how far we have come from a notion of progressive politics in africa when the idea of fighting for freedom did not mean freedom to become as rich as possible, never mind who suffers as a consequence.
moses and others are right to say we are here, we can't go back to older days with socialist ideals. but there i a huge difference between those like david brooks whose admiration for the rich and their ways is unstinted, and those like bob herbert who aligns himself with the poor and continues to fight for their rights.
now in dakar as in new york it isn't a question of simply the rich and the poor, it is the superrich, the obscenely rich, the don't-ever-dare-to-try-to-tax-
me rich, the this-country=belongs-to-me-i-own-it-and-everything-in-it, and the poor whose life is marked by struggle, unemployment, and the sight of a fortress's wall, always from the outside.
whose voice am i hearing? is it gbagbo, or limbaugh?"
-----Ken
Ken, the problem with your contention is that it has huge blind spots. You are always universalizing the problem, denying that Africa is a peculiar victim of the neoliberal order you discuss. I understand the Troskyist provenance of your contentions. You're advocating the need for a global solidarity of working, poor peoples who are united by their collective victimhood in the hands of a predatory capitalist order. Ken, the blind spot in your contention is that it is not only on the basis of class or economic victimhood that people organize or mobilize. Even class solidarity and victimhood have disparities and degrees that follow from race, culture, geographic location, resource gap, religion, etc. You want to discuss your all conquering neoliberal hegemony and its deterministic qualities outside of these parallel realities. I don't think that is helpful. Is your narrative not being clearly structured by an unconscious Euro-American liberal intellectual universalism? Are you going to look me in the face and say with a bold face that the poor peoples of Africa experience the global neoliberal order in the same way as those of Portugal, Ireland, Spain or the United States? Does poverty mean the same thing in these countries as it does in Africa or India or other non-Western spaces? Will you equate the opportunities afforded these European peoples by the neoliberal order with those afforded the peoples of Africa? Or argue that they are victims of the order to the same degree? Or that they've been impoverished to the same degree? Or that their personal economies have been empowered or disempowered to the same degree? Your advocacy of an ameliorative twenty first century Socialist International and your insistence on an undifferentiated, organic, coherent influence of global capital and your Manichean division of the world into the simplistic categories of rich and poor (without regard to degree, racial privilege, culture, religion, location etc) is, to put it rather bluntly, quite dated. This debate was conducted among black intellectuals, especially among black Marxists, as early as the Harlem renaissance and more vigorously in the 1950s and '60s. Many black Marxists eventually abandoned the universalism of doctrinaire Marxism and its inattention to the peculiar fates of colored, Third World peoples under capitalism. They insisted on acknowledging the role that color, history, location, etc plays to mitigate or exacerbate the fates of people under the global capitalist order. So, with all due respect, it seems to me that you may not be aware that this debate was conducted and fairly settled decades ago. To acknowledge that the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America started their journey from a position of peculiar disadvantage vis-a-vis the working, poor white peoples of Euro-America is to be faithful to historical realities. It is not the search for authentic parameters or an obsession with particularism. China and India (and to some extent Brazil) have caught on in spite of their peculiar handicap, not because of it.
Another blind spot in your analysis is the notion that seems to drive much of your contribution: that only capitalist expansion comes with prices, costs, and disparities. Come on Ken, after all that we know about the ugly underbelly of most socialist regimes and the exclusionary practices beneath the beautiful egalitarian rhetoric, can you still make the claim that socialism and other self-described egalitarian systems (especially in the Third World) were not as big a machine for creating inequalities, disparities in opportunities, and poverty as capitalism has been? Mine is not a mindless endorcement of trickle down. But can you compare the standard of living of Chinese and Indian peoples in the period before their neoliberal revival to that of today? No system is a perfect creator and (re)distributor of wealth, and the notion of total economic equality is a mirage. Economics and politics are tradeoffs for the creation of the greatest possible aggregate value for society. In every system there will be victims, losers, and collateral damage. This true of China, India, and Brazil, just as there has been victims and damages for centuries in the Euro-American bastions of capitalism. That is precisely why the emphasis should be on taming capitalism, restraining it, curbing its excesses, and giving it a human face. It can be done. It has been done to varying degrees in the Scandinavian countries, which have a good balance of capitalism and robust social welfare states that perennially repair or at least soothe the injuries and damages caused by capitalist wealth creation.
Lastly, the more I read your contribution, the more I come away thinking that you're projecting your American, white liberal economic anxieties that are informed by the class dynamics and wealth disparities of America unto Africa. It is problematic to do that. When I hear Americans talk about poverty sometimes and about infrastructural decay, my experiential references are alerted and I cannot but laugh at the elitist luxuries that underpin these narratives of "poverty," "inequality," and capitalist exploitation. Ditto when I listen to Americans discuss the global catastrophe that is climate change and how Africans need to be protected from it. They don't even stop to think that in much of Africa, climate change is a discourse of luxury and that pollution is not a choice but a byproduct of staying alive. Even the narrative of unemployment in America will bow to the unemployment realities of many African countries. It's no contest. So, I will counsel caution in the ways that we construct equivalences between the experiences of diverse peoples under the global capitalist order and the way that we constantly seek to universalize both the problem and the solution to it. The economic priorities of the African poor, workers, and the unemployed do not always mirror those of their counterparts in the West. Their demands are often more basic, more mundane, more modest. They would welcome a better, just economic order in place of the predatory neoliberal order of today. But they'll also appreciate it if their leaders were able to adroitly negotiate and navigate this system to provide jobs, livable incomes, and BASIC infrastructure for them.
And it's not about who is compassionate and who is not. We all care about the poor. But do we exclusively invest energy in insulating the poor from the excesses of neoliberalism and neglect using the rules of the neoliberal game and our resources to improve their lot? Would building a wedge between the poor and their neoliberal surrounding magically transform their economic fates? To the extent that we're saddled with an ever expanding neoliberal system, isn't it a mark of compassion to try and maneuver within it to solve some basic problems that poor people face and to turn constraints into strengths? The poor in India, Brazil, Singapore, China, and Russia, are slowly but steadily writing their own scripts in the story of their countries' economic ascent. We all hope for a fundamental global redress and a just global order. But until the Utopian alternative to global capitalism materializes, it is reasonable to urge African leaders and elites to take a cue from the examples we have provided and take advantage of the limited openings in the international systems to lift some of their people out of extreme poverty. It is being done, however imperfectly and at whatever cost, in India, China, Brazil, and Russia as we speak.
whose voice am i hearing? is it gbagbo, or limbaugh?"
-----Ken
Ken, the problem with your contention is that it has huge blind spots. You are always universalizing the problem, denying that Africa is a peculiar victim of the neoliberal order you discuss. I understand the Troskyist provenance of your contentions. You're advocating the need for a global solidarity of working, poor peoples who are united by their collective victimhood in the hands of a predatory capitalist order. Ken, the blind spot in your contention is that it is not only on the basis of class or economic victimhood that people organize or mobilize. Even class solidarity and victimhood have disparities and degrees that follow from race, culture, geographic location, resource gap, religion, etc. You want to discuss your all conquering neoliberal hegemony and its deterministic qualities outside of these parallel realities. I don't think that is helpful. Is your narrative not being clearly structured by an unconscious Euro-American liberal intellectual universalism? Are you going to look me in the face and say with a bold face that the poor peoples of Africa experience the global neoliberal order in the same way as those of Portugal, Ireland, Spain or the United States? Does poverty mean the same thing in these countries as it does in Africa or India or other non-Western spaces? Will you equate the opportunities afforded these European peoples by the neoliberal order with those afforded the peoples of Africa? Or argue that they are victims of the order to the same degree? Or that they've been impoverished to the same degree? Or that their personal economies have been empowered or disempowered to the same degree? Your advocacy of an ameliorative twenty first century Socialist International and your insistence on an undifferentiated, organic, coherent influence of global capital and your Manichean division of the world into the simplistic categories of rich and poor (without regard to degree, racial privilege, culture, religion, location etc) is, to put it rather bluntly, quite dated. This debate was conducted among black intellectuals, especially among black Marxists, as early as the Harlem renaissance and more vigorously in the 1950s and '60s. Many black Marxists eventually abandoned the universalism of doctrinaire Marxism and its inattention to the peculiar fates of colored, Third World peoples under capitalism. They insisted on acknowledging the role that color, history, location, etc plays to mitigate or exacerbate the fates of people under the global capitalist order. So, with all due respect, it seems to me that you may not be aware that this debate was conducted and fairly settled decades ago. To acknowledge that the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America started their journey from a position of peculiar disadvantage vis-a-vis the working, poor white peoples of Euro-America is to be faithful to historical realities. It is not the search for authentic parameters or an obsession with particularism. China and India (and to some extent Brazil) have caught on in spite of their peculiar handicap, not because of it.
Another blind spot in your analysis is the notion that seems to drive much of your contribution: that only capitalist expansion comes with prices, costs, and disparities. Come on Ken, after all that we know about the ugly underbelly of most socialist regimes and the exclusionary practices beneath the beautiful egalitarian rhetoric, can you still make the claim that socialism and other self-described egalitarian systems (especially in the Third World) were not as big a machine for creating inequalities, disparities in opportunities, and poverty as capitalism has been? Mine is not a mindless endorcement of trickle down. But can you compare the standard of living of Chinese and Indian peoples in the period before their neoliberal revival to that of today? No system is a perfect creator and (re)distributor of wealth, and the notion of total economic equality is a mirage. Economics and politics are tradeoffs for the creation of the greatest possible aggregate value for society. In every system there will be victims, losers, and collateral damage. This true of China, India, and Brazil, just as there has been victims and damages for centuries in the Euro-American bastions of capitalism. That is precisely why the emphasis should be on taming capitalism, restraining it, curbing its excesses, and giving it a human face. It can be done. It has been done to varying degrees in the Scandinavian countries, which have a good balance of capitalism and robust social welfare states that perennially repair or at least soothe the injuries and damages caused by capitalist wealth creation.
Lastly, the more I read your contribution, the more I come away thinking that you're projecting your American, white liberal economic anxieties that are informed by the class dynamics and wealth disparities of America unto Africa. It is problematic to do that. When I hear Americans talk about poverty sometimes and about infrastructural decay, my experiential references are alerted and I cannot but laugh at the elitist luxuries that underpin these narratives of "poverty," "inequality," and capitalist exploitation. Ditto when I listen to Americans discuss the global catastrophe that is climate change and how Africans need to be protected from it. They don't even stop to think that in much of Africa, climate change is a discourse of luxury and that pollution is not a choice but a byproduct of staying alive. Even the narrative of unemployment in America will bow to the unemployment realities of many African countries. It's no contest. So, I will counsel caution in the ways that we construct equivalences between the experiences of diverse peoples under the global capitalist order and the way that we constantly seek to universalize both the problem and the solution to it. The economic priorities of the African poor, workers, and the unemployed do not always mirror those of their counterparts in the West. Their demands are often more basic, more mundane, more modest. They would welcome a better, just economic order in place of the predatory neoliberal order of today. But they'll also appreciate it if their leaders were able to adroitly negotiate and navigate this system to provide jobs, livable incomes, and BASIC infrastructure for them.
And it's not about who is compassionate and who is not. We all care about the poor. But do we exclusively invest energy in insulating the poor from the excesses of neoliberalism and neglect using the rules of the neoliberal game and our resources to improve their lot? Would building a wedge between the poor and their neoliberal surrounding magically transform their economic fates? To the extent that we're saddled with an ever expanding neoliberal system, isn't it a mark of compassion to try and maneuver within it to solve some basic problems that poor people face and to turn constraints into strengths? The poor in India, Brazil, Singapore, China, and Russia, are slowly but steadily writing their own scripts in the story of their countries' economic ascent. We all hope for a fundamental global redress and a just global order. But until the Utopian alternative to global capitalism materializes, it is reasonable to urge African leaders and elites to take a cue from the examples we have provided and take advantage of the limited openings in the international systems to lift some of their people out of extreme poverty. It is being done, however imperfectly and at whatever cost, in India, China, Brazil, and Russia as we speak.
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 8:58 AM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
pius
outside of maybe north korea, what country's economy and social structure does not obey the logic introduced by neoliberal capitalism. to a lesser degree in one location, to a greater in another?
for instance, neoliberalism dictates free trade and enforces it by imf rules. so it is built around a worldwide system of financial exchanges that dictate conditions for lending and borrowing. those that provide the funding are not subject to tariff rules; that that borrow are subject to tariff rules. both operate within the same system, although the impact is felt differently. the borrowers run enormous risks, as we have seen with the rules for borrowing stifling the ability of local african farmers to compete. when malawi chose to forgo the loans in order to support their own crops, things improved.
maybe the loans worked better for ghana than for mali. again, there is room within the system, as everyone has been loudly and correctly arguing, to maneuver, so that some states do better than others. but all are maneuvering within the same systemic constraints.
consider iceland's vertiginous fall, along with ireland's, before you tell me that europe stands outside the system. all are vulnerable to its effects, but not all are positioned in the same way within the system. thus germany emerges relatively unscathed; but english university students are completely screwed.
finally, it dispirits me to see moses cite approvingly the ascension of new states like india or china within this system, as proof that it accommodates positive change. there is not a shred of concern over the vast numbers of people whose impoverished conditions are exploited by the constraints of neoliberal capitalism, as though there were no price to be paid in capitalism's workings, as though there were no labor to be exploited, as though there were no police actions in china to repress workers' rights, as though the advances for the very rich offset any abuses of the working class
how far we have come from a notion of progressive politics in africa when the idea of fighting for freedom did not mean freedom to become as rich as possible, never mind who suffers as a consequence.
moses and others are right to say we are here, we can't go back to older days with socialist ideals. but there i a huge difference between those like david brooks whose admiration for the rich and their ways is unstinted, and those like bob herbert who aligns himself with the poor and continues to fight for their rights.
now in dakar as in new york it isn't a question of simply the rich and the poor, it is the superrich, the obscenely rich, the don't-ever-dare-to-try-to-tax-me rich, the this-country=belongs-to-me-i-own-it-and-everything-in-it, and the poor whose life is marked by struggle, unemployment, and the sight of a fortress's wall, always from the outside.
whose voice am i hearing? is it gbagbo, or limbaugh?
ken
On 12/20/10 10:42 PM, Pius Adesanmi wrote:
"i stated, as clearly as i could, that africa does not stand in a different position vis-a-vis neoliberal capitalism or globalization than any other country" - Ken
Ken, Ken, Ken:
You mean "any other continent?" If our enemies rush for your jugular because of this dangerous slip up, remember to tell them that I denied ever knowing you three times before the cock crowed.
Pius
--- On Tue, 21/12/10, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
From: kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why is Africa in such a mess?
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Tuesday, 21 December, 2010, 2:46
chikwendu
i have two problems with your argument
first, you, and others, have constructed a straw man, or refuse to hear or accept the argument i advanced.
i stated, as clearly as i could, that africa does not stand in a different position vis-a-vis neoliberal capitalism or globalization than any other country; that the effects of today's capitalism is to generate enormous disparities in wealth, to generate a reliance on minimal state social services in the faith that corporate development will take care of social needs, and that the increasing size of the empoverished populations, in countries i listed from every continent, follow that pattern. i also acknowledge that there are disparities in power, which contribute to the weaker or poorer states and populations suffering more. but there is no more agency as such for any state, no matter how wealthy, to escape these forces. i don't know how many examples i need to give: i offered russia at one point. how about ireland and spain, portugal, the miracle states of the eu. now the catastrophe states, with enormous problems of unemployment and poverty, debt, anger in the streets, you name it.
secondly, pace pius's picture, it isn't a question of "academic arguments," but simply intellectual arguments. how much anti-intellectualism do we have to bear in these arguments. first it is foucault, misspelled to boot, then the academy or western thinkers. it is incredible that we can't have an intelligent discussion on questions of economic growth or political structures without seeking to establish some formula for authenticity as a basis for thought.
let me see...i don't like the fact that freud came from austria, as did hitler, so the unconscious must be a nazi invention
or should we ask where newton came from before we board a plane?
is the academy in which gravity's law in taught somehow less capable of understanding the forces involved than the engineer who builds the plane or the captain who flies it?? did the engineer validate f=ma? discover f=ma?
if this path of reasoning bothers you, i suggest you ignore it since it is emerging from my computer in east lansing, no doubt a very remote location from the hard realities of life.
so my question is, what is the use of thought? where is thought's home validated?
"the academy" is, in fact, yet another straw man in this argument, deflecting us from the issues at hand which are oversimplified into notions of agency that are never really given meaningful definition.
ken
On 12/20/10 3:05 PM, Chikwendu Ukaegbu wrote:
> Academic arguments that continue to paint the African as slave to structure do a disservice to the continent because the commanding heights of the global economy will not and cannot philanthropically plant national development in African countries.
-- kenneth w. harrow
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
east lansing, mi 48824-1036
ph. 517 803 8839
harrow@msu.edu
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-- kenneth w. harrow distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu--
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---Mohandas Gandhi
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