[DEBATE] : (Fwd) CCS EJ colloquium intros/abstracts

[Patrick Bond]

(Some of the intros and abstracts from papers that have arrived. More to follow.)

Articulation from Feudalism to Neoliberalism

Michael Perelman

Through a very roundabout way, I came to the conclusion that primitive
accumulation has an ongoing importance for the global economy.  I was
beginning a dissertation on capitalists' application of technology in the
context of dynamic game theory -- a new technique at the time that I was
probably ill-equipped to pursue.  My advisor, George Kuznets, supposedly
Simon's smarter brother, just left my drafts unread.
            Irritated, I became determined to write the easiest dissertation
ever produced in our department.  I went to the departmental library to find
the shortest dissertation ever published.  I determined to make my proposal
the first chapter.  I looked for a subject that I though would be of
relatively little consequence, so no advisers would be tempted to meddle.  I
found a data series on tractors in the United States.  I became especially
interested when I discovered that the person who had compiled the data had
just retired and that nobody was going to take up his work.  Unfortunately,
Kuznets suddenly got interested in my work, but that is another story.
            The dissertation had nothing to do with primitive accumulation,
but my work sparked interest in the subject, even though I did not know what
primitive accumulation was at the time.  The American agricultural community
used to regularly celebrate its success by compiling statistics that showed
that one farmer feeds 10, 20, 30 U.S. citizens.  This number grew steadily
over the decades as the farm sector shrunk.  I realized that this statistic
was ridiculous because a new social division of labor was at work.  Farm
labor, which had once raised horses, for example, was now hard at work
building tractors and other farm inputs.  Similarly, another part of the
agribusiness industry took over farmers' traditional work in distributing
food.
            At the same time, this number also reflected an element of
primitive accumulation, since relatively self-sufficient, self-provisioning
farmers were the first to fall by the wayside.  At the same time, the
tractor data led me to look at the fossil fuel consumption of the
agricultural sector.  I concluded that the agricultural sector was consuming
more than 10 calories of fossil fuel for each calorie of food that it was
delivering to the table.
            A bit of further research revealed that the large, supposedly
successful farms that were taking over the agricultural sector were not
necessarily more efficient than small farmers; instead, they just seemed to
be making more intensive use of purchased inputs, many of which depended
upon cheap fossil fuels.  When I showed this data to the professors in my
department, they dismissed it, explaining that if fossil fuels became more
expensive in the future, farmers could easily find substitute technologies
that depended less on fossil fuels.  When the first oil crisis hit, severely
affecting much of the farm sector, these same professors denied having said
what they did.
            After I finished my first book on agriculture, I decided to
pursue the nature of the social division of labor in agriculture.  Peasant
movements at the time seemed to be a very dynamic force.  I had begun
teaching a class in the history of economic thought, a subject for which I
was untrained, having taken only one undergraduate class.
            Reading the history of economic thought, I began taking an
interest in how classical political economists treated the social division
of labor in agriculture.  A sharp pattern began to emerge.  Although the
social division of labor was almost entirely absent from the theoretical
works of classical political economy, the major theorists took a keen
interest in the subject, although they largely confined to their ideas to
their non-theoretical writings.  These authors were consistent.  The peasant
system of self-provisioning had to be destroyed in order to create a labor
force, but the destruction had to be gradual.
            I was struck by the sophistication of some of these primitive
accumulationists.  They realized that to destroy the subsistence economy
altogether would not be in their best interests for two reasons:  first, and
most obviously, the capitalist employers were not prepared to absorb the
entire subsistence.  Second, and more subtly, self-provisioning subsidized
wage labor.
            I was not aware at the time either of the literature on the
articulation of modes production or of the works of Harold Wolpe, but these
primitive accumulationists clearly described how such matters worked.
Crudely, for the capitalist sector as a whole, surplus value represents the
difference between variable capital and the total output.  If, for example,
the worker or the worker's family produces food or support from within a
pre-capitalist mode of production, the quantity of necessary variable
capital falls, leaving more surplus value.  In effect, capitalism sucks
value from the peasant sector...

***

Separating the doing and the deed:
Capital and the continuous character of enclosures

Massimo De Angelis

Capital encloses. The different articulations comprising the current global
justice and solidarity movement are increasingly acknowledging and fighting
against this truism: by opposing the attempts to relocate communities to
make space for dams; by resisting privatization of public services and basic
resources such as water; by creating new commons through occupation of land
and the building of communities; by struggling against rent positions of
intellectual property rights threatening the lives of millions of aids
patients; by simply playing music beyond the cash limits imposed by the
market.

Despite the piling of evidence on real social struggles against the many
forms of capital's enclosures, that capital encloses is not something that
has been sufficiently theorized by critical social and economic theory. On
the side of mainstream research, the broad question of enclosures appears
one of justification and modes of implementation. In the first case, we have
what has been referred to as the "tragedy of the commons."  The core of this
argument, first proposed by Hardin (1968) is that commons represent an
incentive and distribution arrangement that inevitably results in
environmental degradation and generally resource depletion. This because the
commons are represented as resources for which there is "free" and
"unmanaged" access. In this framework, no one has an obligation to take care
of commons. In societies in which commons are prevalent, Hardin argues,
people live by the principle: 'to each according to his needs' formulated by
Marx in his Critique of the Gotha program. By assuming that commons are a
free for all space from which competing and atomized  "economic men" take as
much as they can, Hardin has engineered a justification for privatization of
the commons space rooted in an alleged natural necessity.[i] Hardin forgets
that there is no common without community within which the modalities of
access to common resources are negotiated. Incidentally, this implies that
there is no enclosure of commons without at the same time the destruction
and fragmentation of communities. [ii]

In the second case, it is sufficient to mention the extensive literature on
the modes of privatisation and the methods of implementation, the alleged
benefits that they would cause, not to mention the different fields in which
enclosures of commons would emerge and reinforced following trade
liberalization policies in new areas such as public services. In this
immense literature, enclosures are the basso continuo of a neoliberal
discourse within which we are fully immersed.

On the critical side, there is of course plenty of literature opposing this
or that privatization, this or that strategy of trade liberalization,
identifying the effects of WTO sponsored trade liberalization policies, or
the immense social cost of the building a new dam and relocating millions,
or the injustice involved in privatizing water.[iii] Yet, there are very few
systematic works attempting to put it all together, in a fashion of
theoretical constructs, so as to help us to clarify the nature of the
enclosing force we are facing.[iv]

A part from few exceptions[v], it is within Marxist literature that we find
the most paradoxical deficiency in the attempt to theorize enclosures as an
ongoing pillar of capitalist regimes. This is literature that in principle
should be very sensitive to issues of struggles and capitalist power, as
well as alternatives to capital. There is one main fallacy in the way
traditional Marxist literature has dealt with the issue of enclosures.[vi]
It marginalizes enclosures from theory by making it not just a question of
genealogy, but a genealogy within a linear model of development. To
simplify, the narrative goes something like this: before capitalism there
are enclosures or "primitive accumulation". These processes of expropriation
are preconditions of capitalism because they create and develop markets for
commodities such as labour power and land. Once the job is done, we can stop
talking about enclosures (or primitive accumulation) and need to talk about
"capital logic". "Primitive accumulation" and "capital logic" are thus
distinctly separated, and therefore become the subject matter of two
distinct Marxist disciplines. Marxist historians debate issues of genealogy
and "transition" to capitalism very much linked to the issue of primitive
accumulation or enclosures. On the other hand, and at the same time, Marxist
economists debate the intricate issues of "capital's logic" such as
questions of value, accumulation, crises as if the social practices in front
of their noses have nothing to do with real and ongoing enclosures (since in
their framework these have already occurred some time in the past).

This framework is extremely problematic, both theoretically and politically.
Theoretically, because as I will argue in this paper, enclosures are a
continuous characteristic of "capital logic" once we understand capital not
as a totalized system (the capitalism that Marx never refers to, strategies
deployed by capital see Smith (1996)) but as a force with totalizing drives
that exists together with other forces that act as limit to it. This not
only at the fringe of capital reach, in the strategies of imperialism for
the creation of new markets. Even if we conceptualize the domain of capital
as not having a territorial outside, as Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000), there
is the theoretical and political need to recognize the central role of
enclosures as part of the world we live in. In this world, enclosures are
one of the strategic horizons clashing with others. It is either capital
that makes the world through commodification and enclosures, or it is the
rest of us - whoever is that "us" - that makes the world through
counter-enclosures and commons. The net results of the clashes among these
social forces Marx called "class struggle", while Polanyi theorizes it in
terms of "double movement of society."

Politically, because the confinement of enclosures to a question of
genealogy within a linear model of capitalist development paralyses
Marxian-inspired contributions on the question of "alternatives". Paralysis
understood here as state of powerlessness or incapacity to act. Indeed, in
the linear model of historical development inherited and practiced by
classical Marxism, the alternative to capitalism can only be another "ism".
The ongoing struggles for commons within the current global justice and
solidarity movement are thus not appreciated for what they are: sprouts of
alternatives to capital. Marxian-inspired thinking cannot join the
intellectual and political endeavors to shape alternatives in the here and
now because its framework is for another "ism" projected into an unqualified
future, and generally defined by a model of power that needs a political
elite to tell the rest of us why power cannot be exercised from the
ground-up starting from the now[vii]. Thus, while current movements around
the world are practicing, producing and fighting for a variety of different
commons - thus posing the strategic question of their political
articulation - traditional Marxist theoreticians cannot conceptualize these
movements in terms of categories familiar to them. They thus endeavor to
reduce these movements to these familiar categories, and when they do that,
their contribution to the rich debate on alternatives is poor indeed, of the
series: "one solution, revolution".

This paper is divided in three sections. First, I propose an alternative
reading of Marx's analysis of "primitive accumulation", one that shows the
continuing relevance of "enclosures" as constitutive element of the capital
relation and accumulation. In this perspective, enclosures are
characteristics of capital's strategies at whatever level of capitalist
development. Second, I briefly propose an analytical framework to study
current new enclosures. Third, I offer few concluding reflections on the
question capitalist enclosures as "discursive practices."

NOTES
[i] For a critique of Hardin approach, see for example Anderson and Simmons
(1993). Ronald Coase offers a parallel argument to that of Hardin. The
theorem that goes under his name, the Coase Theorem, proposes that pollution
and other "externalities" can be efficiently controlled through voluntary
negotiations among the affected parties (that is both polluters and those
harmed by pollution). A key to the Coase theorem is that many pollution
problems emerge with common-property goods that have no clear-cut ownership
or property rights. With clear-cut property rights, "owners" would have the
incentive to achieve an efficient level of pollution. Thus, pollution can be
reduced through voluntary negotiation by assigning private property rights
to common-property resources and the consequent development of a market in
property rights can be established. Now the problem with this is that every
human action is a social action and therefore bound to produce
externalities. In Coase's framework therefore, everything becomes
enclosable. See Coase (1988).
[ii] For an analysis of the relation between commons and communities, see De
Angelis (2003) and De Marcellus (2003). For an application of this analysis
in the area of higher education, see Harvie (2004).
[iii] The literature here is truly, and fortunately so, very extensive. For
some examples see Shiva (2002b) on intellectual property rights and
enclosure of knowledge and Shiva (2002a) on water enclosures. On the subject
of an important wave of struggles against water privatisation in Cochabamba,
Bolivia, see the resources in Web 5. On  the impact of dams to project on
local population and their struggles see for example the case of the
Narmada's
valley (Web 1 and Web 2) or the massive integrated system of enclosures
across Central America with the plan Puebla-Panama (Hansen and Wallach
2002). The campaign against GATS (General Agreement on Trade and Services)
has highlighted the corporate agenda of "locking in" past privatisation and
"enclosures" as well as promoting new ones. See the resources in Web 3 and
Web 4, as well as Wasselius (2002). On the denunciation of the effects of
debt and and struggles against it see the resources in web 6. For broad
survey and identification of struggles against the enclosures imposed
through structural adjustment policies see Walton and Seddon (1994).
[iv] Exceptions coming from three different perspectives are for example the
work of John McMurtry (1998, 1999, 2002) who tries to put it all together by
identifying the market as an ethical system and counterpoise commons to
marketisation. His work is truly full of insights and should be studied
carefully by Marxists. Another exception is the work of John Holloway
(2002), and his important and refreshing analysis on power and revolution
today. Finally, Hardt and Negri (2000)  open the way for "commonwealth", but
without articulating it to the problematic of capital as enclosing social
force. Whatever their strengths and weaknesses, these bodies of work leaves
the strategic question of enclosures in the background. In this sense, this
paper intends to complement these other works.
[v] See for example Bonefeld (2001),  De Angelis (2001), Federici (1992),
Midnight Notes Collective (1992), Parelman (2000) among others. The web
journal The Commoner (http://www.thecommoner.org) is largely dedicated to
pursuing this line of research. For a critique of this approach, see
Zarembka (2002) and, for a counter-critique, see Bonefeld (2002a).
[vi] In De Angelis (2001) I discuss the main horizons of interpretation of
primitive accumulation within the Marxist tradition. I identify a
"historical primitive accumulation" deriving from Lenin and a
"inherent-continuous  primitive accumulation" from Luxemburg. Subsequent
more modern interpretations seem to share the basic characteristics of these
two approaches. For example, in his classic studies on the development of
capitalism, Maurice Dobb (1963: 178) uses the category of primitive
accumulation to indicate a well-defined age of accumulation of property
rights better known as the mercantile age. According to Dobb, therefore,
primitive accumulation is accumulation "in an historical sense". It is worth
noticing that also Paul Sweezy, Dobb's main opponent in the famous debate on
the transition from feudalism to capitalism published in Science and Society
1950-53,  acknowledges Dobb's "excellent treatment of the essential problems
of the period of original accumulation" (Sweezy 1950: 157). The now historic
debate on "transition" (collected in Hilton 1978)  and its later
developments and transfigurations such as the Brenner debate on the pages of
the journal Past and Present of the 1970s (collected in Astor and Philperin
1985) and later exchanges in Science and Society (Gottlieb 1984; Leibman
1984; Sweezy 1986; McLennon 1986) is characterised by a general common
acceptance of this  historical definition of primitive accumulation. It is
fair to point out however, that the approach by Samir Amin (1974:  3) is
different from Dobb's approach of primitive accumulation as an historically
prior period and  is closer to the notion of inherent and continuous
primitive accumulation that occurs through what Amin defines transfer of
value within the world economy. Another interpretation within this general
framework may also include Wallerstein's (1979) notion of a world-system.
Differently from the approach here taken, the continuous character of
primitive accumulation in these accounts seem to stress only "objective"
mechanisms of accumulation and circulation of capital.
[vii] For a discussion of this model of power - understood as "power over"
or potestas, vis-à-vis another emancipatory model of power, as "power to",
or potentia, see Holloway (2002).

***

'No eyes, no interest, no frame of reference':
Rosa Luxemburg, southern African historiography, and pre-capitalist modes of
production

Jeff Guy

In a rousing and provocative treatment of South Africa in the historical
section of The Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg applied aspects of
her theoretical arguments on the necessary structural links between
capitalist and non-capitalist systems, to the contemporary imperialist
world. She described the destructive impact of mining capital on Boer
small-commodity producers, who had themselves 'built their peasant economy
like parasites on the backs of Negroes.'. These writings, together with Rosa
Luxemburg's earlier studies of the impact of capitalist forms of production
on non-capitalist societies, and the imperatives which structure their
interaction, are especially interesting to those of us who have studied the
dynamics of the impact of capitalism on pre-capitalist societies, and tried
to apply these studies to the writing of historical narratives. In addition
to this, the recent application by radical commentators of the idea of
primitive accumulation to contemporary manifestations of imperialism allows
Luxemburg's work to reach across the century that has passed since she used
her remarkable talents so courageously to analyse, and change, her world. In
this paper I examine some of her ideas and their application, in the context
of the historiography of the relation between capitalist and non-capitalist
modes of production in South Africa, and suggest some of the reasons why we
should revive this important debate and extend it beyond the walls of an
increasingly confined academy.

***

South African political economy

Martin Legassick

 "Why is the country not embarking on a large-scale socialist programme to 
mobilize young people, in order to build roads and schools and plant fields? 
"Forget it' says the media manager. 'The government dare not be seen as 
socialists, or the West will crap in its pants.' 'I am actually sick of 
being held to ransom by the West,' grumbles the mfundisi. 'Do this, do that. 
What has all this free-market stuff brought us? They don't give up a thing, 
not tariffs, not lifestyle, yet we have to be more capitalist than Wall 
Street.'
Antjie Krog in the Transkei, A change of tongue[1]

There has been an enormous transformation of the South African state from a 
white-controlled and staffed apartheid repressive monster to a state with a 
democratic parliament and an extremely democratic constitution (at least on 
paper) which guarantees basic freedoms. The ANC was elected to govern with a 
majority of more than 60% in 1994 and has increased its apparent share of 
the vote at two subsequent elections (1999, 2004) to some 70% - though the 
percentage of the population voting in the elections has consistently 
diminished so that in 2004 only 38% voted for the ANC.[2] But the mass of 
people elected the ANC into government not for the sake of having members of 
parliament, but in order to improve their lives. ANC election propaganda has 
recognized this, promising (1994 onwards) "a better life for all", and (in 
2004) to "create jobs and fight poverty". But does the ANC have a policy and 
programme which is adequate to the task?
The bosses' guru Raymond Parsons reasserted recently that "rapid growth and 
transformation in SA are possible only with a market-related economy" - that 
is, a capitalist economy.[3] The negotiated settlement drew the ANC, in 
government, into compromise with capitalism. Since 1994, the ANC government 
has promoted the capitalist economy. 'There is no other way' the ideologists 
of the ANC proclaimed when they introduced GEAR in 1996, echoing right-wing 
Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain in the 1980s. But GEAR has 
been a vicious neo-liberal economic programme equivalent to the SAP's of the 
International Monetary Fund and World Bank, attacking the living standards 
of the working class.
The ANC leaders introduced GEAR with the claim that it would speed up 
economic growth. But what is the record? Growth has been sluggish - 
averaging 2,4% a year between 1996 and 2000 and 2,7% a year between 1994 and 
2003, compared with the target set by the government in 1996 of an average 
4,2% rising to 6% by 2000.[4] The chief director of economic policy in the 
President's office himself describes this rate of growth as "pedestrian".[5] 
The government itself stated in 1996 that a rate of growth of 3% a year 
would not be able to reverse rising unemployment, nor be able to expand 
social service delivery adequately, nor yield sufficient progress towards an 
equitable distribution of income and wealth."[6] And so it has proved.
The ANC managers of the economy have been congratulating themselves on their 
achievements. But what has been the record of delivery since 1994? 
Overwhelming evidence shows that since 1994 the unemployed have increased in 
numbers, that the gap between those at the top and the bottom of society has 
widened, that impoverishment has increased, and that social problems have 
increased in scale. (see chapter 14)
The government disputes this evidence. I myself went through the experience 
in early 2004 of attending first a conference of the Africa Institute at 
which Joel Netzhitenze claimed that 2 million jobs had been created since 
1994, and only weeks later a meeting at which Western Cape COSATU regional 
secretary Tony Ehrenreich asserted that since 1994 1 million jobs had been 
lost. The evidence is confusing in fact, on jobs, on inequality, on delivery 
in general. Government agencies such as Stats SA and the Reserve Bank are 
constantly 'revising' the figures - always in the direction of creating a 
more favourable impression. Perhaps the first occasion was when in 2000 the 
Reserve Bank revised the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures for 1998 
upwards by 17,9%, and 'adjusted' the GDP figures back to 1992. As a result a 
recession (negative growth) in 1998 was wiped out, and "real per capita GDP 
figures, which had been showing a continuous decline throughout the decade, 
now showed a rise from when the ANC government took office in 1994." The 
reasons given were the need to include the 'informal economy', although, as 
Bond points out, the correction was not carried through consistently.[7] 
Straightening out the confusions, removing from the figures the spin given 
by the government spin-doctors, leads to the same conclusion that most 
ordinary people have experienced: that the rich are getting richer and the 
poor are getting poorer.
Recently they have again revised the statistics (upwards) on GDP between 
2002 and 2005. It is now claimed that in 2002 the economy grew by 3,7% 
(rather than 3,6%), in 2003 by 3% (rather than 2,8%) and in 2004 by 4,5% 
(rather than 3,7%). In 2005 the figures have also been revised upwards, from 
3,5% to 4,6% for the 1st quarter and from 4,8% to 5,4% for the second 
quarter, leading to a predicted growth for 2005 of 5,1% as opposed to the 
original government estimate of 4,3%.[8]  In addition, the government has 
announced a new plan - the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for 
South Africa (ASGI) - this time to achieve 6% growth by 2010. But what 
confidence can be placed in this plan? Rather the experience that is likely 
to be confirmed again and again in our country - as around the world - while 
the capitalist system continues, is that the government does not and cannot 
deliver its promises. The real question raised by an understanding of the 
dynamics of the economy is: how can capitalism be ended?
The evolution of capitalism in South Africa - in particular the development 
of secondary manufacturing industry -- had already created by the 1970s an 
enormous and militant black working class whose opposition to apartheid and 
capitalism constituted the major challenge to the system. Today apartheid 
has been ended. Yet neither national nor social liberation has been 
achieved. The working class, organized predominantly within COSATU, holds 
the key to the future in its hands. At the head of all the oppressed - the 
unemployed, young and old, women and men, in countryside and town, as well 
as drawing to its side a middle class exploited and oppressed by the banks 
and monopolies - and with a programme to solve the social and democratic 
tasks - it could easily defeat the ANC and win power. Is its leadership 
however up to the task?

NOTES
[1] (Johannesburg: Random House, 2003)
[2] In the 1994 elections only 56 percent (15 806 380) of all eligible 
voters (27 438 897) cast their ballots; just under 7 million people eligible 
to vote, did not even bother to register; of those registered to vote (20 
600 000), nearly 5 million chose not to exercise their vote; just 38 percent 
(10 877 302) of the entire voting population voted for the ANC; there were 
250 871 spoilt votes; the national voting turnout has gradually decreased 
since South Africa's first, one-person one-vote elections. In 1994, 19,5 
million people voted; in 1999 just over 16 million voted; and in 2004, under 
16 million (remembering that the country's voting population has grown 
substantially over the last decade. See Dale McKinley 'New Power to the 
People', radicalcommunities at yahoogroups.com, 16/5/2004.
[3] Business Day, 12/5/2005. He added: "provided the hand of the 
'development state' is not too heavy, especially for small and emerging 
business."
[4] S. Terreblanche, A history of inequality in South Africa, 1652-2002 
(Pietermaritsburg: UKZN Press, 2002) p. 117; Stephen Gelb, "An overview of 
the SA economy", J. Daniel, R. Southall, J. Lutchman (eds), State of the 
Nation: South Africa 2004-5, (HSRC Press, 2005), p. 367. For caveats at GDP 
as an indicator of economic well-being see P. Bond, "From racial to class 
apartheid: a critical appraisal of SA's transition" Paper to AIDC's 10 years 
of democracy conference, 27 November 2004.
[5] Alan Hirsch, Season of Hope, (Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press, 2005), p. 
237
[6] Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy: edited version in 
Business Report, 18/6/1996
[7] S. Jones and J. Inggs "The SA economy in the 1990s" in Special Issue of 
the SA Journal of Economic History, 18,1-2, September 2003, pp. 4-5; P. 
Bond, "From racial to class apartheid". See also Business Day, 22/6/1999; 
Sunday Independent, 27/6/1999; Sunday Times Business Times, 27/6/1999
[8] Business Day, 30/11/2005; Business Report, 30/11/2005

***

Explaining uneven and combined development in South Africa

Patrick Bond and Ashwin Desai

In Results and Prospects, Leon Trotsky's notion of 'permanent revolution' 
provided a profound critique of the Russian bourgeoisie, based on skepticism 
that genuine democracy and the land question could be solved through their 
leadership. How well does the argument travel to South Africa a century 
later, at a time of a marked void in political-economic reasoning by 
socialists? We argue below that the theory underlying the permanent 
revolution, namely uneven and combined development, is entirely appropriate 
for South Africa. Here, a mix of market and non-market coercion permitted a 
permanent system of racialised, gendered 'primitive accumulation' to emerge 
at the very moment Trotsky was analysing Russian social relations. Does a 
revival of his broader theory, and a comparison with a half-century of 
flawed neo-Marxist intellectual approaches, assist in clarifying the 
character of accumulation and class formation in South Africa? Does it help 
vanquish both the 'two economies' argument advanced in the African National 
Congress and the stageist theory - with its aspirational 'developmental 
state' - so popular in the official centre-left? The arguments below provide 
a preliminary case in the affirmative, without yet attempting to do more 
than flag the logical political conclusions.

***

South Africa: A Developmental State?

Bill Freund

In a series of short articles, I have tried to suggest new ways of 
characterising contemporary post-apartheid South Africa. I would describe 
these at the moment as work in progress and this talk is intended as a 
continuation of those efforts.[1] A starting point for me has been 
dissatisfaction at describing the ANC and its administration in terms of 
negatives. It clearly is not a socialist organisation, it is not suffused 
with the concerns with the RDP, its central concern is not poverty or 
inequality in South Africa but what then is it?  Historically I would 
emphasise the centrality of united African nationalism transcending tribal 
or class distinctions as its main unifying thread. Its success in promoting 
that ensures overwhelming electoral success despite a variety of 
dissatisfactions. Favouring the "previously disadvantaged" as a totality is 
a central strategy: recovering the dignity of the black man (and in recent 
discourse, woman) and his empowerment as the dominant force in the country 
is absolutely central: it is hard to imagine a supporter of the ANC who is 
not committed to that goal getting anywhere. Other discourses such as 
inclusive non-racialism of citizenship and the alleviation of poor living 
conditions are not unimportant, one could say even critical parts of the 
total picture, but they are certainly secondary.

The ANC has bought into what it sees as a viable means of inserting South 
Africa into international capitalist trends. I am indebted to William Gumede's 
insightful book for stressing and confirming that this has been the 
intention of Thabo Mbeki and indeed much of his generation, and the one 
following, amongst the exile elite for a long time, certainly before 1990. 
There simply never was a socialist agenda for Mbeki nor was there one for 
Tambo.[2] The failure to articulate a vision of a socialist South Africa 
beyond the words of the Freedom Charter from the 1950s was not merely a 
useful way of keeping the ANC united; it also blocked the possibility of 
such a vision attaining any reality beyond pious hopes. In this view, the 
1993 RDP does have such a vision although it lacked any coherent plan for 
attaining it. Far from challenging the ANC, it was devised as an election 
manifesto. I will further suggest that the RDP was adopted late and 
uncritically and indeed cynically by the ANC as an election ploy; its 
proponents were typically UDF radicals rather than exiles close to the power 
engine of the party, radicals who could mostly be held into line through the 
largesse and connections of this very effectively centralised political 
machine.  The RDP was of course unceremoniously dropped in 1996 as a major 
government stratagem. Its minister, Jay Naidoo, a former trade unionist, 
made a completely seamless transition into the world of big business deals 
not long afterwards.

If we follow the recent work of Michael Macdonald,[3] the result has been to 
stabilise the ANC in power, able to win so far all elections by increasing 
majorities with its continuous commitment to black unity and black 
leadership and the very numerous carrots it can offer to leaders, present 
and future, while simultaneously stabilising South African capitalism which 
the ANC endorses (even with its white captains being forced to swallow the 
corruption and to them rather unpalatable racial vision that goes with 
BEE).[4] Thus a rather small-scale land reform programme largely targeting 
the so-called emerging farmers, a small minority, is rhetorically 
continuously held up as a means of holding at bay the danger of a Zimbabwean 
type land grab. This stability is in turn recognised and appreciated 
internationally, especially in the wake of the multi-fold doubts that hung 
over South Africa's future in the 1980s. I was part of a group of radical 
scholars who followed through on the ideas of John Saul and Stephen Gelb and 
promoted the notion of an organic crisis of South African capitalism before 
1990.[5] Today it looks as though business has disengaged itself quite 
successfully from the social crisis and engaged fairly well with 
international business trends.

Gelb and others built on the thesis of Harold Wolpe, who in his most 
distinguished work tried to see how segregation/apartheid had in an earlier 
period stabilised and enabled SA capitalism. He concluded that it had done 
so at a crucial time but that this process was failing from the 1940s and 
that apartheid was an attempt, in his view ultimately an unsuccessful one, 
to shore things up.[6] In that sense, this analysis can be compared to what 
he wrote a generation ago.

NOTES
[1] See Bill Freund,  'South Africa: A New Nation-State in a Globalising Era' 
Transformation, 56, 41-52. 2004, and  'Mbekis Dritte-Welt Vision', Das 
Argument,  262, 552-556,  2005. The references that follow intentionally 
select new available reading rather than the 'classics' with their longer 
historical vision.
[2] Luli Callinicos' new biography, Oliver Tambo; Beyond the Engeli 
Mountains (Cape Town: David Philip, 2004 ) is perhaps unintentionally 
devastating in this regard. See William Mervyn Gumede. Thabo Mbeki and the 
Battle for the Soul of the ANC, (Johannesburg: Zebra Press, 2005).
[3]  Why Race Matters  (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
[4] This is not a relationship without problems. South Africa still suffers 
from low internal investment which in turn affects the appeal of foreign 
investment, for instance. On BEE, see Roger Southall, 'Black Empowerment and 
Limits to a More Democratic Capitalism in South Africa' in Sakhela Buhlungu, 
John Daniel, Roger Southall & Jessica Lutchman, eds., State of the Nation 
South Africa 2005-06,  (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2006), 175-201.
[5] Stephen Gelb, ed., South Africa's Economic Crisis (Cape Town: David 
Philip. 1991).
[6] 'Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa; From Segregation to 
Apartheid' in Wolpe, ed., The Articulation

***

The Accumulation of Capital by Rosa Luxemburg in Historical Perspective

Arndt Hopfmann

Rosa Luxemburg was compelled to write her treatise on the accumulation of 
capital in an incredibly short period of time. Her burning desire was to 
publish a theoretical solution to what she believed were two paradoxes. The 
first was that in Karl Marx's 'reproduction schema' published in Das 
Kapital, volume II, it was impossible to explain permanent increasing 
output, i.e. accumulation. The second paradox proved to be even more 
challenging. In the 1890s, >young Russian Marxists< successfully established 
not only that Marx's schema - with slight corrections - could in fact be 
used to explain an accelerated process of reproduction - but that, in 
addition, the capitalist mode of production could generate within its own 
sphere, ie. as a >closed system<, unlimited demand. The capitalists 
themselves would solve the >realisation problem< as long as the process of 
accumulation goes on and on uninterruptedly. To resolve both paradoxes, 
Luxemburg developed her concept of the necessity of a non-capitalist sphere 
as an »immediate and vital condition for capital and its accumulation«. This 
necessity is however undermined by imperialist tendencies which destroy more 
and more all non-capitalist surroundings. Thus the collapse of the system is 
unavoidable in the long run, Luxemburg claims. However, this argument has 
not stood the proof of time. Nevertheless, in her desperate attempt to find 
a »theoretically precise solution« to the reproduction process schemes drawn 
by Marx, in particular to explain the accelerated accumulation of capital, 
Luxemburg arrived (somehow unwillingly) at a whole set of valuable insights. 
Amongst others these include the economic role of force and violence in 
the >old< and the >new<, imperialism, the role of demand in a capitalist 
accumulation process, and the limits of growth to capitalism as a social 
system.

***

Denaturalising Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of Resurgent Imperialism

Gillian Hart[1]

In these commentaries drawn during September 2001, the South African 
cartoonist Zapiro captures contemporary geographies of empire with stunning 
precision and prescience. Seen in retrospect, the image of Bush and Sharon 
swaggering into space serves as a chilling reminder of the anger that 
erupted at the UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban 
in the week before 9/11. On September 3 the US and Israel walked out of the 
conference to protest criticisms of Israel - including references in some 
conference documents to a new form of apartheid. Barely a month earlier, 
Colin Powell had threatened a US boycott of the WCAR unless the organizers 
removed references to Zionism as racism, as well as to slavery as a crime 
against humanity and related demands for reparations. Many saw the 
withdrawal as a convenient way for the US to circumvent these and other 
confrontations over racial injustice in its multiple manifestations. I 
recall vividly several telephone conversations with colleagues in South 
Africa on Sunday September 9, in which they spoke of the incandescent rage 
directed at the US and Israel that had consumed the Durban conference.
      Juxtapose, if you will, the 'geographies of anger' portrayed so 
vividly by Zapiro with another set of global images - those produced by 
Thomas P.M. Barnett, a professor of warfare analysis in the Naval War 
College in Newport, Rhode Island, advisor to Donald Rumsfeld's Department of 
Defence, and author of 'The Pentagon's New Map' (Esquire, March 2003) and a 
book by that title published in 2004.
The world according to Barnett is divided between the Functioning Core and 
the Non-Integrating Gap, with a series of 'seam states' (including Mexico, 
Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, 
Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia) that 'lie along the Gap's bloody 
boundaries'. Here, in Barnett's words, is the logic of what Roberts, Secor 
and Sparke (2003) aptly term his 'neoliberal geopolitics':

Show me where globalisation is thick with network connectivity, financial 
transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show 
you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and 
more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the 
Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalisation is thinning or 
just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically 
repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, 
and - most important - the chronic conflicts that incubate the next 
generation of terrorists. These parts of the world I call the 
Non-Integrating Gap or Gap. (Barnett 2003: 2)

Barnett goes on to declare that 'In many ways the September 11 attacks did 
the U.S. national-security establishment a huge favor by pulling us back 
from the abstract planning of future high-tech wars against 'near peers' 
into the here-and-now threats of the global order. By doing so, the dividing 
lines between Core and Gap were highlighted, and more important, the nature 
of the threat environment was thrown into sharp relief' (2003: 10).
      In short 'disconnectedness defines danger' and, we are told in another 
set of italics, 'A country's potential to warrant a U.S. military response 
is inversely related to its globalisation connectivity' (Barnett 2003: 5). 
The Non-Integrating Gap must, quite literally, be bombarded into embracing 
Western liberal democracy and market capitalism. So direct, salient, and 
prescient is Zapiro's cartoon of September 28 2001 that one is led to wonder 
whether he had privileged access to these savage Pentagon cartographies.
      In a series of recent articles and a brilliant forthcoming book 
entitled Hyphen-Nation-States, Matthew Sparke underscores the crucial 
importance of grasping how resurgent imperialism works in conjunction with 
neoliberal globalisation, and with related representations of a smooth, 
decentred globe and a 'space of flows.' Indeed, he observes, Thomas Friedman 
(1999) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) deploy remarkably similar 
images of smoothed global space - an imagery that not only downplays 
American dominance, but is partially enabling of the very asymmetries it 
obscures (Sparke 2003: 385). There are important resonances, he notes, with 
representations of space by American leaders in the first half of the 20th 
century (Sparke, forthcoming). In American Empire, Neil Smith shows how 
these leaders viewed their post-colonial imperium as a 'quintessentially 
liberal victory over geography' and how 'this deracination of geography in 
the globalist vision abetted a broad ideological self-justification for 
American Empire' (Smith 2003: xvii). A distinctive feature of the current 
conjuncture is how the Iraq war was legitimised by Pentagon officials as 
completely congruent with a neoliberal (and thus supposedly non-imperial) 
project of networking and more fully integrating the globe (Roberts, Secor 
and Sparke 2003).
      Geographers have, of course, long been complicit with imperial 
projects. Yet conceptions of space (or space-time) and scale as actively 
produced through everyday practices that are simultaneously material and 
meaningful can do vitally important critical work in illuminating the 
exercise of imperial power. Such conceptions are also crucial to the closely 
related project of a critical rethinking of area studies. In staking this 
broad claim, I am not seeking to demarcate and elevate a disciplinary 
terrain occupied by a rather small subset of geographers. In fact, some of 
the most insightful deployments of critical conceptions of spatiality that 
are directly relevant to rethinking area studies have come from beyond 
geography.
      For example, anthropologist Fernando Coronil extends Lefebvre's (1991 
[1974]) insistence on the importance of a relatively neglected theme in Marx's 
writings - his explication of the 'trinity formula' in Volume III of Capital 
that includes the commodification of land/nature along with labour and 
capital:

A perspective that recognises the triadic dialectic among labour, capital, 
and land leads to a fuller understanding of the economic, cultural and 
political processes entailed in the mutual constitution of Europe and its 
colonies, processes that continue to define the relation between 
postcolonial and imperial states. It helps to specify the operations through 
which Europe's colonies, first in America and then in Africa and Asia, 
provided it with cultural and material resources with which it fashioned 
itself as the standard of humanity - the bearer of a superior religion, 
reason, and civilisation embodied in European selves. (Coronil 2000: 357; 
see also Coronil 1996). Coronil is seeking to do for Lefebvre what Stoler 
(1995) does for Foucault - directing attention from a predominantly European 
focus to the mutually constitutive processes, practices, and forms of power 
through which metropoles and (post)colonies make and remake one another.[2]

As I have suggested elsewhere (Hart 2004a), in building on Lefebvre's 
concepts of spatiality Coronil also moves postcolonial debates beyond 
Chakrabarty's (2000) critique of historicism through which 'non-Western' 
societies are consigned to the waiting-room of a linear narrative of 
history. In contesting teleological accounts, Chakrabarty posits 'two 
histories of capital' through which diverse ways of human belonging (History 
2) constantly modify and interrupt the totalising thrust of the logic of 
capital (History 1), but are never subsumed by it: 'capital is a provisional 
compromise, made up of History 1 modified by somebody's History 2' 
(Chakrabarty 2000: 70). The key limits of this sort of formulation - and of 
related neoWeberian notions of 'multiple capitalisms' as well as 
'alternative modernities' (Gaonkar 2001) - lie in their abstraction from 
processes of interconnection. Precisely what is so important about critical 
conceptions of spatiality is their insistent focus on relational 
understandings of the production of space and scale, and the inseparability 
of meaning and practice. In so doing, they provide a means for grappling 
with the divergent but increasingly interconnected trajectories of 
socio-spatial change that are actively constitutive of processes of 
'globalisation.'
      My purpose in this essay is to contribute two related arguments to 
efforts to rethink area studies in the moment of danger in which we find 
ourselves. At a broadly methodological level, I want to underscore the 
importance of critical ethnography and strategies of what I call relational 
comparison. Such ethnographies are not accounts of 'local' variations or 
instances of a 'global' process. Nor are they case studies of the impact of 
globalisation, imperialism, or any other set of inexorable, pre-given 
forces. Nor do they simply represent methods for the detailed production of 
area knowledge. Instead, critical ethnographies offer vantage points for 
generating new understandings by illuminating power-laden processes of 
constitution, connection, and dis-connection, along with slippages, 
openings, and contradictions, and possibilities for alliance within and 
across different spatial scales. Critical ethnography and relational 
comparison share close political and analytical affinities with sociologist 
Michael Burawoy's (2000) project of global ethnography. Yet I want to 
suggest how an explicit deployment of critical conceptions of spatiality can 
extend and enrich global ethnography.
      More concretely, I draw on my ethnographic research in two sites in 
South Africa that are closely connected with East Asia to engage with recent 
discussions of what Marx dubbed 'so-called primitive accumulation.'[3] In an 
important but little recognised book entitled The Invention of Capitalism 
(2000), Michael Perelman calls attention to a deep tension within Marx's 
critique of Smith and other classical political economists. On the one hand 
Marx insisted on an historically (and geographically) grounded account in 
which colonial conquest, plunder, and slavery in Africa, Asia, and the 
Americas were central to 'classic' English primitive accumulation that he 
took as the focus of his own historical account. Yet his analytical focus in 
Volume I of Capital was on the 'silent compulsion' of economic relations, 
rather than on crude methods of primitive accumulation: 'Marx did not want 
his readers to conclude that the ills of society resulted from unjust 
actions that were unrelated to the ills of a market society' (Perelman 2000: 
30). There is a vitally important distinction, Perelman reminds us, between 
primitive accumulation construed as an event that can be relegated to a 
precapitalist past, as opposed to an ongoing process. This latter 
understanding, he argues, compels attention to the gendered relations and 
conditions of unwaged work - what Mitchell, Marston and Katz (2004) call 
'life's work' - through which the labour force is produced and renewed on a 
daily basis.
      Engaging with an unpublished version of Perelman's text, Massimo De 
Angelis (1999; see also De Angelis 2001; 2004) maintains that Marx's theory 
of primitive accumulation encompasses both an historical element (the ex 
novo separation of producers from the means of production), and an element 
of continuity even in 'mature' capitalist economies. The persistence of 
primitive accumulation, he suggests, is usefully understood through Karl 
Polanyi's (1944 [2001]) concept of the 'double movement'.[4] For De Angelis, 
primitive accumulation as an ongoing process derives from strategies to take 
apart those institutions that protect society from the market, and the 
associated struggles between capital and labour. His intervention 
contributes to understandings of neoliberal capitalism as a form of 'new 
enclosures' aimed at dismantling the social commons created in the post-war 
period.[5]
      In The New Imperialism (2003), David Harvey attributes the rise of the 
neoliberal project to chronic problems of over-accumulation since the early 
1970s. Drawing on Rosa Luxemburg he distinguishes between expanded 
reproduction and accumulation through dispossession, and argues that the 
latter has become the dominant form of accumulation: 'Accumulation by 
dispossession re-emerged from the shadowy position it had held prior to 1970 
to become a major feature within the capitalist logic. On the one hand the 
release of low-cost assets [though privatisation] provided vast fields for 
the absorption of surplus capitals. On the other, it provided a means to 
visit the costs of devaluation of surplus capitals upon the weakest and most 
vulnerable territories and populations' (2003: 184-5). Finance capital and 
institutions of credit backed by state powers constitute the 'umbilical cord' 
that ties together expanded reproduction and accumulation by dispossession.
      A key shortcoming of orthodox left politics, Harvey maintains, has 
been its single-minded focus on proletarian struggles at the point of 
production, and its neglect of the extraordinary array of struggles 
unleashed by accumulation through dispossession - struggles over 
displacement, privatisation of water, electricity and other services, 
depredations of nature, biopiracy, and so forth. The key political challenge 
is to forge connections between these two forms of struggle - a prospect 
about which Harvey is sanguine, in light of widespread recognition of the 
crucial role of financial arrangements in linking expanded reproduction and 
accumulation through dispossession: 'With the core of the problem so clearly 
recognised, it should be possible to build outwards into a broader politics 
of creative destruction mobilised against the dominant regime of neoliberal 
imperialism foisted upon the world by the hegemonic capitalist powers' 
(2003: 180).
      What seems so compelling about the idea of primitive accumulation (or 
accumulation by dispossession) as ongoing process is its potential to 
illuminate connections - as De Angelis (2001: 20) puts it, the continuous 
character of enclosures makes clear how 'peoples of the North, East and 
South are facing possibly phenomenally different but substantially similar 
strategies of separation from the means of existence.' There is, however, a 
key difference between the 'new enclosures' formulation and Harvey's 
analysis. While Harvey foregrounds tendencies to over-accumulation, De 
Angelis and others in the 'new enclosures' school place primary emphasis on 
working class struggles.[6]
      Yet neither formulation can really come to grips with the ongoing 
fragmentation of the multiple struggles unleashed by neoliberal forms of 
capitalism, such as those that have erupted in post-apartheid South Africa. 
While it may be useful, as De Angelis suggests, to understand the continuous 
character of enclosures in terms of a Polanyian double movement, this is 
only a first step. Likewise, while there may be dialectical interconnections 
between the categories that Harvey identifies as expanded reproduction and 
accumulation by dispossession, these categories and their interconnections 
operate at quite a high level of abstraction.
      Given the potential political significance of recognising primitive 
accumulation as an ongoing process, there is a pressing need for more 
concrete levels of specification - not just in the sense of descriptive 
empirical detail, but concrete concepts that are adequate to the complexity 
with which they are seeking to grapple. The material 'facts' of 
dispossession are as important as their meanings - and they must be 
understood together in terms of multiple historical/geographical 
determinations, connections, and articulations.[7]
      Let me start with the first Zapiro cartoon, and with the 
expressions of anger over histories, memories, and meanings of racialised 
dispossession that erupted at the Durban conference. By taking the WCAR as 
my point of departure, I am not making the claim that it constituted some 
sort of microcosm of the 'global' tensions that literally exploded the 
following week - this was not, in other words, a latter-day version of 
Clifford Geertz's Balinese cockfight. Instead, I suggest that we envision 
the WCAR as a moment when multiple and multiply-scaled forces came into 
conjuncture (and disjuncture) with one another in ways that speak directly 
to creative destruction on the ground, as well as to what might be entailed 
in a critical rethinking of area knowledges.

NOTES
[1] Originally presented at the conference on 'Creative Destruction: Area 
Knowledge & the New Geographies of Empire,' Center for Place, Culture & 
Politics, City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, April 15-17 
2004. The Centre for Civil Society is grateful especially to Neil Smith of 
CUNY for permission to make the material available to a South African 
audience in this form.
[2] See also Cooper and Stoler (1997) and Cooper (2001).
[3] In using the term 'so-called' to preface primitive accumulation, Marx 
was deliberately distancing himself from Adam Smith's naturalised account of 
the accumulation of landed property by capital as 'previous' to the division 
of labour. Perelman (2000: 25) notes that Marx translated Smith's word 
'previous' as 'ursprünglich,' which Marx's English translators in turn 
rendered as 'primitive' - but which in German is far closer to Smith's 
neutral language. So-called primitive accumulation plays about the same role 
in political economy as original sin in theology, Marx remarked - an 
anecdote of the past that is supposed to explain its origin. What the early 
political economists portrayed as the 'eternal laws of Nature' of the 
capitalist mode of production - the transformation of the mass of the 
population into the 'free labouring poor' - were in practice established 
through concrete historical processes of expropriation in which 'capital 
comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt' 
(1954: 712). Further, Marx insisted, 'The history of this expropriation, in 
different countries, assumes different aspects and runs through its various 
phases in different orders of succession, and at different periods' (1954: 
669-670).
[4] Although this formulation is actually somewhat at odds with Polanyi's 
arguments, it opens up interesting possibilities that I discuss more fully 
in Hart (2004b).
[5] See for example the set of articles in The Commoner (no. 2, September 
2001) (www.thecommoner.org), as well as the debate between Zarembka and 
Bonefield in The Commoner of March 2002.
[6] Various issues of The Commoner make clear the relationship of 'new 
enclosures' to autonomist Marxism.
[7] I am using the term 'articulation' here in the sense laid out by Stuart 
Hall, who extended the concept of articulation along Gramscian lines to 
include not only the joining together of diverse elements in the 
constitution of societies structured in dominance, but also the production 
of meaning through practice: 'By the term 'articulation', I mean a 
connection or link which . requires particular conditions of existence to 
appear at all, which has to be positively sustained by specific processes, 
which is not 'eternal' but has constantly to be renewed, which can under 
some circumstances be overthrown, leading to the old linkages being 
dissolved and new connections - re-articulations - being forged' (Hall 1985: 
113-114)

***

The Second Age of the Third World: From primitive accumulation to global 
public goods?

David Moore

The post-cold war era of neoliberal globalisation is the 'Second Age of the 
Third World'. No longer defined by comparisons with advanced capitalism and 
state socialism, or by attempts to chart a non-aligned path between liberal 
and Marxist utopias, which characterised the 'First Age of the Third World', 
the Third World's identity is now constituted by its re-entry into the 
protracted process of primitive accumulation. Neoliberalism simultaneously 
accelerates and aggravates the uneven, destructive and creative route 
towards proletarianisation and private property. This prospect throws 
contemporary development theory into disarray, especially when confronted 
with the everpresent but usually hidden role of the increasingly 
internationalised state. The idea of global public goods has arisen out of 
this impasse. This article discusses primitive accumulation and global 
public goods, offering 'public accumulation' as an alternative.