We suffer the recent loss of a founding editor and dedicated contributor to this journal, Lionel Cliffe. Issa Shivji, Peter Lawrence and Morris Szeftel pay tribute in this issue. Lionel was a generous friend and mentor to many of us and his deeply engaged scholarship, both in the struggles he brought to light and, with the people around him (in the globalised sense1), substantially exceeds the contemporary dimensions of academic achievement. A loss of this scale leads one inexorably to re-evaluate what is important but Lionel is an inspiration to me because consciously and by example, he also showed this in his life. We met in the formative and typically disheartening years of my academic career and built a friendship based on our shared interest in migration and refugee issues, a concern that he, his partner and daughter were actively engaged in while I was writing up fieldwork from West Africa. He regarded me with his characteristic warmth and humour and once playfully referred to me as his ‘grand-student’; while our conversations were never trivial but focused on our joint research project (mapped out and yet to be finished), on world events including wars and revolutions, and on the experiences and insights of him and his comrades. In reflecting on Lionel's influence, I recognise that over our leisurely coffees and sturdy lunches, seemingly only ever in the sun on the lesser known terraces in the University of Leeds campus or in his resplendent South Yorkshire landscape, he left me with something of a manifesto: to fight for political awareness, to nurture the minds of compassionate people who struggle, and to enjoy life.
Lionel implored those of us who earn our living in academia to make choices about our work agenda and approach, opting for an approach that is not ‘forced upon us by institutional pressures and intellectual fashions’, and to be prepared to rebel as we examine our vocation. Emphasising the need to build networks with other scholars and activists, he noted that ‘not all intellectuals earn their bread as academics, and not all academics deserve the title intellectuals’ (Cliffe 2012, 222). The especially industrious and solidary tone of our latest editorial meeting, the first of our 40th anniversary year, was undoubtedly a credit to Lionel’s influence. Although we can barely begin to consider his legacy at this early time, we are making concrete plans to do so. Lionel continued up to the end of his life to cultivate intellectual projects and collaborations and to set and elaborate on research agendas for the Review and elsewhere, based on his political concerns.
At the celebration of Lionel's life last November, a former colleague recounted his response when employers demanded that he state his aims and objectives in teaching. After some thought, he explained that his aim was to instil empathy in students for people around the world. This empathy is ingrained in Lionel's work, reflected in his consistent attention to gender as well as class in the changing relations of production (see Cliffe 1978, 339–342), and it has played an important role in shaping the ‘aims and objectives’ of this journal. It underpins a radical approach to political economy because, as Agozino's piece in this issue reminds us, capitalism as the prevailing ideology actively discourages the understanding of people in the world, particularly those who struggle. In the fable of primitive accumulation, there are two types of people: those who work hard, invest wisely, are highly educated and are wealthy, and, on the other hand, the ‘lazy rascals’ who waste their time and wages, rob or beg for a living and are poor (see Marx [1867] 1970, 713). The continuous accumulation of capital is aided by the reproduction of these distorted tropes, contributing on one hand to condescending development policies that dismiss existing forms of knowledge and rationality, and on the other to the propagation of racism and xenophobia. This mythology makes the expropriation of land and resources and the exploitation of labour more palatable to the onlooker.
In seeking to refine understanding of the changing dynamics of development in Africa and to contribute useful insights, Lionel Cliffe's work is also marked by the balance between using conceptual frameworks, analysing actual experiences and engaging in policy debates. In Cape Town in 2011, he paid tribute to Archie Mafeje (see 1981, 137) for recognising the care involved in managing competing intellectual demands, avoiding the extremes of unthinking empiricism and distant abstraction. Lionel did not reify theory, as is the tendency in political economy, but he did recognise its importance in practice. He observed that analyses of the global structures of imperialism could present a Eurocentric view of history if they neglected attention to the pre-colonial legacy, as offered by scholars like Claude Meillassoux, and if they failed to recognise that capital operates with labour, land and other resources ‘as it finds them’.
Biko Agozino's article in this issue exemplifies the importance of this concern by challenging the ‘scandal in social thought’ that Karl Marx's work is in itself Eurocentric. Agozino provides a reading of Marx that credits the innovations in theory, methodology and policy found in Africa-centred scholar-activism. In so doing, he asks not only what Marxism can contribute to Africana struggles, but more importantly, how Africana struggles contributed to Marx's thinking. This contribution is well illustrated in an excerpt from Grundrisse, which satirises the West Indian plantation owner's outrage that Quashees (free blacks of Jamaica) did not care for sugar or the fixed capital invested in the plantations, but rather they took pleasure in the impending bankruptcy of the enterprise. This was because they did not cease to be slaves in order to be wage labourers, or to move from direct to indirect forced labour, thus reproducing the relation of domination, and so were content with producing only for their own consumption as self-sustaining peasants. Agozino concludes powerfully with the importance of delinking Marx from the later Eurocentric work of Durkheim, who considered that religion, and not the mode of production in the economy, was the most important social institution, and from Weber, who supported this view, and argued that capitalism was created by the Protestant ethic of hard work and thrift. Marx instead recognised that the exploitation of unpaid labour of millions of Africans led to the accumulation of capital by Europeans.
We see the persistence of the relation of domination in Julia Jänis's contribution, which examines post-apartheid efforts to bring the tourism industry into indigenous ownership in Namibia. These initiatives include Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and Community-Based Tourism (CBT). As black Namibians own only 6.6% of all registered tourism enterprises in a highly unequal middle-income country, BEE is intended to increase their ownership, management and control over productive assets by promoting small and medium enterprises, human resource and skills development, employment equity and preferential procurement. It has, however, been reshaped towards a less tangible primary aim to support so-called empowerment through ‘social justice, economic growth and transformation’. The prejudices persisting in the apartheid legacy and the political and economic interests of the Namibian elite challenge the scope of BEE, while the success of CBT is restricted by the geographical separations that were central to the apartheid era. The forced movement of 93% of non-white Namibians into reserves established underdeveloped rural communal areas, which require substantial external support for institutional capacity building and marketing. The scarcity of access to services and resources further limits capitalist transformation because the local response to scarcity is to emphasise the distribution of community benefits rather than the accumulation of profit.
A further class-sensitive analysis is found in Richardson-Ngwenya and Richardson's examination of the EU's sugar trade policy in Swaziland. They focus on the emergence of different fractions of agrarian society as a consequence of this ‘Aid for Trade’ initiative and question the role of corporate capital in determining the development trajectory. A focus on labour shows that contemporary agro-industry creates labour-expelling production regimes which challenge food security because hunger emerges in ‘job losses not crop losses’. As the cane is processed soon after harvest, there are different fractions of labour that are dependent on each sugar mill, meaning that corporate restructuring leads to major retrenchments, outsourcing and the casualisation of labour into seasonal contracts, untouched by the social safety nets that are supposed to be incorporated in post-Washington Consensus neoliberalism. This amounts to a change in the political economy of the sugar industry, as the mills reduce their direct labour and social costs while incorporating smallholders to expand their supply base, leading to a shift in wealth from labour and towards land.
Carol Hunsberger continues the theme of agricultural production. She presents a novel and very useful approach to the growth of jatropha, an oilseed shrub that is being developed for use as biofuel to the planned scale of almost 12 million hectares, with over 5 million hectares in Africa. She deploys Anna Tsing's concept of ‘economy of appearances’ to interrogate the promotion of the crop in Kenya. In so doing, she draws insight into the political economy of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which in this case treat the spread of jatropha as an end in itself without attentiveness to, or concrete provisions for, the production and marketing that follow the harvest. Furthermore, NGOs are found to build up an optimistic discourse within a strong media strategy, to guard information and to suppress dissenting views – one justification being that farmers' hopes might be crushed if they hear evidence of a poor economic outlook! The NGOs were found to create ‘drama’ and ‘spectacle’ around the crop to attract funds, using non-existent knowledge. This, Hunsberger finds, expands some of the characteristics of private sector behaviour into the realm of development NGOs and raises the need for detailed research into the institutional environment that permits this performance.
Land transformation is also examined in Marion Dixon's article, which intervenes in the ‘global land grab’ debate by focusing on the role of Egyptian finance capital in appropriating land and other resources in Sudan, South Sudan and East African neighbours. The case study of Citadel Capital, an Egyptian financial firm that created the largest holding company within the country's agri-food industry, shows its expansion and vertical integration as it leases agricultural land in Sudan and South Sudan while also investing in food production and transport in East Africa. A ‘close circuit’ of corporate systems is revealed which deepens the immiseration of populations, intensifying food insecurity and political instability as the commodified food favours middle and upper classes. This restructuring of the food regime also represents the southward expansion of Egypt's frontier, opening up new spaces for capital accumulation.
Power relations are central to Cyril Obi's political economy analysis of the Post-Amnesty Programme (PAP), launched in 2009 in the Niger Delta. He questions whose interests are served by this peacebuilding programme and finds that in co-opting militant groups, it preserves the conditions for optimal extraction of oil for the Nigerian elite coalition as well as maintaining the basis for Nigeria's integration in the transnational capitalist system. Oil produced in the Niger Delta provides over 80% of government revenues and over 90% of export earnings, while locally oil revenues dwindled from 50% in 1966 to 1.5% in the 1990s. A union between the elites, the military, oil companies and ex-militants constitutes an ‘oil theft trade’. Obi finds that the PAP has delivered peace to the government, not the people, maintaining this misappropriation of the spoils. Emerging forms of protest and resistance, however, suggest the potential for social transformation.
Further recognition of political and economic power informs Murphy and Carmody's article on Africa's place in the global information economy. They closely examine tourism and wood products industries in South Africa and Tanzania to interrogate the optimistic expectation that Africa's role in the global economy will be transformed by the growth of information and communication technologies (ICTs). They find mixed results, not forgetting the outcomes of the continent's supply of raw materials to the ICT revolution and its transformation of e-waste. This connects with a broader understanding of Africa's structural ties to international capitalism, which limit the depth of change to ‘thintegration’, meaning that firms' productivity and visibility might improve, but the structures that sustain extraversion and underdevelopment remain. Worse, ICTs are found to help foreign-owned businesses and corporations to tighten their grip on African markets, in tourism transferring ‘place rents’ from local to foreign firms. It is therefore a political challenge rather than a technical one to reposition Africa's role in the global information economy.
Class and the relations of production
This issue of the Review has an insistent theme around class and relations of production. This was identified as a priority area for research and activism when this journal turned 30 (Vol. 31, Issue 2, 2004).2 In this field, Lionel Cliffe encouraged the consideration of Claude Meillassoux's (1974) article on the connections between the Sahel famine and the interaction between emerging capitalism and African social forms, finding this radical work ‘an embodiment of scholarly and humanitarian concern’ (Cliffe 2005, 6). Meillassoux argued plainly that the intervention of capitalist nations in the economies of underdeveloped countries was not to ‘develop’ them but to exploit resources and labour under the guise of humanitarianism (1974, 28). He emphasised the role of the state in manipulating prices and monetary rates, while exploited labour would create the surplus value. He also included discussion of the growing role of finance. The head tax would force the peasant to sell produce in quantities that diminished the amounts usually retained for storage and even basic needs, household members would then be forced to buy provisions at higher prices and on credit, and this fiscal policy would ultimately encourage speculation and the formation of a parasitic social class. Indebtedness would lead to accelerated expropriation, benefiting a new class of landowners and the managers of international finance (Ibid., 31–32).
It remains important to consider how class formation and the relations of production are changing in the contemporary era of capitalist development. The articles in this issue bear the hallmarks of some of these changes.
Cash cropping and neo-plantation agriculture are increasingly dominated directly by large-scale finance and merchant capital as well as indirectly (Cliffe and Lawrence 1979, 3). This is the outcome of the neoliberal project of financialisation, which is ideologically concerned with improving and reducing the costs of information flows and generating profit from ‘idle’ money (Aybar and Lapavitsas 2001; Lawrence 2006). This global project reduces development to market-building, extending the sphere of market relations ‘direct to sector’ through public–private partnerships and other forms of technical assistance (Carroll 2012). The transmission of financial control through the technological ether, financial speculation over food in politically unstable regions, the focus on profit rather than production in biofuel expansion and the role of corporate capital in the EU's continued liberalisation of the sugar industry are symptomatic of this policy as it builds on the existing relations of domination.
The capitalist credit system has a two-way relationship with capital accumulation in that it is based on relations of accumulation and also reinforces those relations (Aybar and Lapavitsas 2001, 38). It has a dual effect on the relations of production. First, it expands the imbalance of power between buyers and suppliers so that the income distribution from producers shifts towards lead firms in the USA and Europe, bargaining power is weakened and prices become more volatile (Newman 2013). As Dixon points out in this issue, in this sense financialisation undermines the hegemonic state order by creating new regional centres of finance but it simultaneously sustains this order because Western institutions remain central to capital flows. Secondly, in this two-way relationship with capital accumulation, finance capital – by entering the sphere of circulation – is created out of the labour power that creates value out of commodities. It subsequently promotes intensified relations of production by seeking further profit from casualised and latent, or shedded, forms of labour through the credit system and in its growing influence over cash exchange and remittance flows, thus deepening the power of capital over labour. It is too early to say how profound and successful these intended transformations will be in relation to previous eras, but, in evaluating these developments, there is much to gain from Agozino's insights into the importance of African struggle to our radical understanding of the world.