by ISSA SHIVJI
“We can certainly say that history has once again put back the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist socialist agenda on the world stage.”
Africa in the Global South: The Basics
The North-South divide is statistically well documented. I need not repeat it. It is necessary, however, to refresh our knowledge of Africa’s geo-political space in the Global South. The total population of the Global South is roughly 6.2 billion of which Africa is only one-fifth, or 1.2 billion. The most populous country in Africa, Nigeria, has less population than that of Brazil. South Africa, one of the partners in BRICS, has only a quarter of the population of Brazil. Just in population alone, leaving aside the size of the economy, Africa as a whole does not reach the size of India or China, the so-called “locomotives of the South,” to use Manmohan Singh’s phraseology.[1] But Africa in the Global South, or in the world for that matter, does not speak as Africa, as a pan-Africa. On the train of the Global South pulled by the locomotives of the South like China, India and Brazil, individual African countries would be more like cabins, not even wagons. And this, in my view, is true not only in terms of geographical space but also political and economic space. However, as I would argue, the Global South is not a political construct, or at least, not a political construct of the people of the South.
The second point I would like to make is that the Global South exists and makes sense only in relation to the Global North. The relation between the two has determined the movement of history of the world over the last five centuries. What constitutes the global whole today? The Global North and the Global South are linked together in the global capitalist system. What is the motive force of this system? What is it that makes the system tick? A detour into the political economy of global capitalism is, therefore, necessary for us to answer these questions and to understand better and more systematically the trajectories of Pan-Africanism and African nationalism and its neo-liberal progeny NEPAD on the one hand, and Bandung and its progeny BRICS, on the other. In the next section, I suggest in a skeleton, and in a somewhat abstract and oversimplified manner, the heart of the global capitalist system, which is the process of worldwide accumulation, or what Samir Amin in his pioneer work called. “Accumulation on a World Scale.”[2]
The Global Capitalist System
Capitalism from its birth has been a global system. It continues to be so. The socialist breaches in the system in terms of historical time have been episodic. In Samir Amin’s model, the global capitalist system divides into the Center, roughly the Global North, and the Periphery, roughly the Global South. The heart of the capitalist system is accumulation. “Accumulate, accumulate!” Marx said, is the “Moses and the prophets”.[3] The process of accumulation is worldwide. It is characterized by two tendencies. I call it capitalistic accumulation, CA, and primitive accumulation or PA. Marx’s economic model was based on a closed system of capitalist accumulation. One of the fundamental assumptions of his model of production and reproduction of capital is equivalent exchange of commodities, including labor power. Appropriation of surplus value by capital created in the very process of production is called exploitation. Exploitation is not stealing or cheating at the level of sale of commodities. In real life there may be stealing and cheating but it is not inherent in the system. Exploitation is appropriation of surplus value that is created in the process of production.
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