Review: Emmanuel Oritsejafor and Allan Cooper, ‘Africa and the Global System of Capital Accumulation’
Applying Marx’s ‘Primitive Accumulation’ to Africa’s Political Economies
Review of Emmanuel Oritsejafor and Allan Cooper’s (eds.) Africa and the Global System of Capital Accumulation (Routledge, 2021), 294 pages.
Abstract
The African continent, so rich in various resources, remains mired in poverty. Scholars across various disciplines have sought to explain the African predicament by suggesting factors that include institutional failure, wars, ethno-religious strife, corruption, mismanagement, bad leadership and ill-conceived political ideologies. This book takes a different view and argues that Africa’s poverty is largely the consequence of global capitalism’s exploitation of the continent’s resources. The discussion is composed of contributions by various scholars each focusing on selected African economies with the main argument framed around Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation. But is this thesis new and how far does the concept of primitive accumulation explain contemporary African socio-economic predicament?
Reviewed by Gabriel O. Apata
A story was told of a Ghanaian cocoa farmer who was so poor that he could not afford to buy his son a bar of chocolate. The cruel irony is that the cocoa seed from which the chocolate bar was produced came from a farm like his. This is because Ghana is the world’s second largest producer of cocoa after Ivory Coast, and while the annual global sales of chocolate are worth $107 billion, Ghana earns from this a mere $2 billion and Ivory Coast, $3.5 billion respectively. The baulk of the revenue is shared among several companies like Mars Wrigleys, the Ferrero Group, Mondēlez, Lindt and Sprüngli, Hershey, Nestlé and others. Subsequently, the profit from chocolate sales alone dwarfs the entire annual revenue of both Ghana and Ivory Coast. Furthermore, cocoa farming is labour-intensive and the farmer’s son, like thousands of children his age, are forced to work the farms and so do not attend school and are in turn denied the education that would lift them out of poverty and into prosperity. This story not only reveals the injustice of a system that vastly rewards the exploiter at the expense of the exploited but also the vicious circle of poverty, poor healthcare and educational attainment as well as infrastructural decline.
That then is the story of contemporary African political economy that this new book Africa and the Global System of Accumulation, edited by Emmanuel Oritsejafor and Allan Cooper, tells. Many authorities have sought to explain the poverty of African nations by arguing that the problem is inherently autochthonous (Bayart, 1993), where corruption is a significant factor. Also, Landes in his The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1995) claims that the wealth and poverty of nations must do, amongst other factors, with a Weberian culture of the religious ethic (Protestantism) of hard work, rational calculation as well as environmental factors. However, in 13 chapters, each written by different scholars, this book argues that Africa is poor not because ‘there is something endemic to Africa’, but because there is something endemic about the way that the rest of the world treats Africa. It frames its main argument around Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation.
Primitive accumulation is a concept that Marx applies to the initial phase of the capitalist development (original sin) that signalled the break between the feudal system and modern capitalism. In the Grundrisse, Marx describes it as ‘original accumulation’ and later as ‘primitive accumulation’ in Capital. The features of primitive accumulation include: (a) the original state of the capitalist development; (b) the separation of the people from their land that turns them into labourers; (c) the violence of enforcement of extraction – slave labour, and (d) the accumulation of capital from production.
By way of analysis, each contributor focuses on a major African country and its main economic resource – so cocoa in Ghana and Côte d’Ivore (Okosun, chapter 2); rubber and iron ore in Liberia (Kieh, chapter 3); forced labour in Sao Tome and Principe (Ewoh, chapter 5); diamonds in Namibia, (Cooper, chapter 7). External vested interests extract these products, refine and then resell them to these countries at premium prices that many cannot afford. We mentioned Ghana earlier, but this model is pervasive across Africa. Take Nigeria for example, which is Africa’s largest producer of crude oil, yet it imports refined oil that fuels its economy. Also, the iron ore that is used to make mobile phones returns to Congo as mobiles phones that only the rich can afford, just as much of coffee extracted from Kenya is consumed not by Kenyans but outsiders, mainly in the West. However, the cost of refining these raw materials in the West cannot account for the vast profits that accrue to the Western producer.
Nwanasali in chapter 4 applies this idea to explain the ‘Congo-paradox’ or what has become known as the ‘resource curse’ in which a resource rich state experiences levels of poverty that are incommensurate with its latent wealth. According to the author, the DRC economic problems ‘lie in the top-down economic paradigm that had been dominant since the times of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State in the 19th century’ (72).
The entry by Tim Zajontz and Ian Taylor – Chapter 11, Capitalism and Africa’s (Infra)structural Dependency, argues that colonial infrastructural development was a façade since it was constructed as a way of entrenching colonial subjugation. The paradox is that ‘the dynamics of the incurred debts to foreign creditors no doubt will mean that a substantial portion of any capital generated by the new improved roads and ports will, in the first instance, have to go to servicing this very same debt’ (196). What the West gives with one hand it takes back with the other in manifold that leaves the African economy in net loss, because as the authors further argue, much of the value of these projects accrue to the foreign companies with ‘limited supply chains to local links.’ Thus, the outcome is that ‘the infrastructure-aid nexus has ensured that financial capital flows back to its origins’ (197).
But capitalism’s model of exploitation is not merely trans- or international, it is also intra-national. Within the United States for instance are levels of poverty not dissimilar to those in the developing nations, while the wealth of certain individuals in poor countries is comparable to the wealth of some in rich countries. In chapter 12, Oritsejafor discusses the emergence of the Nigerian billionaire club with focus on Africa’s wealthiest man Aliko Dangote. But how do Africa’s billionaires make their money? One explanation is that African elites have imbibed the Western bourgeoisie model that capitalism underpins and have themselves become exploiters of their own people. For Oritsejafor, ‘the attainment of political independence does not seem to have transformed the state because the elites that replaced the colonial administrators have failed to take steps to move the country forward politically and economically’ (213). The author also speaks of ‘uneven capitalism’, but is capitalism meant to be even?
But it is not all doom and gloom since there are successes to report. Chapter 10 by Ojakorotu presents the case of Angola, which has transformed itself from a largely poor war-torn country into a relatively prosperous one. The author claims that ‘The Portuguese, US and the Chinese have been major partners with Angola in terms of infrastructural development. Angola, working with world powers, is achieving its 2025 strategy goal in industrialization which has been made possible through its low electricity tariff’ (183). But are these not the same groups of stakeholders that the book claims are responsible for primitive accumulation?
Wetengere on Tanzania, chapter 13, takes up the same theme of African success in which he identifies four factors responsible for the development of the Tanzanian economy: industrialisation, international trade, construction of infrastructure, technology and innovation. He argues that the liberalisation of Tanzanian economy has been the catalyst for growth in that country which has averaged 7 percent year on year in the past decade. Tanzania too has produced a few wealthy individuals and ‘these business tycoons have built multibillion-dollar industries in diverse sectors…’ and ‘their investments in various sectors have made the country a strategic investment opportunity for global billionaires’ (244). According to Wetengere, the emergence of wealthy tycoons in Tanzania is a positive testament to economic growth in that country, but this is a thesis that contradicts the preceding chapter in which Oritsejefor discusses the negative effect of the emergence of Nigeria’s billionaires as examples of primitive accumulation. In the overall context of the book the question is why have Angola and Tanzania been able to benefit from international trade in ways that Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and others failed to do? This question strikes right at the heart of the book’s contention and the uneven outcomes of each country’s economic growth shows that the application of primitive accumulation as a source or cause of poverty in Africa remains problematic.
But having identified the problem, what is the solution? Here the authors make a distinction between ‘ethical and exploitative capitalism’. ‘Ethical capitalism,’ they write, ‘provides opportunity and parity, but exploitative capitalism is hinged on manipulating labor to extract massive profits at the expense of laborers, their families and communities’ (45). Is there really such a thing as ‘ethical capitalism’? Is the logic of capitalism not predicated on exploitation for profit and is profit not precisely what creates accumulation, which in turn is the point of the book? And what does ‘parity’ mean and how is it to be achieved within the context of ethical capitalism? Is parity a kind of socialism? One proposal is for African producers to set prices that they believe is fair, but the authors concede that such a move would be countered in other ways by Western companies.
The introduction of the language of morals into this discussion is understandable but muddies the water. Capitalism and ethics are strange bedfellows. The appeal to the ethical side of the Western corporate system is akin to asking the butcher to stop selling meat. Neo-liberal approaches to ethical questions that revolve around fairness, justice, equality and so on remain problematic within a system defined by voracious exploitation as the very model upon which Western businesses run. There is so much at stake to expect the model to change.
The main problem with this book is that its central thesis is not exactly new. As far back as the turn of the twentieth century, scholars like John Hobson, Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxembourg, Vladimir Lenin, all the way to Walter Rodney, Frederick Jameson, John Harvey and many more have advanced similar Marxist primitive accumulation line of argument. The question is whether this nineteenth century concept of primitive accumulation that Marx applied to an earlier phase of the capitalist system is relevant to twenty-first century economic system in Africa. David Harvey (2020) for instance has updated this concept by turning it into ‘accumulation by dispossession’, even though he believes that many of the main features of Marx’s primitive accumulation are still ‘with us’, including the violence of expropriation of capital. In agreeing with Harvey and with Perelman (2000) the authors argue that primitive accumulation is not a phase but an integral part of the capitalist system. Some of the features of primitive accumulation may still be with us, but there is something pre-modern about the language of primitivity that conjures the early stages of a historical development. Yet, does it matter what the concept is called, whether primitive accumulation, capital accumulation or accumulation by dispossession when the impact appears to be the same? it does matter because this is not merely the case of a rose by any other name will smell just as sweet but rather a matter of conceptual analysis that opens the debate in new ways. Given the sophistication of the global capitalism and its new forms of imperialism one might ask whether the idea of the primality of accumulation remains integral to an advanced economic system rather than to its early stages of development that Marx identified? We must concede that the unspeakable brutal violence of Leopold’s reign in Belgian Congo and its horrors, a veritable case of primitive accumulation, are no longer with us because that regime has given way to ‘soft power’ in which rules, regulations and laws govern that constitutes a new phase of the capitalist system. No doubt these rules and regulations disguise as well as legitimise an unfair and punishing system in which labourers appear to freely give consent, when in fact consent is not truly freely given. However, the illusoriness of free dealing, which speaks to acquiescence by compulsion, marks a shift from the naked aggression and violence of the original phase.
In that case it is debatable whether the main features of primitive accumulation, namely dispossession of land and the violence of enforcement are still integral to contemporary capitalism in the way they once were in its early stages. If they are, then capitalism appears to be a fixed rather than a developing system, but if they are not, then Marx is right that primitive accumulation is a phase in the historical development of capitalism, and within this evolutionary process are different phases, in which case its modern form must differ from its early stages in some respects, even if some of its core aspects remain. In any case, these are contentious issues that the book does not adequately address.
Still, the book has its strengths one of which is that it convincingly argues that much of the problems that bedevil African economies are caused by the exploitative practices of external stakeholders. It succeeds therefore, in its refutation of the orthodoxy that the African predicament is to be explained by a peculiar African essentialism that is wrapped around primitive backwardness. Instead of presenting loose generalisations, it focuses precisely and analytically on individual economies and shows how exploitation creates poverty across Africa. However, the book does not pretend to offer a complete story of contemporary African political economy, but merely a strand of what is a complex history since colonialism. For instance, there is the ‘Africa rising’ thesis (Jerven, 2022) that takes a statistical view of growth in Africa and concludes that the history of African economies is more complex but that overall, it shows that economic growth has occurred over the past century with the occasional dips.
References
Bayart, Jean-Francois (1993) The State in Africa: Politics of the Belly. London, New York: Longman.
Harvey, David (2020) Anti-Capitalist Chronicles. London: Pluto Press
Jerven, Morten, (2022) The Wealth and Poverty of African States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Landes, David (1995) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are Rich and Some are Poor. New York: Little Brown
Perelman, Michael (2000) The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Boston MA: Beacon Press
Gabriel O. Apata is a research scholar and writer whose works cut across the humanities and social sciences. His interests include Philosophy, Sociology, Aesthetics, Religion, Post-colonial Studies, African history and politics and Diaspora Studies.
