Africa's Development Impasse: Rethinking the Political Economy of Transformation - Softcover

Andreasson, Stefan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1842779729 ISBN 13: 9781842779729

Verlag: Bloomsbury 3PL, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Orthodox strategies for socio-economic development have failed spectacularly in Southern Africa. Neither the developmental state nor neoliberal reform seems able to provide a solution to Africa's problems.

In Africa's Development Impasse, Stefan Andreasson analyses this failure and explores the potential for post-development alternatives. Examining the post-independence trajectories of Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa, the book shows three different examples of this failure to overcome a debilitating colonial legacy. Andreasson then argues that it is now time to resuscitate post-development theory's challenge to conventional development. In doing this, he claims, we face the enormous challenge of translating post-development into actual politics for a socially and politically sustainable future and using it as a dialogue about what the aims and aspirations of post-colonial societies might become.

This important fusion of theory with empirical case studies will be essential reading for students of development politics and Africa.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stefan Andreasson is Lecturer in Comparative Politics in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen's University Belfast. He received his PhD in political science from Arizona State University and was a Research Associate with the Institute for Global Dialogue in Johannesburg. His primary research interest is the political economy of development, including state-market relations, the history of capitalism in Southern Africa and theoretical debates on what constitutes development. His research has appeared in journals including, among others, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Third World Quarterly, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Political Studies, Democratization, and Business and Society.

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Africa's Development Impasse

Rethinking the Political Economy of Transformation

By Stefan Andreasson

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2010 Stefan Andreasson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84277-972-9

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii, 
Key abbreviations, ix, 
Introduction, 1, 
ONE | FROM DEVELOPMENT TO POST-DEVELOPMENT, 
1 Foundations for development in southern Africa, 15, 
2 The elusive developmental nexus, 36, 
3 Beyond development, 64, 
TWO | COMPARATIVE REGIONAL TRAJECTORIES, 
4 Botswana: paternalism and the developmental state, 93, 
5 Zimbabwe: the failing state revisited, 119, 
6 South Africa: normalization of uneven development, 154, 
Conclusion: comparative lessons from southern Africa, 191, 
Notes, 200, 
Bibliography, 221, 
Index, 249, 

CHAPTER 1

Foundations for development in southern Africa

Capitalism is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous – and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed. – John Maynard Keynes

Capitalism and development

As anticipated by Keynes, writing in the Yale Review in 1933 on the eve of Europe's descent into a second phase of the collective madness initiated by the First World War (during which time Lenin wrote his influential pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism), capitalism remains the central organizing principle of economic and often also social activity worldwide. Having weathered the storm of fascist and Stalinist challenges, global capitalism seemed to be shrugging off the persistence of poverty and inequality affecting a large majority of the world's population ever since. But the question raised by Keynes about capitalism not delivering the goods remains central to the most marginalized people of the global South, who see few benefits of global wealth creation accruing to them. Moreover, the currently unfolding global economic crisis that might become a new Great Depression has not produced a rejection of the market as a core element of contemporary societies, but merely a populist backlash against the neoliberal vision dominant in recent decades. Attempting to understand how poor people's aspirations for a better life clash with capitalist imperatives of accumulation and profit, this chapter examines how capitalism in southern Africa has shaped and in turn been shaped by the region's political transitions over the last several decades. It does so by considering general post-liberation trajectories in Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa in a historical context. The aim is to understand how capitalism in southern Africa impacts struggles to transform the region's social and economic relations in the pursuit of broad-based and sustained improvements in well-being.

The core assumption here is that an unreconstructed or blandly reformed kind of capitalism will merely entrench southern Africa's inequalities and unacceptable levels of underdevelopment, and that this is essentially the only kind of vision on offer by the region's political leaders – although what, precisely, is 'on offer' in Zimbabwe is presently not very clear at all. Despite heady liberation rhetoric, the region's post-liberation governments have, with the notable exception of Zimbabwe in recent years, remained largely accommodating to the demands by international and local capital for continuity in relations and the protection of business interests from excessively redistributive politics. Consequently, the renewed integration of a southern African region characterized by uneven development into the global world economy as currently constituted along neoliberal lines is likely to exacerbate its severe social and economic problems (Andreasson 2003). This is not simply a process of 'betrayal' on the part of post-liberation governments, since long-established and well-entrenched (economic) forces work against the many social and economic changes that those leading these liberation struggles thought, perhaps in earnest, that they would be able to bring about. Southern Africa therefore constitutes a particularly good case study for understanding both the destructive aspects, economically as well as socially and culturally, of global capitalism and the difficulties in organizing alternatives to the current system in which these problems originate.

Consequently, this chapter addresses the fundamental 'developmental dilemma' in southern Africa: how generations of uneven development, symptomatic of the region's historical evolution and political economy (the regional apartheid system in which the logic of a race-based and exploitative settler colonialism shaped regional developments far beyond the national borders of South Africa within which the actual policy of apartheid emerged), combined with the increasingly competitive global economy and its attendant strictures of neoliberal economic reform to produce converging pressures on states and peoples to accept the market (and haute finance) and its harsh demands as the sine qua non of any feasible socio-economic system. These pressures make it very difficult for the so-called 'targets' of development to formulate and implement independent strategies suited to their own particular needs. Such an environment does not encourage serious consideration of issues ranging from social harmony and belonging, what is in the African context usually encompassed by the concept of ubuntu, to sustainability and other aspects of acceptable living conditions not easily incorporated into orthodox economistic accounts of development. Continued social, political and economic marginalization of peoples, and of indigenous sources of knowledge and legitimacy, explains why political transitions to independence and procedural democracy have not produced socio-economic transformation.

Reform or revolution? For genuine socio-economic transformation to be possible, capitalism must itself be transformed and, in terms of it being a core organizing principle and signifier of life, eventually transcended. Any such development should be considered entirely open-ended in terms of how it may unfold and cannot be dependent on the Marxist understanding of how capitalism will (inevitably) collapse under the weight of its own inherent contradictions. Although a project seriously derailed by the late twentieth century, not least by the gross transgressions of those states and rulers claiming to lead the building of 'really existing socialism', struggles against exploitation remain on the agenda with the efforts of its proponents renewed in the twenty-first century and now given increasing impetus by the unfolding economic crisis originating in the central banks, financial centres and housing markets of the world's core economies. Such efforts against exploitation are imagined, retold and examined in a rich vein of recent scholarly work, ranging from Saul's (2005) writings on the 'next liberation struggle' in southern Africa and Moyo and Yeros's (2005) chronicling of resurgent movements to reclaim land across the global South, to de Angelis's (2007) anthropological-economic account of contemporary social struggles against global capital and Budgen et al.'s (2007) re-examination of the 'idea' of Lenin and the potential for revolutionary thought and action in the twenty-first century.

Despite continued marvelling at economic growth rates in countries like...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bloomsbury 3PL
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1842779729
• ISBN 13: 9781842779729
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 270
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland