John S. Saul

The crisis in South Africa : class defense, class revolution

The strikes by African workers first erupting in Durban in 1972 and spreading throughout the country ever since, the outbursts sparked by students in Soweto and elsewhere from 1976 to the present, the actions undertaken by the African National Congresss guerrillas on the ground (most dramatically evidenced) by the Sasolburg bombings of 1980): these and other developments have been clear signs that the tide has at last begun to turn against South Africas apartheid system. In the 1960s, after the regimes fierce and effective crackdown on the burgeoning opposition movement of the preceding two decades, the forces of liberation were in a state of disarray, the South African people momentarily stunned. In North America, too, there was a danger that opposition to apartheid would be forced into the cul-de-sac of sterile moralizing about an indefensible but apparently unyielding situation. This need no longer be a temptation, and for that reason political work around South African issues takes on a new kind of urgency. Ronald Reagan, Alexander Haig, and their various minions will seek, no doubt, to persuade us that most of the actions mentioned above reflect the working of some sinister Soviet plot.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Sub-Saharan Africa in Global Capitalism

If we define sub-Saharan Africa as excluding not only north Africa but also bracket off, for the moment, the continents southern cone, dominated by South Africa, the key fact about the rest—the greater part of the continent—is thrown sharply into relief: after 80 years of colonial rule and almost four decades of independence, in most of it there is some capital but not a lot of capitalism. The predominant social relations are still not capitalist, nor is the prevailing logic of production. Africa south of the Sahara exists in a capitalist world, which marks and constrains the lives of its inhabitants at every turn, but is not of it. This is the fundamental truth from which any honest analysis must begin. This is what explains why sub-Saharan Africa, with some 650 million people, over 10 percent of the worlds population, has just 3 percent of its trade and only 1 percent of its Gross Domestic Product; and why income per head—averaging 460 dollars in 1994—has steadily fallen, relative to the industrialized world, and is now less than a fiftieth of what it is in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. It also explains why sub-Saharan Africas economies have responded worse than others to the market-oriented development policies urged on it by the World Bank and other outside agencies since the 1980s. Now the aid flow is declining, while population growth is still racing towards a barely imaginable 1 to 1.2 billion in the year 2020.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

‘For fear of being condemned as old fashioned’: liberal democracy vs. popular democracy in sub‐saharan Africa

This article is a theoretical companion to an essay on the ‘transition to democracy’, which we published in our previous issue, ROAPE 72. Here John Saul contrasts two approaches to the understanding of democracy and democratisation, both of which see democratic transition as part of a larger political and economic process, which for one limits the possible scope and sustainability of democratisation, and for the other both threatens but also enhances its scope and strength. The latter approach, older and currently less fashionable, sees democracy and democratisation (and our analysis of them) as rooted in processes of imperialism, class struggle and state‐society relations. This ‘political economy’ of democratisation’ approach, characteristic of the work of Issa Shivji and of John Saul, is contrasted with a larger and more pessimistic body of work, which Saul labels as the ‘political science of democratisation’. Thus Diamond, Huntington, Przeworski, Di Palma and others, while stressing the necessity of democratic institutions and values, at the same time argue that only a highly attenuated version of these is feasible under current (African) conditions, and that ‘if reform is to be adopted without provoking a crisis’ (Diamond), then it must be reform consistent with the demands of capital and the neo‐liberalism of the IFIs: ‘thin’ democracy.

The unsteady state: Uganda, Obote and General Amin

It would be incorrect to see in the replacement of the colonial state by the post‐colonial state merely a distinction without a difference. The colonial state provided imperialism with a quite direct and unmediated instrument for control in the interests of ‘accumulation on a world, scale’ within the colonial social formation. The post‐colonial state, while prone toplay a similar role tothat played by its predecessor, is something more of an unpredictable quantity in this regard. Unpredictable, because of the greater scope for expression given to indigenous elements who now find in the ‘independent’ state a much more apt target for their activities and a potential instrument for the advancement of their own interests and concerns. In theory, such unpredictability might hold the threat of challenges to the structures of continuing imperial domination arising either from the left (socialism) or from the right (a burgeoning and competitive locally‐based capitalism), with indigenous classes attempting to use ...

Liberation without democracy? the Swapo crisis of 1976

This article examines the internal convulsions that racked the Namibian liberation movement, Swapo, in Zambian exile in the mid‐1970s. This was a crisis that saw the Zambian army link up with the Swapo leadership to arrest, as ‘dissidents’, well over a thousand of the movements cadres. Often misleadingly labelled ‘the Shipanga crisis’ (because of the alleged central role in the events of then senior Swapo leader Andreas Shipanga) the crisis actually represented something far more important than a mere power struggle within the leadership. For, crucially, it turned on the demands for democratic accountability within the movement articulated by that generation of young Namibians who flooded into exile, and into ‘external Swapo’, from 1974 on — in the wake of South Africas brutal repression of the youth‐led upsurge that had defined politics inside Namibia in the early 1970s. This article, drawing on a wide range of recent interviews with key participants in the Zambian events and on hitherto unpublished do...

African peasants and revolution

Are peasants like a ‘sack of potatoes’, divided and demoralised, or can they become a revolutionary force? While most of the worlds oppressed are peasants and their discontent generates the ‘steam of revolution’, a ‘piston box’ is needed to transform it into power. This may be provided either by forms of extraordinary and direct oppression or by organisation and political leadership. In practice it will almost always require both. John Saul examines the range of peasantries in Africa and, using the contrasting experiences of Mozambique and Tanzania, discusses the methods and circumstances which may transform peasantries into the mass base of revolutions.

Liberal Democracy vs. Popular Democracy in Southern Africa

This article accompanies an essay reviewing recent literature on ‘transitions to democracy’, which we publish in our next issue. There Saul contrasts two approaches to the understanding of democratisation. Both see transition as part of a larger political and economic process; for one this limits the possible scope and sustainability of democratisation, while for the other it threatens but also enhances its scope and strength. The latter approach, older and currently less fashionable, sees democratisation (and its analysis) as rooted in processes of imperialism, class struggle and state‐society relations. This ‘political economy of democratisation’ approach, characteristic of the work of Shivji and Saul, contrasts with a larger, more pessimistic body of work, which Saul labels the ‘political science of democratisation’. While sometimes used in suggestive ways, it can narrow debate disastrously when detached from any self‐conscious mooring in the critical traditions of political economy. This literature stresses the necessity of democratic institutions and values, but argues that only highly attenuated versions are currently feasible: ‘if reform is to be adopted without provoking a crisis’, then it must be reform consistent with the demands of capital and the neo‐liberalism of the IFIs. This companion article analyses two highly significant cases of transition in southern Africa; each seems to epitomise the ‘political science’ approach, yet to contain the longer term possibility of ‘popular democracy’. Thus in South Africa the left accepted the necessity of a carefully negotiated transition to obviate the risk of civil war. However, the ANC, to retain the ‘confidence’ of local and external capital and of foreign governments, has had to demobilise its (non‐electoral) popular support, and to abandon a social redistributive strategy in favour of a one dominated by neo‐liberal ‘market solutions’. What keeps a progressive agenda alive in these conditions are the pressures from trade unions, civics, womens organisations etc, where there are growing signs, at least at grassroots level, of resistance to the ANCs new project. In Mozambique, the transition has been less euphoric, more perhaps a matter of transition from authoritarian rule and from war than to a democratic regime. As in South Africa, the transition would seem to disempower popular forces ‐ but outside the electoral arena, there are instances of resistance and struggle within civil society, which may carry with them the longer‐term potential for the growth of popular democracy.

Mozambique -- not then but now

I first knew Mozambique through close contact in Dar es Salaam with Frelimo in the early and difficult years – the 1960s and the first-half of 1970s – of its armed liberation struggle. At that time Mozambique was seeking both to unite itself and to find political and military purchase against an intransigent and arrogant Portuguese colonialism. And Frelimo did indeed manage, by 1975, to lead the country to victory. Along the way, Frelimo succeeded in liberating zones in Mozambique adjacent to its rear bases in Tanzania and Zambia where it built a new social infrastructure of agricultural coops, schools and health services. Equally important, it forged an impressive corps of politically conscious and disciplined leadership cadres (see Cabaço 2001, 2009). Then, in the very first years of Mozambique’s independence, Frelimo also launched a bold experiment in socialist development. The intention: to implement a society-wide programme that would liberate the country’s economic potential while also meeting the needs of the vast majority of Mozambique’s population. The result? As Norrie MacQueen would firmly state of former ‘Portuguese Africa’, the initial plans of Portugal’s ‘guerrilla enemies’ did offer ‘a clear alternative to the cynical manipulation of ethnicity and the neo-colonial complaisance of the kleptocratic elites who increasingly defined African governance in the 1970s and 1980s’. In sum:

Race, class, gender and voice: four terrains of liberation

This article focuses on the complex conceptual and practical terrain offered by the concept of ‘liberation’, both analytically and practically. It argues that liberation is best considered to be a multi-dimensional process, evoking an approach to its study (and to its practice) that would take seriously its resonance, for purposes of the analysis of Africa, as implicating struggle on the levels of race, class, gender, and (democratic) voice. The article then seeks, with special reference to South Africa, to suggest the costs that have accompanied a collapsing of the meaning of the term ‘liberation’ into a mere metaphor for national emancipation from colonial/quasi-colonial and racially defined rule. Comfortable as the narrowing of its definition in such a way may be to the domestic elites who have succeeded their former colonial rulers into possession of formal power, it leaves great scope for merely rationalising the imposition of a kind of recolonisation upon the territories concerned and ensuring the continued subordination in class, gender, and political terms of the vast mass of the ostensibly ‘liberated’ population. In sum, in both political and theoretical terms the concept ‘liberation’ must be reclaimed so as to permit both more precise scientific investigation and more militant and engaged practical work.

Two fronts of anti-apartheid struggle: South Africa and Canada

Having been, for most of my adult life, a student of southern African, including South African, affairs, I was pleased but also intrigued to receive an invitation from Ingrid Fiske and the South African Association of Canadian Studies to come to South Africa to give several talks and seminars in this country. This included a public lecture on the topic presented in this essay - an essay which explores both the collaboration between Canada and South Africa in support of apartheid, as well as the much more savoury links established between (many) Canadians and (most) South Africans in resistance to that system. Let us first explore the former of these two possible emphases.