refresh our knowledge of Africa’s geo-political space in the Global South. The total population of the Global South is roughly 6.2 billion of which Africa is only one-fifth, or 1.2 billion. The most populous country in Africa, Nigeria, has less population than that of Brazil. South Africa, one of the partners in BRICS, has only a quarter of the population of Brazil. Just in population alone, leaving aside the size of the economy, Africa as a whole does not reach the size of India or China, the so-called “locomotives of the South”, to use Manmohan Singh’s phraseology.[1] But Africa in the Global South, or in the world for that matter, does not speak as Africa, as a pan-Africa. On the train of the Global South pulled by the locomotives of the South like China, India and Brazil, individual African countries would be more like cabins, not even wagons. And this, in my view, is true not only in terms of geographical space but also political and economic space. However, as I would argue, the Global South is not a political construct, or at least, not a political construct of the people of the South.
The second point I would like to make is that the Global South exists and makes sense only in relation to the Global North. The relation between the two has determined the movement of history of the world over the last five centuries. What constitutes the global whole today? The Global North and the Global South are linked together in the global capitalist system. What is the motive force of this system? What is it that makes the system tick? A detour into the political economy of global capitalism is, therefore, necessary for us to answer these questions and to understand better and more systematically the trajectories of Pan-Africanism and African nationalism and its neo-liberal progeny NEPAD on the one hand, and Bandung and its progeny BRICS, on the other. In the next section, I suggest in a skeleton, and in a somewhat abstract and oversimplified manner, the heart of the global capitalist system, which is the process of worldwide accumulation, or what Samir Amin in his pioneer work called, ‘Accumulation on a World Scale’.[2]
THE GLOBAL CAPITALIST SYSTEM
Capitalism from its birth has been a global system. It continues to be so. The socialist breaches in the system in terms of historical time have been episodic. In Samir Amin’s model, the global capitalist system divides into the Centre, roughly the Global North, and the Periphery, roughly the Global South. The heart of the capitalist system is accumulation. “Accumulate, accumulate!” Marx said, is the “Moses and the prophets”.[3] The process of accumulation is worldwide. It is characterized by two tendencies. I call it capitalistic accumulation, CA, and primitive accumulation or PA. Marx’s economic model was based on a closed system of capitalist accumulation. One of the fundamental assumptions of his model of production and reproduction of capital is equivalent exchange of commodities, including labour power. Appropriation of surplus value by capital created in the very process of production is called exploitation. Exploitation is not stealing or cheating at the level of sale of commodities. In real life there may be stealing and cheating but it is not inherent in the system. Exploitation is appropriation of surplus value that is created in the process of production.
In Marx, primitive accumulation appears as original accumulation to account for the pre-existence of capital before he could work out the production formulae.[4] Marx posits two types of primitive accumulation, one internal and another external. The internal refers to the driving out of the peasantry from the countryside to be thrown on the labour market, that is, the enclosure movement. External refers to the looting of ivory, minerals and slaves from non-European countries, or, what we once called the Third World, and now call the Global South. Marx calls this looting or robbery, as distinguished from stealing and cheating.[5] In ordinary language, and even bourgeois law, robbery is distinguished from stealing and cheating by the use of force. Force was inherent and central to the process of primitive accumulation in Marx’s sense. In Marx’s model of capitalistic accumulation, there is no force involved. But in Marx’s model the process of primitive accumulation ceases as the capitalistic accumulation becomes generalized. Primitive accumulation, for Marx, “forms the pre-historic stage of capital…”.[6]
As we know, Rosa Luxemburg modified Marx and argued that for capitalist accumulation to function and ward off crisis, it has to have non-capitalist sectors on which to feed.[7] Such non-capitalist sectors are found in non-European societies. Using the other tendency of capitalism, concentration and centralization of capital, Lenin developed his theory of imperialism.[8] Imperialism invades non-European societies and establishes the rule of the financial oligarchy in which imperialism extracts rent from these societies. In more recent times, David Harvey has revisited Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of primitive accumulation to show that in the neo-liberal phase, primitive accumulation resurfaces and takes on different forms, which he calls accumulation by dispossession.[9] Synthesizing these arguments, and developing them further, I argue that throughout its existence, both tendencies, (i.e. capitalistic and primitive) exist side by side in tension. Broadly speaking, hitherto, the CA dominated the centres while PA the periphery. Socially, capitalistic accumulation manifests itself in the bourgeois tendency and primitive accumulation in the comprador tendency. From the side of the periphery, we may call the bourgeois tendency national bourgeois to distinguish it from the comprador bourgeois. The tension between the two tendencies translates into historically determined social struggles, with class alliances, ruling blocs, and resistances, which allows us to historicise and periodise class struggles.[10]
Extreme forms of primitive accumulation mark the history of the struggles of the global South, or the periphery. I call them three great robberies. The first great robbery, augmented by the Spanish pirate Christopher Columbus in 1492, is that of the people of their lands. In the Americas, land was robbed from the people by exterminating them, by design or disease. This was the first holocaust in the history of humankind. The second great robbery, augmented by the Portuguese pirate Vasco da Gama in 1498, is that of robbing people from their lands. In Africa, people were robbed from their lands by being enslaved and shipped en masse to work other lands. As history would have it, Brazil found itself at the confluence of these two great robberies, thus boasting today of the biggest African population outside Africa, while virtually no indigenous population, less than half a percent.
The third great robbery is that of people being robbed of their labour. This is central to the colonization process. In the periphery, not only surplus labour is appropriated by capital through the process of capitalistic accumulation, but also the insatiable appetite of monopoly capital usurps a part of necessary labour – that is labour for survival.[11] This means that the labour power is not exchanged at its equivalent. I consider the non-equivalent exchange of labour power, which is at the level of production, and not simply at the level of circulation, to be the defining characteristic of primitive accumulation in the periphery dominated by monopoly capital. This need not involve the use of force. Primitive accumulation of this type is reproduced by the dominance of monopoly capital both at the level of production and at the level of circulation. It does not matter whether the labour is that of a peasant producer on land, or a craftsman in a workshop, or a proletarian in a factory, or a hawker on the street – all labour is pressed to subsidize capital and augment its surplus for further accumulation. In all these cases primitive accumulation is dominant. Under neo-liberalism new forms of primitive accumulation are at work based on non-equivalent exchange of labour and on grabbing of resources. Commodification of natural resources, public goods and services; privatization of common and public property, including social wage and public debt; creation and multiplication of private money through splitting and splicing of securities are new forms of neo-liberal primitive accumulation which we find both in the Centre and the Periphery. Ultimately this artificial, intangible economy has to have a base in the real economy in which the primary actor is human labour, whether simple or complex. When the artificial financial economy flies off its anchor in the real economy you get a crisis of the type the world faced in 2008 resulting in massive destruction of lives and livelihoods of the popular classes. Destruction-construction is another running theme in the narrative of the development of global capitalism.[12]
It is in the mega-narrative of the development of global capitalism during the last five centuries that we have to locate the Pan-African and Bandung narratives.
POLITICAL MILESTONES IN PAN-AFRICAN AND BANDUNG TRAJECTORIES
THE PAN-AFRICANIST TRAJECTORY
Pan-Africanism as an ideology and movement was born in the United States towards the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th century. Its founders and leading lights were African-Americans and African-Caribbeans like Henry Sylvester Williams, George Padmore, W. E. Du Bois, C.L.R.James, and others.[13] ,[14] Of course their conception and perception could only be African because they were snatched from Africa before the continent was sliced into countries by the European imperialist powers at Berlin in 1885. The early Pan-Africanist thought revolved around essentially cultural and racial issues whose main demand was for equality and non-discrimination.[15] This was reflected in the resolutions of various Pan-African congresses before 1945.[16] The Manifesto of the 1923 Congress, for instance, proclaimed, “In fine, we ask in all the world, that black folk be treated as men.’[17]
The turning point was the Second World War. In 1944 some 13 welfare, students’ and other organisations based in Britain came together to form the Pan-African Federation, which was to organise the most famous Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945. The Manchester Congress was most political, with clear demands for independence and whose rallying cry was ‘Africa for Africans.’ It was also for the first time attended by young Africans from Africa. Its two organising secretaries were Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana and Jomo Kenyatta from Kenya. Some 200 delegates attended the congress; among them were representatives of trade unions, political parties and other organisations. The pan-Africanist ideology was transformed from a cultural and racial ideology to the ideology of national liberation.
The Manchester resolutions were clearly political demanding autonomy and independence; sounding warnings that the age-old African patience was wearing out and that “Africans were unwilling to starve any longer while doing the world’s drudgery”[18] ; condemning and rejecting imperialism while proclaiming in its own language a kind of social democracy. One resolution read:
“We condemn the monopoly of capital and the rule of private wealth and industry for private profit alone. We welcome economic democracy as the only real democracy.”[19]
The Fifth Pan-Africanist Congress already signaled, in an embryonic form, the idea of African Unity in the following words: “... [T]he artificial divisions and territorial boundaries created by the imperialist Powers are deliberate steps to obstruct the political unity of the West African peoples.”
Armed with the pan-Africanist idea which rested on two majors pillars, national liberation and Africa unity, Nkrumah returned to Ghana, then the Gold Coast. He organised his people and led them to Ghana’s independence in 1957, the first black African country to break off and throw away the shackles of colonialism. This was an earth–shaking event in the annals of the struggle of African people. In the words of that great historian, C.L.R. James, Nkrumah “led a great revolution” and he “raised the status of Africa and Africans to a pitch higher than it had ever reached before”.[20]
Nkrumah passionately pursued his twin objectives of liberation and unity. Between 1958 and 1964, with the help of his friend and mentor George Padmore, Nkrumah organised two sets of conferences: the Conference of Independent African States, and the All Africa People’s Conference, pursuing African independence and African unity. Eventually, the conference of African states led to the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (O.A.U.). The OAU Charter was a compromise and as one of the drafters said, “a far cry from what Nkrumah would have wanted.”[21] Meanwhile, the All Africa People’s Conferences receded to the background and eventually disappeared. Except for the establishment of the Liberation Committee based in Tanzania, the Pan-Africanist idea on African unity disappeared from the OAU discourse. The new proto-bourgeoisies now in power set to consolidate their states under the ideology of narrow territorial nationalism. Pan-Africanism was drained of its political content and its radical anti-imperialism, which, in the establishment discourse, was reduced to anti-colonialism. African unity became a distant dream to be pursued gradually rather than a polar star guiding African politics. The gradualist approach to African unity ironically led by another great Pan-Africanist, Nyerere of Tanzania, and Nkrumah’s proposal for an immediate African union came to a head in the 1965 summit of African Heads of State held in Cairo. Nyerere’s vitriolic attack on Nkrumah left him a broken man. Nkrumah’s militant pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism cost him his rule. In 1966 he was overthrown in a military coup backed by CIA.[22]
For the first 25 years of African independence, the elites in power tried to build their nations, which was essentially a statist project. The political economy of nation building, whether through the agency of the state or state-aided private bourgeoisies, revolved around domesticating the process of capitalistic accumulation. Imperialist hegemony, however, ensured that whatever national bourgeois elements were born were quickly compradorised re-imposing primitive accumulation. Even the most radical nationalist elites failed to build popular hegemonic blocks that would spearhead the national project. By the 1980s, when imperialism regained offensive in the form of neo-liberalism, African states were already vulnerable. They quickly capitulated with internal compradors seizing the initiative. Neo-liberalism exposed the limits of the territorial national project. History once again asserted that African nationalism could only be pan-Africanism.
Pan-Africanism in Africa dies hard. Even compradors have to pay it lip service. Thus was born the African Union (AU). But AU was born as a neo-liberal project apparent in its economic programme NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa’s Development). The North welcomed it. The former Executive Director of the Economic commission for Africa, Adebayo Adedeji, described aptly the partnership between Africa and the North envisaged in NEPAD as “feudo-imperial partnership…”.[23]
Let me now trace the Bandung trajectory.
THE BANDUNG TRAJECTORY
Twenty-nine nations, five of which were African[24] , some Middle-Eastern and the rest Asian, convened in Bandung, Indonesia, from April 18th to 24th, 1955. The congregation included the most populous Asian nations – People’s Republic of China and India – which had attained their self-determination around the same time through different means. The Afro-Asian bloc present at Bandung had just emerged from the colonial phase of imperialism as independent sovereign nations. They were jealous of their political and economic self-determination. Finding themselves in the midst of the bi-polar world divided into military blocs, their only means of survival as sovereign nations was through solidarity among themselves. Samir Amin calls Bandung the first ‘Awakening of the South’. I would add ‘awakening and assertion’ of the South on the world stage. In the graphic words of Richard Wright, the great African-American writer who was attending the conference as an observer, this was a meeting of “[T]he despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed – in short, the underdogs of the human race…”.[25]
The Bandung agreement rested on five sets of mutually reinforcing principles.[26] Many of them are still relevant and even more pressing in the neo-liberalized world.
1. Economic, social and cultural co-operation based on mutual interest and respect for national sovereignty: The accent was particularly on economic co-operation including establishment of joint ventures, national and regional banks and insurance companies, mutual technical assistance, encouragement of inter-regional trade, and, common policies in matters to do with oil, such as remittances of profits and taxation.
3.2. Collective action and unified approach to the stabilization of the prices and demand for primary commodities: Some countries of the South have graduated to producing and exporting manufactured commodities but for many African countries the question of international commodity prices remains a major concern.
5.3. Nuclear disarmament and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes: The Conference called for an immediate establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The imperialist countries of the North to this day have retained their monopoly of nuclear arms making exceptions only for their geo-political “allies” such as Israel and now India.
7.4. Independence for remaining colonies and dependent countries: All those present agreed to struggle together for the freedom of colonised peoples in the councils of the world. In this regard, it is interesting that the Conference declared its support “of the rights of the Arab people of Palestine and called for the implementation of the United Nations Resolutions.” Since then some leading countries of the South, including India, which was then very strongly against the Zionist state, has broken ranks.
9.5. Respect for fundamental human rights generally and in particular the right of nations and peoples to political and economic self-determination: This was not a blanket endorsement of the Western generated human rights ideology that is characterized by double standards and double-speak. Rather it was an affirmation of equality of all peoples, races and nations and made it abundantly clear that the “rights of peoples and nations to self-determination” includes the right of nations “freely to choose their own political and economic systems and their own way of life …”. By any standard, this is a powerful statement against the political and ideological hegemony of the North.
The language of the Bandung principles is moralistic but its content is undoubtedly political and to an extent anti-imperialist. The anti-imperialism is that of a proto-national bourgeoisie that had come to power after independence in many Bandung countries. Bandung laid the foundation for the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) formed in 1961 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Notwithstanding its class limitations, Bandung did open space for the maturing of the Third World project which was preeminently a political project giving voice to the countries of the periphery. In the sixties and the seventies non-aligned countries played a vocal role in the UN General Assembly. Responding to the demands and concerns of the developing countries the UN General Assembly established the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). UNCTAD provided both a forum for and a secretariat of the South to investigate and document unequal international economy dominated by the North. Eventually, these analyses resulted in the demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). The developed industrialised countries retaliated with the formation of G7.
All in all, the movement of the ‘Third World’ countries set in motion by Bandung exhibited the national bourgeois tendency “to re-conquer control over the accumulation process …”.[27] Its bourgeois class basis was its limitation. When the crunch came towards the late seventies and eighties, when many developing countries found themselves in dire economic crisis, their resistance collapsed. The final nail in the coffin was struck at Cancun in 1981 where the Reagan-Thatcher hegemony triumphed and neo-liberalism was inaugurated in the form of the Washington Consensus. By the time of the 1983 NAM summit the Third World Project had been effectively defeated by Atlantic powers. The South Project in the form of the South Commission headed by Julius Nyerere of Tanzania was born in the womb of neo-liberalism. It was not a re-incarnation of NIEO, let alone the Bandung spirit. Its report ‘The Challenge of the South’ carried all the birthmarks of neo-liberalism inviting the label “Neo-liberalism with Southern Characteristics”.[28]
Vijay Prashad gives a fascinating account of the debates within Nyerere’s South Commission.[29] There were the doves and the hawks, the integrationists and the auto-centrists. Doves wanted a people-centered development, while the hawks pushed for growth-led, market-oriented development. Hawks were driven by “[B]ureaucratic politics and instrumental economics”. Doves wanted a development that would benefit the large majority even if it did not show up in GDP growth figures. The most vocal spokesperson of the hawks was Sony Ramphal, a veteran who had served on several such commissions. Gamani Corea of Sri Lanka and Abdlatif al-Hamad, a son of a wealthy Kuwaiti family whose politics were rabid anti-nationalist and anti-communist, supported him. The doves were a collective of radical Third World activists like Devaki Jain, Marie-Angélique Savané, Ismail Abdalla and a Cuban Carlos Rafael Rodriguez. Rodriguez attended only one meeting though he wrote a hard-hitting note on the final draft pointing out that the Report offered no programme of action for the ‘Third World’; the concept of imperialism was missing and terms like the New International Economic Order had been avoided. Sure enough, terms like neo-colonialism and imperialism had been expunged at the insistence of Ramphal. Ramphal considered such terms “NIEO type of presentation” which, in his opinion, was outdated. That was the critique he made of the first chapter drafted by Nyerere and his assistant Joan Wicken. Manmohan Singh, the executive secretary to the Commission, was an in-between though leaning more in favour of the hawks. Nyerere played a mediator resulting in a report, which was not only turgid but also disembodied of people’s politics.
‘The Challenge of the South’ was neither challenging nor exciting, as perhaps Nyerere would have liked it to be.[31] It was certainly not a rallying cry for, much less a call to, arms to the Third World peoples that the Bandung spirit had been. Instead, the Report provided a justification for the “locomotives of the South”, (Manmohan Singh’s terminology) to bargain their entry into the G-group under the guise of South-South co-operation which gave birth to BRICS. As neo-liberalism speedily enveloped the Global South in the 1990s, including Nyerere’s own country, the Commission’s report was forgotten. No one reads or refers to it today.
Bandung and its offspring, the ‘Third World’, were political projects driven by nationalist, albeit bourgeois, social forces. Global South, and its progeny, BRICS presents itself as an economic project, innocent of politics, driven by compradorial forces all out to integrate themselves in the G-club. What is BRICS to the Global South, NEPAD is to AU – the neo-liberal outcomes of embattled nationalism.
NEO-LIBERALISATION OF BANDUNG AND PAN-AFRICANISM
The end result of the Bandung and Pan-African trajectories is a semi-neo-liberalized Africa and a fully neo-liberalized South, tied to the chariot wheels of the imperialist North. I call this the integrationist path. The path of auto-centric accumulation offered by the original Bandung and Pan-Africanism has been successfully defeated and subverted, at least for the time being.
In the neo-liberal world the locomotive and engine of the world wide capitalist accumulation is located in the North, making nonsense of the so-called “locomotives of the South”. If anything, the “locomotives of the South” are sub-stations pulling the Southern wagons behind them on an onward journey of integration with the North. The surpluses of the South produced by super-human effort of its working people are sucked into the belly of the Global Minotaur servicing US’s twin deficits leaving the people in sub-human conditions.[32] This is primitive accumulation on a global scale.
BRICS and NEPAD are symptomatic of the integrationist path based on hubs and hinterland.[33] Presumably Brazil would be a Latin American hub, India the South East Asian and South Africa the African. Brazil’s status as the Latin American hub is not uncontested given the ALBA initiative (Bolivarian Alternative for the People of Our America), which has an auto-centric orientation.[34] Whether ALBA can provide a more auto-centric hub is doubtful. The ALBA formation is shaky and enfeebled by the day by the concerted and calculated attack from the North, literally and figuratively. China and Russia fall in a category of their own with the potential to provide an alternative centre or pole to the North. But this is only a potential. Its actualization can go either way, auto-centric or integrationist. Its development in an auto-centric direction will depend on two conditions. The first condition is the extent to which popular classes are included in their respective ruling blocs on the basis of a genuine social-democratic agenda. The second is the extent to which they are able to resist from being drawn into an arms race. China may well be on the auto-centric path if it is not derailed. Russia, on the other, is quickly losing course. India is firmly on the integrationist path.
Things stand differently for Africa. The continent is marked by two distinct tendencies, external integration and internal disintegration, the social agency being its big and middle compradorial bourgeoisies. The illusion of a ‘middle class’ Africa is exactly that – an illusion. The three potential hubs - Egypt in North Africa, Nigeria in West Africa, South Africa in southern, central and East Africa – are being quickly militarized. Ethiopia too is vying for the status of a hub. Its militarization is legendary. They are all bedeviled by their internal social problems, including extreme inequalities and internal conflicts. The dominant tendency is that of primitive accumulation as the multinational capital of the North plunders and pillages Africa’s natural and bio-resources. In spite of the Arab Springs, in the short run, alternatives are difficult to discern. Africa’s comprador ruling classes, and educated middle class, are so compromised by imperialism that they are incapable of providing leadership. The only possible alternative bloc is that of the working people made up of popular classes – workers, peasants, small producers, urban and rural poor, the so-called slum-dwellers and informal workers or the “precariat”[35] , small bourgeoisie with nationalist tendencies and other strata of rural petty bourgeoisie. They need an ideology, organisation and leadership to constitute an alternative political bloc. Can a refurbished pan-Africanism, integrating the agendas of both national liberation and social emancipation, provide such an ideology?
LESSONS OF BANDUNG AND PAN-AFRICAN SPIRIT
There are five lessons that we can draw from the Bandung and Pan-African spirit to guide the post-neo-liberal phase of the struggles of the peoples and nations of the periphery.
First, both Bandung and Pan-Africanism and their respective derivatives, Third World and African nationalism, were political projects. Economics followed and was governed by politics, not the other way round. They were ideological rallying points providing vision, hope and dignity to the struggling peoples of the periphery. They were the kind of projects which, to paraphrase Nyerere, would make people wanting to do something.
Second, both Bandung and Pan-Africanism were anti-imperialist in their conception and development. They did not seek accommodation within the imperialist system; rather they sought to provide an alternative to the dominant hegemony. They were in that sense anti-hegemonic, not yet counter-hegemonic.
Third, the Bandung and Pan-African spirit inspired unity and solidarity of the people beyond selective and self-serving “co-operation” and “partnership” of the states.
Fourth, as the trajectories of Bandung and Pan-Africanism show, they were led by the bourgeois tendency that sought to install an auto-centric capitalist accumulation within their countries and nations. This proved to be its failure as peoples’ projects. The bourgeoisies in Asia and the proto-bourgeoisies - private or state - in Africa were eventually compradorised thus yielding BRICS and NEPAD – integrationist projects par excellence. The auto-centric tendency of accumulation was subverted.
Fifth, and this is the most important lesson to draw, nations still want liberation and people still want revolution. The national question in Africa remains unresolved. The agrarian and social questions in much of the periphery remain unresolved. History teaches us that the bourgeoisies in the periphery are incapable of resolving these questions. Their discourses of BRICS and NEPAD and the Global South are, at the end of the day, ideologies of integration with the North, not auto-centric strategies to de-link. They may provide conjunctural spaces for anti-imperialist discourses but only that and no more.
The leadership and the agency of the post-neo-liberal phase of struggle in the periphery have to be reclaimed by the working people[36] and popular classes. What ideologies, organisations and visions would lead such struggles are, of course, concrete questions to be resolved concretely by struggles themselves. Among African intellectuals, at least, there is a resurrection of the ideology of pan-Africanism, perhaps refurbished to address both the question of national liberation and social emancipation but definitely anti-imperialist. For the periphery as a whole we can certainly say that history has once again put back the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist socialist agenda on the world stage.
History thus beckons the working people and nations of the South to the rendezvous of revolution on the long road to socialism.
* Prof Issa Shivji is Director, Nyerere Resource Centre, Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology.
END NOTES
[1] Quoted in Prashad 2012: p. 144.
[2] Amin 1974.
[3] Marx 1887: p. 558.
[4] Ibid.: Part VIII.
[5] “The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital.” Ibid. P. 705.
[6] Ibid.: p. 668.
[7] Luxemburg 1963 (1913).
[8] Lenin 1963 (1916).
[9] Harvey 2005. One of the problems with Harvey’s position is that it abstracts from the relation between imperialist Centres and dominated Peripheries with the potential danger of belittling the national question and, thus its obverse, imperialism.
[10] As Samir Amin (2012) does in broad strokes in his article ‘The South challenges globalization’
[11] For an example of this in the case of the exploitation of small peasants see Shivji 1987.
[12] Jha 2006.
[13] Legum 1965.
[14] Based on Shivji 2009 (a).
[15] Pannikar 1961.
[16] Legum op. cit. passim.
[17] Ibid.: p. 29
[18] Quoted in Legum op.cit. p. 32.
[19] Ibid.: p. 155.
[20] James 1966 in Grimshaw ed. 1992: p. 356.
[21] Selassie 2015: pp.131-2.
[22] Shivji 2009(b).
[23] Adedeji 2002: p. 44.
[24] Liberia, Libya, Egypt, Ethiopia and Gold Coast which at the time had internal self-government and became independent in 1957 as Ghana.
[25] Wright 1956: p.12.
[26] For the final communiqué of the Bandung conference see: http://www.ena.lu/final_communique_asian_african_conference_24_april_1955-2-1192
[27] Amin, Samir 2009.
[28] Prashad 2012: p. 12.
[29] Prashd 2012. The account of the South Commission that follows is based on this source.
[30] Ibid.: p. 106.
[31] When Nyerere and Wicken received comments on their draft of the first chapter, Joan Wicken wrote to Manmohan Singh: The Chairman, in talking to me said he couldn’t put his finger on what it was that was worrying him about the draft now, but somehow has the feeling that the tone has been changed so that it no longer gives leadership, or makes people want to do something. He is not sure whether this is still because he doesn’t like pretending that there is no neo-colonialism or need for liberation, or whether it is more than leaving out those words. If you could ‘beef it up’ a bit, and make it more exciting and challenging it would be good. But I don’t know whether that is possible while still leaving it acceptable to the ‘opposition’ [namely Ramphal and Correa]. Quoted in Prashad 2012: p.117fn.
[32] See generally Varoufakis 2015 for the innovative theory of recycling of surplus in the capitalist world.
[33] Whatever the illusions of these locomotives of the South may be, they will only be “reactors”, not “full actors” (to use Nyerere’s phraseology) in the world economic system. Quoted in Prashad 2012: p. 166.
[34] ALBA consists of relatively small Latin and Central American countries: Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Ecuador, and Saint Vincent and the Granadines.
[35] These are casual and unemployed working people who have no guarantee of jobs or livelihood since much of the proletariat was literally decimated as a result of deindustrialisation dictated by the neo-liberal structural adjustment programmes.
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