Africa: A Marxian Analysis

 Introduction

1. State and class in pre-colonial West Africa

2. Tribalism, colonialism and capitalism

3. Religion, racism and class

4. Sharia in Nigeria: a class analysis

5. The poverty of education in Ghana

6. South Africa in the twentieth century

Africa: A Marxian Analysis – worldsocialism.org/spgb

A question about development in poorer nations

A correspondent enquired, "When developing a poor nation, such as the ones on the coast of West Africa, is it better to use a capitalist approach or a communist approach?"

Reply:
 There is no present alternative to capitalist development in the short term.

 The only approach which can be used to develop nations requires capital.

 Despite answers to the contrary communism has not existed anywhere in the world, they were all examples of state developed capitalism, developing and retaining waged slavery, state ownership instead of, or in addition to, private ownership of the means of production and distribution in the absence of a large domestic capitalist class.


 This has allowed some nations with huge populations to develop capitalism (with Chinese characteristics) in some cases, utilising the availability of their populous numbers to move into production gaps in world markets with less initial cost.


 The change from state capitalism to a mixed state and private system may have been started by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, but the idea of China being part of the global economy did not originate with Deng. As Mao Zedong is reported to have told a US diplomat in 1945: ‘China needs to build up light industries to supply her own market and raise the living standards of her own people. Eventually she can supply these goods to other countries in the Far East. To help pay for this foreign trade and investment, she has raw materials and agricultural products. America is not only the most suitable country to assist this economic development of China: she is also the only country fully able to participate. ‘


 Nation states are feature also of capitalist social and political development, their governments, the executive arm of the domestic capitalist class, despite the winning of the franchise, capitalism's democratic pretensions stop at representative democracy, which favours the rule of the dominant class in society over the electorate, with the electorates agreement to be governed over by different flavours of the same capitalist sauce which ensures their subjugation to the necessity, for the immense majority to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary in order to access some basic necessities.

 This is the same the world over in developed nations and developing ones are playing capitalist catch up, but the economic dice are loaded against developing nations.

 It is impossible and always has been so, to have some communist or socialist oasis, in a sea of capitalism.


 Capitalism is global also, in its reach and scope. It requires raw materials and markets and developed capitalist nations combine in their collective interests, with dominant economic players exerting the greatest influence.

 They are all in competition with each other and this rivalry leads to war.
Socialism /communism however is an advanced post-capitalist society still to come into existence but not through underdeveloped nations opting for a state capitalist road as this will only be in the interests of elites and pseuds masquerading or believing themselves, as egalitarians.

 Real communism/socialism is,
· A world without buying and selling.
· A world without classes.
· A world without borders.
· A world without money.
· A world where ‘real’ democracy and mutual cooperation can flourish and grow.

 It’s not just socialists that are repulsed by the hypocrisy, lies and self-seeking of capitalism’s elite. Poverty, hunger, wars and environmental destruction are intrinsic to the market system. As is the extreme wealth of the few at the expense of the many. Reforms, charity, and appeals to the gods have not, and cannot change its fundamental base. Sticking plasters don’t work. Only major surgery will.

 The World Socialist Movement exists to complete one task. And that is to abolish capitalism through democratic means.

 Human beings are unique. We can imagine something and make it a reality.

 Socialism proposes a world for all and not just for the few. Where the present, and future generations, can live in peaceful, mutual cooperation. But, we need your help to achieve it.

http://www.worldsocialism.org/

SixtyFive More Years Before Electricity For All In Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is still far behind in its ability to generate electricity, hampering growth and frustrating its ambitions to catch up with the rest of the world.
All of sub-Saharan Africa’s power generating capacity is less than South Korea’s, and a quarter of it is unproductive at any given moment because of the continent’s aging infrastructure. The World Bank estimates that blackouts alone cut the gross domestic products of sub-Saharan countries by 2.1 percent.
This dismaying picture was echoed in the annual report of the Africa Progress Panel, released in June. Former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan heads the panel. The report foresees electricity coming to all homes and businesses in Africa – by 2080.

Graca Machel, a member of the panel and the former wife of Nelson Mandela, said she was taken aback by the prospect of a 65-year wait for electricity. The report also estimated that an investment of 55 billion dollars would be needed yearly to achieve universal access.
Presenting the report at the World Economic Forum Africa in Cape Town, titled “Power People Plant: Seizing Africa’s Energy and Climate Opportunities,” Annan noted that some African countries are already leading the world in low-carbon climate-resilient development.

“African countries do not have to lock into high-carbon old technologies; we can expand our power generation and achieve universal access by leapfrogging into new technologies,” he said.
However, he cautioned that Africa’s energy challenge was substantial. “Over 600 million people still do not have access to modern energy. It is shocking that Sub-Saharan Africa’s electricity consumption is less than that of Spain and on current trends it will take until 2080” to catch up.
Modern energy also means clean cooking facilities that don’t pollute household air, he went on. “An estimated 600,000 Africans die each year as a result of household air pollution, half of them children under the age of five. On current trends, universal access to non-polluting cooking will not happen until the middle of the 22nd century.”

Africa has enormous potential for cleaner energy – natural gas and hydro, solar, wind and geothermal power – and should seek ways to move past the damaging energy systems that have brought the world to the brink of catastrophe.
The waste of scarce resources in Africa’s energy systems remains stark and disturbing. Current highly centralised energy systems often benefit the rich and bypass the poor and are underpowered, inefficient and unequal.

Energy-sector bottlenecks and power shortages cost the region 2-4 per cent of GDP annually, undermining sustainable economic growth, jobs and investment. They also reinforce poverty, especially for women and people in rural areas.

“Changing this is a huge investment opportunity. Millions of energy-poor, disconnected Africans, who earn less than US 2.50 a day, already constitute a US 10-billion yearly energy market.”
The panel is an advocacy group which lobbies for sustainable development in Africa and which was originally established to monitor whether the world’s leaders were meeting their commitments to Africa.

from here

As we would expect this is presented from a capitalist point of view - there is first and foremost always consideration of the prospect of profit to be made - even though electricity could benefit the lives of huge numbers of people in the area. As is acknowledged new technology is available and quality of life could be improved considerably - and the big hang up? The economic aspect. Imagine a world of free access to the means of production in which requirements like these can be fulfilled promptly. Imagine the knock on effects of improved health and well being. Imagine a world socialist society.

Prepaid Water Meters Deny Millions Access To Water

While many countries appear to have met the U.N. Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, rights activists say that African countries which have taken to installing prepaid water meters have rendered a blow to many poor people, making it hard for them to access water.

“The goal to ensure that everyone has access to clean water here in Africa faces a drawback as a number of African countries have resorted to using prepaid water meters, which certainly bar the poor from accessing the precious liquid,” Claris Madhuku, director of the Platform for Youth Development, a Zimbabwean democracy lobby group, told IPS.

Prepaid water meters work in such a way that if a person cannot pay in advance, he or she will be unable to access water.
As a result, African rights activists like award-winning Terry Mutsvanga from Zimbabwe and other civil society organisations are against the idea of prepaid water meters.
“If one has to pay upfront before accessing water, then it would mean those in most need would be denied access,” Mutsvanga told IPS, adding that water is a global human right.
Mutsvanga was echoing the United Nations General Assembly which, in July 2010, emerged with a binding resolution on the human right to water and sanitation – but for Africa, the human right to water may be far from reality.
Laden with a population of approximately 1.1 billion, Africa’s 300 million people have no access to safe drinking water, according to the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

Many rights activists on the continent attribute Africa’s mounting water challenges partly to the advent of prepaid water meters.
“We already have hundreds of millions of people without access to clean water, and imagine the severity of the water challenge if water prepaid meters would reach everyone on the continent,” Mutsvanga said.

Over the years, prepaid water meters have been widely used in African countries like Namibia, Nigeria, Swaziland and Tanzania, as well as South Africa, where the meters which were rolled out in 1999 are currently in low-income areas.
Zimbabwe is currently conducting a pilot project aimed at installing the prepaid water meters, in towns and cities to begin with. And the country’s impoverished urban dwellers like 51-year old Tinago Chikasha are in panic mode, fearing the worst may be coming their way.
“Local authorities are pressing ahead with the idea of prepaid water meters, but jobless people like me have no money to make prepayments for water while we already have unpaid water bills running into thousands of dollars, which local authorities say they will deduct through all future water prepayments, meaning we run into the danger of having dry water taps for as long as we owe local authorities,” Chikasha told IPS.

In non-African countries like the United Kingdom, prepaid water meters are no longer being used after they were declared illegal in 1998 for public health reasons.
They were also abandoned in South Africa at one stage following a massive cholera outbreak, but were reintroduced and have replaced previously free communal standpipes in rural townships.

Despite U.N. recognition that water is a human right, international financial institutions such as the World Bank argue that water should be allocated through market mechanisms to allow for full cost recovery from users, and civil society activists like Melusi Khumalo in South Africa blame capitalist tendencies for necessitating the advent of prepaid water meters.
“Prepaid water meters are a result of such negative policies by institutions like the World Bank and they [prepaid water meters] deny water access to those in most need,” Khumalo, who is affiliated to Parktown North Residents’ Association in Johannesburg, told IPS.

In Zimbabwe, Mfundo Mlilo, chief executive officer of Combined Harare Residents’ Association (CHRA), told IPS: “We are vehemently against the prepaid meter project because it will not solve the problems of water delivery, and these prepaid water meters will not lead to residents receiving adequate safe and clean water, while the same prepaid water meters will also not lead to increase in revenue flows as the City [of Harare] claims.”
Last month, Harare’s Town Clerk Tendai Mahachi was reported by Zimbabwe’s Weekend Post as saying: “With these meters we expect roughly to save about 20-30 percent of the current costs we are incurring.”
According to Mahachi, at least 300 000 households in the Zimbabwean capital are scheduled to have prepaid water meters installed, while all new housing projects will be obliged to install meters.

Meanwhile, with prepaid water meters set to rake in big money for some of Africa’s local authorities, there are those like Nathan Jamela, an urban dweller in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, who fear the health consequences.
“We experienced the worst cholera outbreak in 2008, and we fear that if prepaid water meters are installed in every household here we will slide back to the crisis, with many people unable to afford to pay for water,” Jamela told IPS.

from here

Land As Commodity Versus The African View

Land is often discussed in economic terms. Debates on the need for land redistribution in Africa focus on whether intended beneficiaries will put the resource to maximum economic and productive use and, moreover, whether they are able to ensure the food security of the nation and realise a surplus for export.
This is mainly the case in Zimbabwe, which has faced food shortages, and is currently the debate in South Africa. Nonetheless, land remains an emotive topic in both contexts and throughout the continent.
This prompts a fundamental question: why should land be discussed only in economic terms? The answers are to be found in how colonial modernity was ushered in, as a gamut of historical experience comprising murder, genocide, destruction of existing knowledge and large scale dispossession of indigenous occupancy.
These facts about the colonial enterprise, of which land was the basis, defined and redefined African agency and reality through subjection and rejection of African personhood as Europeans strove to claim land and eliminate all that occupied it.

 

The colonial view: land as a commodity

Indeed, African personhood and “being” revolve around earth and all that walks on it, the heavens, the waters and all that live in it, the natural landscape, the atmosphere and livestock.
The colonisers brought with them a Eurocentric perception that land was a commodity to be purchased and sold. Of course the legal justification in the form of laws, particularly English common and Roman-Dutch laws, was used to legitimise the commoditisation of land.
Property is seen to be exclusive to the individual. This is the core of capitalist relations, which are embedded in colonial modernity. The history of property rights in European thought can be traced back to the 1215 Magna Carta which served to protect privileges and rights of the nobility against state interference.
In Western Europe land was of great value and defined one’s wealth status and, social, economic and class position. It is little surprise that when colonialists arrived in the colonies and stumbled across vast swathes of land, they viewed this a stroke of fortune. Land provided an opportunity for accumulation, wealth and prosperity for those who had emanated from deprived backgrounds in Europe.

 

The African view of land

But there are other dimensions which are usually neglected when the land question is discussed. To begin with: what is the African view of land? It extends beyond the merely economic, although productive use of land is fundamental.
But contemporary debates on land redistribution in Africa always privileges the production aspect. This, regrettably, is due to a lack of understanding about what land means to Africans.
Of course the economic is part of the social, the political, the spiritual, the cosmological and the philosophical.
The departure point therefore is an African perspective that enables a broader definition and understanding of land as linked to being and identity.
The belief that land stands for production of agricultural commodities destined for the market is perverted. The primacy of the market and private property which is the core of capitalist thought and logic is contrary to the African worldview. Unlike Euro-American considerations, the African views life and what it constitutes of as a totality.

Land is neither a commodity nor an individual possession. It doesn’t belong to humans but is a gift from God. Land is understood as embracing the ecological, cultural, cosmological, social and the spiritual. The juridical considerations which are ingrained in social systems result in values, norms and observances that protect natural resources, the environment and wildlife.
This is the reason for taboos and strict injunctions that forbid environmental destruction, wanton and indiscriminate cutting down of trees, defiling of sacred sites, pollution of sacred pools where water spirits that give life in lieu of water and transgressions that are said to offend the earth.
There is an interface between land, soil, earth and cosmology. These are inseparable.

Of course there is divergence between European jurisprudence and African land laws. The former views land as a private property, a commodity and the ambition to colonise nature where man rises above it and exploits it to sate his greedy impulses. African land laws debunk the idea of ownership. Instead land is a natural endowment that can neither be bought nor sold. African land tenure is not based on ownership but on use and access. Since Africans have common rights to land, communal rights override individual rights which are subsumed under the overall communal good.
Tenure rights are built through reciprocal obligations and mutuality. Land belongs to the living, the dead and the unborn, making it inalienable.
The dead are highly esteemed because they become ancestors. In African cosmology, communion with the dead facilitates meaningful prayers to God. It is the departed who guide and provide for the living.
In African cosmology there is mutuality between humans and the earth: the earth has the omnipotent power to punish transgressors. However, a particular punishment is not directed towards the offending party, it is collective and universal.

There is a need to transcend the flawed economic determinist view current in land debates that denies Africans the right to land on the premise that they would not be able to productively use the land. For Africans land is everything. Depriving one of land means robbing them of their personhood, being and identity - in other words their full humanity.

by Kenneth Tafira from here

More on the vagaries of the market

While Africa is home to oil powers such as Nigeria and Angola, much of the continent is reliant on energy imports, and even producing nations often import gasoline and other fuels. Several African countries are suffering this year from a double-whammy of higher oil prices and weakening currencies. One of the worst hit is Ghana, which is just establishing itself as an oil exporter. Its cedi currency has tumbled almost 20% since the start of the year, meaning oil priced in cedi has soared 43%. Facing a 17% inflation rate and more pressure on the cedi, Ghana raised interest rates by 100 basis points this week to 22%, one of the highest in the world.

For African oil importers, last year’s crude price drop tempered the damage inflicted by a stronger dollar. But now, many are grappling with rising oil prices along with a depreciation of their own currencies versus the dollar. As a result, for much of Africa, the cost of oil has risen far more in local currency terms than in dollars, as this graphic shows:

While the dollar has eased recently, it is up 17% in the past 12 months, contrasting with a 40% oil price drop. Yet since January, both are up – the greenback has risen almost 4% while crude has gained 16%.

“The longer you have that double-whammy of rising oil prices and weakening currencies, the more pressure there is,” said Angus Downie, head of Economic Research at Ecobank  “It all comes down to who manages the exchange rate the best, and what level of foreign exchange reserves they have.”

Oil importers across eastern Africa are also being hit.

“The biggest impact will be in east Africa,” said Cavan Osborne, portfolio manager at Old Mutual Global Investors, citing Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya where currencies have depreciated between 6 and 13% in 2015. “We will see some slower economic growth out of that region because the oil price is rising again.”

Exporters are not being spared. Nigeria has seen crude prices rise by 27% in naira terms. This puts the squeeze on the continent’s largest economy which imports 80 percent of what it consumes, including fuel. With crude revenues tumbling, Nigeria’s hard currency reserves are down by a fifth over the past year – lower than most other big emerging economies.

Migration: The Problem Is Capitalism

Anthropologist and author of "Illegality, Inc." Ruben Andersson of the London School of Economics warns that European Union initiatives to collaborate with African states may fuel irregular migration rather than stem it.
 
In 2010, on the eve of the Arab spring, the time had come for the big yearly gathering at Europe’s borders as police, Navy officers and border guards congregated in a swish hotel in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Eighty-nine security chiefs from 25 countries mingled in the fifth Euro-African policing conference on irregular migration. In the breaks, African marines sipped tea with Spanish civil guards on the hotel terrace while Algerian and Greek officers snapped pictures of each other as souvenirs. As journalists and border guards streamed back into the halls, the director of Spain’s security forces assured his audience that the fight against the “scourge” of irregular migration was proceeding apace thanks to “the collaboration between all the institutions represented here”. His speech was strident; the battle for Europe’s borders was being won.

Memories of the triumphalism of 2010 came back to me amid the past months’ drip-drip of news on Europe’s scramble to deal with the latest “migration crisis” in the Med. Instead of investing in more rescues and establishing legal routes into Europe, politicians are now calling for more “collaboration” with African states to halt flows at source or in transit. Refugee reception centres on African soil, naval patrols by North African states and political deals to curtail human smuggling are some of the options on the table as the Union builds towards the May launch of its “agenda on migration”. Yet there is one fundamental problem with these varied bids for more African cooperation: they have been tried numerous times already. Worse, they have repeatedly failed, despite the bright and shiny view from migration policing HQ during those distant days of springtime 2010. 

Regardless of which of the rumoured African cooperation initiatives come to fruition – and going by earlier failures, few will – they all share some common traits. The idea is to outsource tough policing while heaping risks and responsibilities onto African countries, all under the guise of a humanitarian concern for the wellbeing of migrants. The experts on such outsourcing have long been the Spaniards, hosts of the Canaries border guard bonanza. As one Spanish civil guard told me in those heady days of 2010, explaining the logic behind patrols along West African coasts: “You have to prevent them leaving, you can’t wait for them to arrive… That way you save many lives.” 
“Collaborations” of the kind touted in Las Palmas have so far simply exported the idea of migration as a security problem to Europe’s neighbouring states, from Senegal in the west to Turkey in the east. This export has come with a hefty pile of gifts for those willing to play their part in the “fight against irregular migration” from policing equipment and top-up pay to repurposed development aid and diplomatic concessions.

As European politicians sign secretive deals with African governments, a border business has grown in Europe’s backyards – and the perverse incentives generated by this business have in turn helped contribute to precisely the type of crisis we now see in the Med. 
Well aware of Europe’s anxieties over the statistically small flows of sub-Saharan migrants and refugees into the Union, North African states in particular have in the past decade squeezed substantial political capital out of deepening border cooperation. Morocco has perfected the art of using its newfound status as “transit state” to extract concessions in fields as varied as fishing rights, aid, acquiescence over occupied Western Sahara and even some selective mobility for its own citizens. In Libya, long an important destination for African workers, Gaddafi used migrants as a bargaining chip even as NATO bombs started to fall. That legacy has been continued by militias and security forces, which have increasingly treated African migrants as fair game for extortions, beatings and arbitrary detentions. Further south, in similarly migration-dependent Mauritania, cooperation with Spain has brought arbitrary raids, detentions and deportations. And in Algeria, migrants have been serially expelled and robbed at gunpoint: deportees I met in Mali and Morocco alike told me how Algerian soldiers had stolen their cash and mobiles, leaving only their SIM cards as they were bundled into cattle carriages rumbling through the Sahara. 

The rare “success stories” – especially Spanish operations along West African coasts – come not just at the cost of migrants’ rights, but also simply displace routes into more dangerous areas. Meanwhile, migrants arriving in North Africa are becoming a valuable commodity not just to smugglers preying on a captive client base, but also to police and politicians. All this makes life increasingly impossible for black foreigners, who desperately start scrambling for an exit. It is a vicious cycle that has to be broken. 

Instead of fuelling this trade in human misery, European politicians should be doing the opposite – minimising rather than inflating gains from the border business. This would mean encouraging the normalisation of mobility, for instance via more legal pathways into Europe and via the decriminalisation of irregular migration in North Africa. It would mean offering more substantial support to the world’s top refugee-hosting nations – countries such as Turkey and Lebanon – as well as grappling seriously with the chaos in Libya and Syria. And it would mean reframing migration not as a security problem in need of more policing cooperation but as an inevitable socio-economic force that can yield substantial benefits to Europe as well as its neighbours.

Plenty of political courage is needed to dismantle the policies and collaborations that have so far contributed to making the migration crisis a self-fulfilling prophecy. Optimists may take heart that there seems to be some political will for such a change among “partner” states, not least Morocco. Yet the border amnesia in European political circles – not to mention the onward march of the far right – means there is sadly little chance of a rethink as leaders gear up to meet this May on the EU migration agenda. Rather, expect more warm words on deepening policing collaboration with African states, in a faint echo of the Spanish security chief’s strident assurances during those seemingly distant days on Las Palmas.

from here

Migration by humans has been a fact of life throughout their evolution. At this stage of humanity we should be informed enough to look at the cause of this particular era's happenings - both the reasons for such numbers of would-be migrants and the attempts to stop them by the destination countries. Conventional politics represents the capitalist system. 'Political courage', if that means having the will to 'dismantle the policies and collaborations' currently being employed, is unlikely to show itself in any meaningful way to those individuals desperate to move abroad. Each individual nation is struggling with the effects of the failures of capitalism for large percentages of their population and by necessity spend time and energy spinning information to their citizens feeding them fuel to keep the various factions divided and antagonistic towards the perceived economic invaders.
World socialism is a vision of the 'one world' principle - we have one world and that is to be shared between us all. A world of common ownership with free movement for all. The underlying problem to be eliminated is not migration but capitalism.

Beware Development Aid - For Whose Agenda?

Development used to be a battle against deprivation and dependence. Nowadays it’s more about supporting the liberalisation of markets.

The Conservative party’s conversion to development in 2009, most evident in its support of higher aid spending, was seen by many campaigners as one of the development sector’s greatest successes. After years of being seen as a concern of Christians and the left, development had gone mainstream. Apart from a few Little Englanders on the far right, there was a broad consensus that we should fight global poverty.

But a closer look at One World Conservatism – “capitalism and development was Britain’s gift to the world. Today we have an opportunity to renew that gift by helping poor countries kick-start growth and development” – suggests that this victory was not all it seemed. For in equating it with the global expansion of capitalism under the British empire, the term development has clearly come to mean something quite different – indeed pretty much the opposite – to that which anti-poverty campaigners had worked for over several decades.

Back in the heyday of “development”, from the 1950s-1970s, the term had been closely associated with national liberation governments like those of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, which fought poverty, deprivation and dependence by using strong state intervention and provision.

Ugandan activist Yash Tandon went further, saying that development for him meant “people’s struggle for liberation from prevailing structures of domination and control over national policies and resources”. In other words, development was seen as a process of breaking with colonial exploitation and transferring power over resources from the first to the third world. For these activists, development represented a revolutionary struggle over the world resources.

The gutting of development of its political content wasn’t something that happened overnight. In the 1990s, after years of right-wing governments in the UK and US expressing the idea that poverty was an individual responsibility, and aid budgets slashed to historically low levels, some in the development sector actively embraced a new way of talking about what they were doing. The UN invented a new category of extreme poverty, denoting those who really deserved our attention, which separated the idea of poverty from inequality.

Campaign organisations pushed a technical “non-political” set of development policies addressing poverty at the micro level, by digging wells and supplying fertiliser, for example. These policies promised to lift the very poor out of their poverty so that they too could share in the wealth of the global economy.

From here, development quickly became a very different proposition. Because if the assumption is that more of the global economy will solve poverty, then developing countries needed to better embed neo-liberal policies. Aid was important because it meant using public money to facilitate the building the sort of liberalised market necessary for democracy and prosperity to flourish. Development became a chance for the political right to extend economic neo-liberalism into those parts of the world which other forms of intervention couldn’t reach.

Today we have arrived at the stage where development involves the UK spending aid money on private investments in gated communities in El Salvador, upmarket flats and a business hotel in Kenya, luxury beachfront homes in Mauritius. Or the World Bank funding five-star hotels in Ghana in conjunction with one of the world’s richest men. Even the mainstream of aid budgets today are used to foster better investment environments in Africa for the likes of Diageo, Coca-cola and SAB Miller, or private education in Pakistan.

Development, and fighting poverty, have been separated from any conception of politics or power; a fundamental misunderstanding of what poverty is. Poverty isn’t simply the difference between living on $1.20 and $1.40 a day. It’s about lacking power over those resources that you need to live a decent life – food, water, shelter, access to healthcare, education. If one person – or corporation – controls them, that means others don’t.

Today, in the wake of the financial crash, as those most responsible for the economic meltdown walked away, it seems clear that neoliberalism and globalisation has made a tiny proportion of people much better off, while the livelihoods of many others – not to mention the environment – has been eroded. Ironically, one of the areas of society most immune to this erosion is development, where neoliberalism still holds sway and has actually grown stronger.

This is why last week World Development Movement became Global Justice Now. We have taken this radical step to show how far the pendulum has swung. We have always maintained that poverty is deeply political. Despite what we’ve been repeatedly told by the political elite, you cannot get rid of poverty while a tiny minority enjoys wealth beyond imagination. In particular, the power that big business wields today is incompatible with a democratic society capable of solving the world’s problems.

Of course it’s true that sometimes people need immediate help – they can’t wait for a radical transformation. But unless we build that transformation into all of our work, the aid industry will not wither away but grow bigger and bigger. The work of democratic states will become the preserve of NGOs working with private companies. It’s time to take a stand against this ever rightward drift.


from here

Ebola: Big Pharma "Indifferent To Collateral Damage"

Margaret Chan, director of the World Health Organization, nailed it when she blasted the pharmaceutical industry's failure to develop an Ebola vaccine. "A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay," Chan said at a press conference last month.

Since it first surfaced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 1976, there have been 22 outbreaks, all of them in western and central Africa. Incidentally, viruses like Ebola and HIV first jumped from animals to humans in the DRC during a period of rapid deforestation at the hands of rapacious multinational timber and mining companies. Habitat loss pushed chimpanzees and bats into closer contact with humans and, eventually, became vectors for HIV and Ebola, respectively. From the perspective of free market capitalists, ecological devastation and disease epidemics are simply collateral damage with no impact on the bottom line.

A number of commentators have speculated that, had Ebola landed on US shores sooner, a vaccine would already be available. Big Pharma executives, driven by fear of contagion, would have invested in vaccine research even if it wouldn't be profitable. After a handful of domestic Ebola cases, we now see a rush to start human trials of a vaccine that was created 10 years ago, tested successfully on monkeys, then shelved for lack of a profitable market.
Clinical trials are finally on the fast track not simply owning to fear. The industry's decision to move forward was a response to intense public pressure, and, notably, financial sponsorship of clinical trials courtesy of the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies. Now that Ebola has crossed the Atlantic, Big Pharma surely sees dollar signs; in the event of an epidemic, 316 million petrified Americans will promptly roll up their sleeves. It's a great deal for Big Pharma - government foots the bill for clinical trials, and Big Pharma pockets the profits.

In short, the lack of an Ebola vaccine - and the wildfire spread of the virus - are a direct result of private-sector control over vaccine development and the absence of public health infrastructure that could have contained the outbreak.
Western Africa, like much of the developing world, has little by way of public services to compensate for the looting of its forests and mountains by multinational corporations. Those same corporations, along with Big Pharma, are indifferent to the public health catastrophe (aka "collateral damage") now unfolding.

Ebola makes for a tragic case study in the perils of profit-driven medicine, but there are other more ordinary diseases that Big Pharma has chosen to write off. For example, I have an uncommon, stubborn gastrointestinal infection that requires several rounds of a drug called Yodoxin to cure. After one course of Yodoxin, my little friends are still in residence, and I require additional rounds to permanently evict them. Alas, the drug has been discontinued for unspecified "business reasons." That leaves thousands of us to make do with less effective medications and/or cope with lifelong nausea, abdominal pain and fatigue.
The FDA explains: "FDA can't require a firm to keep making a drug it wants to discontinue. Sometimes these older drugs are discontinued by companies in favor of newer, more profitable drugs . . . FDA works to . . . mitigate drug shortages; however, there are a number of factors that can cause or contribute to drug shortages that are outside of the control of FDA." 

What's outside of the FDA's control is the same things that's outside of all of our control: capitalism.
There is no vaccine for Ebola because our economic system vests virtually all decision making in the private sector. We do so knowing that for-profit companies exist to maximize profits. It doesn't matter if they're selling medicine, gasoline, soda pop or credit default swaps - the corporations that make these products do so for one and the same reason.

Big Pharma's greed isn't some kind of aberration; it's an inherent feature of free-market capitalism: A capitalist system, by design, puts profits over people. The handful of sectors that remain under government control, such as water, highways and public schools, anticipate and deliver services that meet the public's needs (or, at least, used to). Not just wealthy people's needs or white people's needs or able-bodied people's needs but, assuming the government has not been crippled by austerity measures, everybody's needs.

On the other hand, sectors controlled by the free market serve only certain people (i.e. those who can pay) and only under certain circumstances. If market research projects insufficient demand for a product or service to meet corporate profit goals, that product or service doesn't come to be, regardless of the fact that it's vital for the health of people or the environment.

Capitalism is inimical to human health and well-being because it rolls like this: If you fit into the right market demographic and can afford to pay, you get the goods. If not, tough luck. Tough luck for you, tough luck for your community, tough luck for the planet.

from here

Capitalism: War, Pestilence and Millions of Dead Children

Six million children under the age of five died last year mostly from easily treatable diseases. Most of the deaths have been from pneumonia, malaria, or diarrhea. Over 70% of these deaths have occurred in Africa and South-East Asia. Nearly half of all under five deaths occur in five countries, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, China, India, Nigeria and Pakistan.

The women and children of the Congo have had to endure two decades of warfare, hundreds of thousands of displaced refugees and systematic rape and other atrocities committed against the women and girls by both government soldiers and rebels. This system is propped up by foreign mining of rare earth minerals for cell phones and other electronics. Western governments and capitalism props up this system of abuse and violence.

Nigeria accounts for more than 30% of early childhood deaths for malaria and 20% for HIV/AIDS. According to the UN Nigeria accounts for one in every eight child death, this is a trend that must be combated.

Other regions where the situation has been dire for tens of thousands of children are Cambodia, Guinea, Mozambique and Nepal.

Angola and Namibia are experiencing their worst drought in 30 years leaving more than 100,000 children without food according to UNICEF.

There has been some progress, a two thirds reduction in child mortality in Ethiopia, Liberia, Malawi and Tanzania. Much of it from the work done by UNICEF, OXFAM, Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders.

Another factor that can have a direct effect on people's well being is climate change. The size and severity of floods in West Africa and droughts in East Africa. In President Obama's first inaugural address he said "To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work along side you to make your farms flourish and let clean water flow."

taken from here 

Capitalism is to blame

The capitalist system is the real enemy in South Africa, so says Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi.
Speaking at a seminar hosted by Wits University's African Centre For Migration and Society in Johannesburg on Friday, Vavi said problems such as xenophobia, corruption, gender-based violence, and substance abuse were rooted in economic misery.

"All of these are rooted in another set of three, even bigger demons: unemployment, poverty, and inequality, which provide a fertile breeding ground for all the others."

Africa's capitalist boom - No silver lining

Sub-Saharan Africa is set to grow by 5.6 percent this year, according to latest figures from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), with 18 countries hitting at least six percent. Yet the continent’s boom has failed in recent years to significantly dent poverty levels, economists say.

Africa’s oil and mining, telecommunications, banking and retail are all flourishing, construction is booming and private investment inflows surging. But the continent’s poor are still not riding the wave.
“More than a decade of strong economic growth has reduced poverty in sub-Saharan Africa – but not by enough,” said the World Bank last week. Growth has been less poverty-reducing than elsewhere in the world; and despite the faster growth in resource-rich countries, levels of poverty are falling at a slower rate , it said. More than a third of the world’s extreme poor still live in sub-Saharan Africa. And it is still the only region in the world where the number of poor people rose “steadily and dramatically” between 1981 and 2010. “Higher economic growth does not automatically translate into higher poverty reduction,” states the report.

“The poverty rate is not going down at the same rate that the growth rate is going up,” said Soren Ambrose, economist of anti-poverty group ActionAid in Nairobi. “The mining companies were given attractive deals: those companies come in and do their business and as a result the growth rates are up.” But, he added: “Not much remains, the amount that is left in the country is not so much.”

South Africa's Capitalism

An excellent analysis of South Africa and the ANC from the anarchist organisation Zabalaza
The African National Congress represents primarily the interests of both the emergent black capitalists and of the (largely black) state managerial elite. Despite the myth of common black interests, the black elite is anti-working class. The ANC is undeniably full of factions but these conflicts have nothing to do with real political divisions or principles; they arise from vicious elite competition for access to the wealth and power provided by high state office itself, like access to tenders. Given the powerful hold of (largely white-run) conglomerates in the private sector, naturally the emergent black elite must rely primarily on state office for enrichment and accumulation. But the state has only so much space – thus the viciousness of the conflicts, paralleling the viciousness of corporate clashes. The ANC is key to getting office, so this translates into a struggle within the ANC. The system generates the ANC factions, and the factions are no threat to the system: these are tertiary contradictions, equivalent to boardroom fights in private companies.

At the heart of the new South Africa is a balance between two ruling class sectors based on mutual dependence: the (largely black) state elite and the (largely white) private corporate elite, allied against the (largely black) working class (as well the Coloured, Indian and white working class). The state elite needs capital accumulation to fund and arm itself; the private elite needs the state’s power to maintain capital accumulation. The ruling class has two wings: private capitalists centred on means of production in corporations, and state managers, centred on means of administration and coercion in the state. The two are bound by common interests, but neither the mere tool of the other.  The mutual interests of the two ruling class sectors are profound. They are concretely expressed in a shared programme of South African expansionism, working class containment and neo- liberalism, exemplifying the primary contradictions between the ruling class and the working class.

Each wields highly centralised resources, via the state bureaucracy, including state companies on the one hand and large private conglomerates on the other. In South Africa, by 1981, the state and eight private companies held 70% of the total assets of the top 138 companies; today, 10 companies control 50% of Johannesburg Securities Exchange capitalisation, matching state monopolies in electricity, rail and so on. There is also a powerful, wealthy black elite centred on the state, wielding an Africanised army and police; and the state bureaucracy, perhaps 30% of the economy through the state, which owns banks, Eskom, harbours, rail, transport, mass media, the weapons industry and South African Airways, plus 25% of all land (including 55% in the provinces of Gauteng and the Western Cape).So “inseparable” are they that the corporate elite uses its private wealth to access state power, and the state elite uses its state power to access private wealth. Both ruling class wings share lives of privilege and power: for example, the top 15 earners in South African state companies got R103 million annually (2010), in a country where 50% of the people get 8% of national income. The ANC government is allied to big business, and the state elite does not represent “the people”, but its own class interests.

Despite (white) corporate hesitancy on BEE, around a quarter of JSE-listed company directorships are held by people of colour, with the proportion of senior managers in the private sector at 32.5% (2008). The top 20 richest in South Africa (using disclosed share data) include old white money, like the Oppenheimers, and new black money, like billionaires Tokyo Sexwale, Cyril Ramaphosa, Patrice Motsepe and Lazarus Zim. Combined with the 25%+ of the economy under state control, it is clear the black elite is far from economically powerless, and it is a myth that the “means of production” are all in white hands, or that the ruling class is mainly white. The ruling class is more than just the capitalists, and not all capitalists are white. However, as the JSE figures show, the private sector remains dominated by white capitalists, just like the state sector remains dominated by black state managers. This is the basic division in the ruling class, generating secondary contradictions.

Not every black is poor; not every white rich. Class is the fundamental mediator. Obviously all whites – including the white working class – benefited from apartheid, and this has had long-term effects. But white South Africa was (and is) deeply divided by class, often violently: consider the strikes of 1913, 1922, 1942, 1979. Meanwhile, under apartheid there was a powerful, if subordinate, black elite with state power, notably through the homelands: consider Lucas Mangope of Bophuthatswana and Bantu Holomisa of Transkei. Today, hundreds of thousands of poor whites live in squatter and trailer camps, while state-led BEE means that a small black elite trades on its race “as a means of justifying entitlement”. No country, not even South Africa, has ever featured universal white privilege and universal black oppression.

The ANC state, despite its talk of national liberation, is an obstacle to the full emancipation of the working class because, first, the state/corporate elite can only exist through the domination/exploitation of the working class in general, through perpetuating poverty, subordination and authoritarianism. And secondly, the conditions of the black, Coloured and Indian working class are deeply marked by an apartheid/colonial legacy in education, housing, health, transport and land that cannot be removed within capitalism or the state system, but only through a society of self-managed, participatory, planned production and distribution for needs, not profit and power, and the abolition of social and economic inequality.

The black elite have achieved their national liberation with the capture of state power; it is now an obstacle to the complete national liberation of the black, Coloured and Indian working class – and of the full freedom of the white working class too. Black nationalism, the official ANC ideology, speaks of a single black interest; it covers the reactionary black elite in the flags of suffering and of struggle. It is mistaken to keep reverting to the easy (but always flawed) black nationalist politics of the 1980s to try and understand the 2000s. Black (like white) nationalism was always flawed, was always an obstacle to completing the national liberation struggle of the black, Coloured and Indian working class. To continue to use nationalist politics is disempowering, confusing and positively harmful. It ignores class, creates illusions in the ANC and disguises the true nature of the black elite. And most dangerously, it easily translates itself into direct racism against the minorities – Coloureds, Indians, whites and immigrant blacks – who make up at least 25% of the population. Cosatu suggests that the ANC is the party with a “working class bias” and the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) a party of “big capital”, but the ANC openly backs “big capital” and its leaders include billionaires like Ramaphosa and Sexwale, and multi-millionaires like Malema and Jacob Zuma. Moreover, “big capital” contributes heavily to the ANC coffers because, as Zuma admits, “investing in the ANC … is good value for your money”. The DA is really a coalition of minority voters, small business and white conservatives, with no serious buy-in by “big capital” outside the Western Cape. The ANC has no “working class bias”, as Cosatu insists but is a party of the ruling class and its “class bias” is against the working class.

Some Trotskyists claim  the ANC government is the tool of big business, either by being bribed (the “sold out its principles” theory), or by having no choice (the “victim” theory). The “sold out” theory’s flaw is that the ANC has never been anti-capitalist, nor for radical change; it has betrayed nothing. Its aim was only the end of apartheid, not socialism. The victim theory’s flaw is that the ANC state wields enormous power through its control of the armed forces and state bureaucracy. It is precisely because of its autonomous power base that it enacts measures (violation punishable by law) like affirmative action/tendering and other BEE measures, and defies private corporate opinion on a host of issues such as foreign policy. The ANC often blames “globalisation” for unpopular choices when speaking to the unions, but let us not conflate useful alibis with the facts.

The ANC is a top-down party, run by small cabals of the rich and powerful with enormous state and corporate resources, the prospect of Cosatu calling them to account is less than zero. Rather the ANC uses Cosatu (and the SACP) to extend the power of a hostile state against the working class itself. Measures to undermine the working class include the direct co-optation of leaders into top ANC government positions, institutions that systematically bureaucratise the unions like the corporatist National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) and political manipulation through a pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric that presents the ANC as a movement of the black poor. Two examples suffice: former Cosatu general secretary Sam Shilowa rocketed through the ANC to become a wine-collecting multi-millionaire [33]; SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande was rewarded for his Zuma support with a ministerial job, immediately buying a R1.2 million German luxury car.

The ANC retains a mass working class base; let us have no illusions, nor engage in the fantasy that widespread township protests over the last 10 years are a “general urban uprising” against the government. True ANC membership is only 700 000, compared to five million in unions, and true, only 25% of the eligible voting age population votes ANC. However, the ANC faces no serious political rivals. Low votes are mainly due to people not voting in ANC township strongholds, not widespread political opposition. Where left-wing movements run candidates, like Operation Khanyisa Movement (OKM), these are regularly defeated. So long as the political subordination of the working class to the ANC, and therefore to the ruling class, continues, the working class is trapped. It is necessary to reject the notion that spontaneous and militant actions are inherently radical, or that a revolution can happen spontaneously. This is not true. Unless the masses have a revolutionary vision, they will simply repeat the errors of the past years, the error of putting our fate into the hands of new masters. That is precisely why Malema could use the poor’s frustration to promote an elite agenda, precisely why Zuma could ride Cosatu frustration to the presidency. No revolutionary ideas, no revolution.

The legacy of apartheid cannot be eradicated under capitalism and the state in present conditions but as part of the project of constructing a self-managed planned economy, a universal and international federation of humanity. 

Full article here

madness of the market

The southern Senegalese region of Casamance produced 40 million dollars worth of cashews in 2011 – 40,000 tonnes – and employed more than 220,000 people, according to figures from the Chamber of Commerce in Ziguinchor, the regional capital. But as of April this year, production stood at only 8,000 tonnes, more than 15,000 tonnes less than at the same point last year. The sharp drop has been attributed to unfavourable growing conditions, a decrease in rainfall, conflict in Casamance – where anti-personnel mines have been laid on farms - and producers discouraged by low prices. Large-scale Indian buyers come to the capital, Dakar, and contract local traders to actually purchase cashews; these traders in turn dispatch freelance agents to the often remote villages where farmers have nuts for sale. "The Indians will never come to see us here. They pass the work on to intermediaries" Producers told IPS they faced numerous obstacles with respect to storage and transporting their crop from their villages to urban centres. They also said traders offered them laughably low prices for cashews, and argued that they were exploited by intermediaries who depress prices only to resell the nuts for far more to Indian exporters. The Indians will never come to see us here. They pass the work on to intermediaries
Idrissa Diatta, a farmer from Diattacounda, some 80 kilometres from Ziguinchor, said traders offer the equivalent of 60 U.S. cents per kilo at the farm gate, but are reselling it to exporters for nearly three times more, around 1.70 dollars. Abdoulaye Diatta, another planter, says traders sometimes claim prices are low because supply exceeds demand, or foreign currency exchange rates are unfavourable. "But if the dollar exchange rate has shifted, or there's really an oversupply, then we wouldn't see a single cashew nut plucked from the bush. But now every nut is sold. Right now, they're trying to swap us a sack of rice for two sacks of cashews: it's ridiculous."

Jean-Marie Badji, one of the much-maligned middlemen, says the price of unprocessed cashews varies according to changes in the world market, and traders are trying to make ends meet, not trying to dupe growers. "Look, we have to travel out to these villages to collect cashews. The roads are in terrible condition, and the truckers charge us heavily to transport goods over them. And we're talking about completely isolated villages. If we pay more than 250 or 300 CFA (less than a dollar), we risk going bankrupt," he told IPS.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107653

Shadow over Africa

"Africa is the embodiment of capitalist exploitation. For almost four centuries it has been systematically plundered for its raw materials and human labour...There’s an Ibo saying “when two Brothers fight, Strangers always reap the harvest”. That encapsulates the aftermath of European imperialism in Africa...Western capitalists and speculators, remain as firmly entrenched in Africa today as they were during Cecil Rhodes’s era "

Full article can be read here in the latest issue of the Socialist Standard.

the contradiction

We read in this newspaper "An estimated 265 million people are said to be chronically hungry when Africa is known to hold 60 per cent of the world’s remaining uncultivated farmland. With one quarter of the world’s arable land on our continent why can’t we adequately feed ourselves? Uganda is an agricultural country; but why are close to 18 million of her people food insecure? The answer must lie in the way we practice agriculture, the tools we use, the techniques we apply, the investment we put into farming, and the determination of our policy makers to turn things round."

The writer correctly pin-points the contradiction yet fails to identify the cause. The problem is capitalist economics - it is the drive for profits and only when there can be a commercial return will farm-land be turned into productive fields. Peoples need for food don't figure in the equation.

world capitalism

"Low income countries are more exposed to the current economic downturn than previously, as they are more integrated in the world economy"

At the town of Luanshya over 3000 copper miners, directly employed and on contracts, lost their jobs at the end of January after the owners announced that the mine was no longer economically viable.

Copper mining is the most important industry in Zambia, accounting for 90% of Zambia's exports and directly employing 50,000 workers. But the price of copper has slumped on global markets, falling from a high of nearly $9,000 per ton last year to just over $3000 per ton now. Zambia has already been forced to abandon its windfall tax on copper mining, which was set to add $450m per year to its anti-poverty budget . Zambia is still one of the world's poorest countries, with 60% of the population living below the $2 per day poverty line .

The collapse of the kwacha, down 36% against the dollar so far, has spread the economic pain even more widely.

The International Monetary Fund says that, because of its dependence on copper, Zambia is one of the poor countries that "highly vulnerable to the adverse effects associated with the global recession." The IMF warns that "commodity prices are unlikely to recover while the global economy remains weak" and says that "low income countries are more exposed to the current economic downturn than previously, as they are more integrated in the world economy."

It's the poor who suffers

The world's poor are bearing the brunt of the global recession and finance ministers from the Group of Seven rich nations meeting in Rome this week must take action to help them, poverty campaigners said.
"They (world leaders) meet to discuss the environment and achieve nothing. They meet to tackle world hunger and achieve nothing. I think the more they meet, the more problems they create," said Anna Stroppiani. We can only agree with those sentiments .

An economic crash that may empty Congo's state coffers within weeks has saddled the country's poor masses with rising prices and a sliding currency, threatening yet more instability in the vast African state.
"The prices have all gone up, and the economy is on its knees," said a woman haggling for bread with a kerb-side vendor at the chaotic central market in Kinshasa, the dilapidated capital and home to over 8 million people. "A child can't just eat bread. It's not enough," she said
A loaf that cost 100 Congolese francs just two months ago today sells for 150 francs. Essentials like flour, rice, and meat have been subject to similar price hikes. For many of Congo's poor, paying more is not an option. They must simply eat less.

Africa will feed the world

Gordon Brown , the British prime minister recently made a speech and referred to Africa .

"...we cannot solve climate change without Africa; nor can we solve the food crisis without Africa. We need a fully financed ‘energy for the poor’ initiative; where commercial sources of capital dry up support from the international institutions; and we need to support agricultural development. In Africa in the past, “feed the world” meant that we helped to feed Africa. In future, if we do things right, we will do best by enabling Africa to feed the world..."

I think that is fair warning that we can expect a new type of exploitation , as rich capitalist countries re-new the plunder of the African continent for its resources and raw materials to stave off economic problems in the developed world .

No copper-bottomed capitalist market

the phrase copper-bottomed began to be used figuratively to refer to anything that was reliable and trustworthy . Well ,that certainly doesn't apply to the capitalist economics of the copper industry in Zambia .

Copper accounts for 80 percent of Zambia's foreign earnings but now the fall in international copper prices is causing unease in Zambia.

"...the pricing is not as profitable as we would like it to be..." general manager of the Zambia Chamber of Mines, told IRIN

"We are foreseeing a situation where our mining companies may begin to cut down on further investment programmes because of [making] less money and, ultimately, this may not just affect their profits but even their employment base," Bob Sichinga, an economist and former MP who served on Zambia's parliamentary mining committee.

"Because of the reduced resource base, government will face problems in social investments for such critical sectors as education and health," Saasa , a consultant economics professor at the University of Zambia ,said.

The prices of key commodities have rocketed over the last three years in Zambia: a 25kg bag of maize-meal now sells for $18.00, up from $11.00 in 2006; a litre of petrol (gasoline) has risen US 75 cents over the same period.