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Editorial: Imperialism &African Social FormationsAuthor(s): Lionel CliffeSource: Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 32, No. 103, Imperialism & African SocialFormations (Mar., 2005), pp. 5-7Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4006906 .

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Review of African Political Economy No.103:5-7 C ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2005

Imperialism & African Social Formations

Lionel Cliffe

In the last Issue of 2004, reviewing 30 years of this journal, an assessment was made of the key dimensions of the new situation facing Africa and the world, and on that basis a 'new agenda' was put forward to highlight priority areas for research and activism. These key areas were:

New Imperialism: The processes of globalised capitalism, still leaving Africa steeped in patterns of 'primitive accumulation', and the radical restructuring strategies of global US militarist hegemony, which seek from Africa only oil and other resources, and military collaboration.

New class. formations: Modified patterns of reproduction of labour, consistent with primitive accumulation, which blur old 'peasant' and 'proletarian' class categories, and limit polarisation of some classes, while reinforcing the salience of 'class' in social analysis.

States and conflict: Reassessment of the African 'state' in this era of new imperialism and of new social formations, in particular emphasising the 'political economy' of war, violence and state failure.

New patterns of African resistance: Contemporary popular struggles and the potential for 'solidarity' - and the appropriate stance of a radical, metropolitan- based journal like ROAPE.

Each of these subjects represents both an area of study and investigation, and one the Review would like to prioritise, but some are also phrased as propositions which deserve continuing debate.

For instance, how far are generalisations about persistent primitive accumula- tion or multiplicity of livelihoods across classes valid, and under what circumstances?

Or, politically, should 'resistance' be geared to the economic challenge of globalising capitalism or military dominance, and are there any contradic- tions between them, and between Europe and the US, that provide leeway that can be exploited?

Although few of the articles were explicitly written in response to that agenda or indeed any theme that characterises the Issue, contributions do in fact continue debates around the agenda we outlined in No. 102. It will be instructive to bring out some of the actual 'contributions' they make to that set of concerns. And as we shall see, some of the contributors have something to say about not just one of the themes.

ISSN 0305-6244 Print/i 740-1 720 Online/05/010005-03 DOI: 10.1080/03056240500120943

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6 Review of African Political Economy

New Imperialism Contributions by Dansereau and Larmer explore one of the few sectors where the international capital stake in Africa is being extended - the mining industry. But as they both stress, the enhanced international corporate stake is not coming about so much through new investment but the take-over of existing assets through outright privatisation or 'public-private partnerships', often of previously 'nationalised' mines, as part of the liberalisation prescriptions of international financial institutions.

Class & Relations of Production Both of these studies also show how in Zimbabwe and Zambia the privatisation process is accompanied with the relaxation of labour relations and worsening conditions for workers. They also confirm that employment in mining is still characterised by migrant patterns and the payment of wages insufficient to guarantee reproduction of labour. McCulloch's case study of the struggle of miners in asbestos offers another example of the treatment of labour in such industries.

In any discussion of relations of production and reproduction, it is appropriate to highlight the massive intellectual debt that is owed to Claude Meillassoux, whose passing is marked in the Tribute in later pages. After all, he more than anyone taught us that African social and economic realities, and the interaction of its social formations with imperialism, could be analysed in terms of 'relations of production'. He was a Contributing Editor of ROAPE, and an active one, from the outset, and a contributor to the inaugural Issue 30 years ago, but more fundamentally he, and his close colleagues among 'marxist economic anthropologists' in France, made a decisive impact on the generation of 'radical' African and Africanist scholars emerging in the 1960s in the English-speaking world. Characteristically, his article in No. 1, 'Development or Exploitation: Is the Sahel Famine Good Business?' was an embodiment of scholarly and humanitarian concern, providing one of the first expressions in English of the seminal work he and other collaborators made in recognising that famine is enmeshed in processes of emerging capitalism in its interaction with African social forms. As the Tribute makes clear, this understand- ing of the social embeddedness of the environment is now standard among the analysts and practitioners still engaged with this kind of emergency a generation later. However, despite this, it is remarkable that the simple-minded Malthusian explanation of 'over-population' as the cause of famine - and conflict - is still so readily accepted unquestioningly by political leaders in and outside the continent.

Another specific contribution that he made to this kind of analysis was a study of poverty and malnutrition in South Africa, an in-depth and now little known report published in English (Meillassoux, 1982). In this and other work he takes further the seminal analysis of the essential nature of apartheid in terms of the articulation of two modes of production, made by the South African scholar, Harold Wolpe, whose work was reviewed at length in ROAPE 102. Claude deepens the theoretical framework while simultaneously detailing the human costs.

State & Conflict The vicious fighting that has engulfed much of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since 1998 has exacted a toll of death (3.8 million) and destruction perhaps greater than in any other African country, and today the most intense

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Editorial: Imperialism & African Social Formations 7

continuing violent confrontations, unchecked by the peace agreement and the largest UN peace-keeping force in the world (13,113), are to be found in the east and north-east of the country, including Kivu province. Van Acker's analysis is a timely reminder that such conflicts do not simply emerge from inherent ethnic rivalries nor even from the warlords' ambitions and greed. It brings out the complex but profound reshaping of property relations and kinship and social capital as a result of changes in arrangements for access to land, through land tenure policy and market encroachment - a perspective in the best Meillassoux tradition. This is an explanation of the roots of violent conflict in terms of 'grievance' rather than 'greed', and may serve to alert analysis to the potency of the oft-neglected factor of land in conflicts such as Somalia, Darfur and Sierra Leone, and the risks of policies that enact privatised land tenure. This insight also helps to set the Briefings on Namibia and Zimbabwe in context.

In a second study of conflict, in Sierra Leone, Riddell points to the obscene irony of the IFI's taking on the role, as they are doing in several 'post-conflict' situations, of promoting recovery and rehabilitation, when they are institutions which previously backed state policies that impoverished the young people in marginal rural areas, factors which fed the conflict in the first instance. As in so many African countries - Liberia, Chad, Djibouti, DRC, Algeria, Eritrea, and now Sudan and Somalia - there is an urgent need for critical debate about the strategies and means for such recovery, and one not dominated by such external interests, if the fragile peace in such places is to be sustained.

Resistance & Solidarity The studies on mining also touch on this theme as they show how privatisation has generated debate and organised campaigning, not least by trades unions in Zambia. Similar anti-privatisation (particularly of services such as water) have also been a feature of new popular protest in South Africa - and in many other parts of the world, notably in Latin American countries - and they have become a focus for international solidarity through networks such as the World (and now African) Social Forums.

Seddon & Zeilig's article would thus place such protests within an emerging third stage of post-independence protest in Africa. Their piece was, in fact, explicitly prompted by our 'new agenda' and had had to be held over from No. 102. It provides a useful survey of a wide range of popular protests during the last three decades, and also attempts a periodisation of them in terms of the international and continental context that spawned them.

Bibliographic Note

Meillassoux, Claude (1974), 'Development or Exploitation: Is the Sahel Famine Good Business', Review of African Political Economy, No. 1, pp. 27-40; (1982), 'Apartheid, Poverty & Malnutrition', FAO Social & Economic Development Paper, No. 24, UN Food & Agriculture Organisation, Rome.

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