Dialogue Series #1: Spectres of Crises, Rays of Hope: Revolution, Liberation and Development Today

Prof. Prabhat Patnaik on “Pandemic shock, economic crises and socialist alternatives:

CONCEPT NOTE & CALL FOR PAPERS

SMAIAS-ASN SUMMER SCHOOL 2021

18-22 January, Harare, Zimbabwe

Alternatives for the South: Liberation, Development and Ecology

The 2021 Summer School of The Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies (SMAIAS) and the Agrarian South Network (ASN) will be devoted to the alternatives for the South in the current systemic crisis, with an interest in advancing perspectives on liberation, development, and ecology. This Summer School will occur at a time of momentous changes triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which marks a turning point in the crisis. It will also occur on the occasion of the 10^th anniversary of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. For both these reasons, the theme will be of a general nature with a view to provide for collective reflection on the diverse issues that have been of concern.

We remain in the long transition from colonial rule to the sovereignty regime which in the twentieth century held out the promise of national liberation, development, and peaceful relations among nations. Over half a century later, the promise has not been fulfilled. The large majority of the world’s population, located in the peripheries of the world economy, faces a fragile and perilous future. On the one hand, the oligopolistic nature of the world economy has been hostile to sustained economic and social development in the countries and regions of the South. On the other, the liberation movements that took the reins of the state harbored weaknesses which hampered the search and defense of alternatives. The political systems that evolved in this transition have thus been compromised, while the ‘developmentalist’ exceptions which from time to time have been projected as economic models are, in fact, so few and particular that they prove the rule that the transition has been resistant to fundamental change.

This historic transition has been aggravated by recurrent turbulence in the world economy especially from the mid-1960s onwards, when a sustained crisis of profitability struck at the centres of the world economy. The crisis did not spare anyone in the South, despite its diversity. A number of countries in the South had embarked on a path of industrialization earlier, while many others gained independence in the 1960s or even later, precisely when the crisis struck. Many of the economic and social gains were sooner or later undermined. Stagflation and the collapse of commodity prices except for oil led to debt crisis in the 1970s, the result of which was a tectonic retreat in North-South relations which gave way to a general neoliberal policy turn. Developing countries were obliged to abandon development planning and open up to oligopolistic markets. Since then, the overall world growth rate has been cut by half, while a powerful financial sector has emerged at the expense of productive investments across the South and even in the North. The burgeoning of a fictitious economy has sustained a wealth effect, while propagating waves of speculation on currencies, commodities and assets, resulting in bubbles, panic, and instability. The financial collapse of 2008 did not put an end to this logic: monetary authorities injected trillions of dollars in the world economy to restore the wealth effect. It took another decade of turbulence and stagnation for the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically to lay bare the obsolescence of this economic order, for both North and South.  

The history of this long transition and the catastrophic rage of the current crisis give us ample reason to conclude that a more fundamental change of direction is needed in North-South relations. Such a change requires an assessment of the evolving structural characteristics of societies in the South, which have essentially been transformed into mere ‘surplus’ populations in the world economy. This includes indigenous peoples, other traditional communities, and peasantries that continue to lose their land and means of livelihood to enter the labour market in the lowest rung. The expansion of informal work, limited access to decent wages, and deepening vulnerability have led to perpetual social and political crisis. This is manifested in the full-blown crisis of social reproduction, which has gained genocidal prospects in the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as in the revival of far-right forces which threaten to negate all the gains of past struggles and use the crisis to escalate supremacist policies. The burden of this comprehensive crisis is borne by women and other historically oppressed social layers determined by race, caste, ethnicity, or religion. The promise of national sovereignty has been undermined by this deepening vulnerability and stratification of peripheral social formations, while national governments themselves promote centrifugal forces in the interest of domestic and foreign oligarchies.

It is further notable that most of the societies in the South retain a foothold in the countryside and in agricultural activities while straddling urban life. This reality plays out at macro and household levels, and is as much a response to agrarian crisis under the advance of corporate agriculture, as of urban employment which is similarly squeezed or reduced to informality by evolving global value systems. Under such conditions, the family farm or indigenous/traditional territory and the urban residential plot become joint sources of social protection, food security, and petty accumulation, and are often the main locus of new contestations, of diverse political hues. Peripheral social formations in the twenty-first century are trapped in a rural-urban flux that is entirely different from anything witnessed in history. Even in the cases where the balance overall has shifted to urban life – as in Latin America, compared to Africa or Asia – the trap of informality and insecurity remains. This trend has important implications for the growing competition among different sections of working people, which is also reflected in anti-migrant, anti-refugee, anti-indigene, and communal politics. It has further implications for urban- and rural-based social movements that struggle to gain national perspective and alliances. It is important that the challenge of resolving these contradictions is squarely faced by contemporary movements and that the liberation perspective is reclaimed against the far-right and fascistic forces that usurp popular aspirations for national sovereignty. For we have again entered a phase in which a series of nationalisms have become incompatible with liberation and international solidarity, to represent elite and exclusivist interests, to shut down democratic spaces and corrode republican institutions – precisely the political gains of national liberation!

A fundamental change of direction also requires an assessment of the evolving ecological parameters of liberation and development. Current patterns of global production and consumption under oligopolistic control are inherently unable to rise to the challenges of global warming, whose effects will be most devastating in the peripheries of the world economy and amongst the poor. Climate-change mitigation and adaptation is an issue of power, privilege, and inequality, whose costs must be distributed in accordance with historical carbon emissions and current developmental needs and capacities. This means that mitigation and adaptation must bring stability to the workforce of the South across the rural-urban nexus, in decent employment and secure land tenure, and at higher and more equitable levels of consumption and reproduction. If development in the twentieth century meant engineering a rural exodus, in the twenty-first century this can no longer be the case. Development planning must encounter a new rural-urban equilibrium, which means undertaking land and tenure reforms, giving definitive priority to peasant agriculture, and investing in both rural and urban industries. In so doing, national and regional sovereignty must be exercised over sources of energy and commons, against the speculative and consumerist vortex of the oligopolies, at the same time as low-carbon and energy-efficient methods of production are developed and introduced. An ecological perspective must remain focused on liberation and development, and not succumb to fundamentalist or nativist claims or corporate philanthropies which also stake claim on ecology. A consideration of ecological alternatives must necessarily be embedded in a discussion of new forms of property – a new mix of collective, cooperativist, and state forms of property – a task that is urgent for the organizing strategies of all social movements.

Liberation, development, and ecology thus understood are internationalist in character and thrive on solidarity among workers and peoples. They are incompatible with the elite internationalism of the current structure of the world economy, and most obviously with the political trends across North and South which resort to authoritarianism, sexism, racism, casteism, and communalism. At the same time, we cannot fail to recognize that the social basis for the revival of fascistic forces in both North and South has been cultivated in the long transition out of colonialism and the neoliberal response to the subsequent crisis. A ‘new deal’ for the twenty-first century must not lose sight of this historic transition. As alliances to defend basic civil and political rights are built, national sovereignty against the oligopolies must be strengthened as a building-block to a new development vision that is shared across North and South and is able to rise to the challenges of our times.

The 2021 Summer School will focus generally on the issues raised above and more specifically on the themes below:

1. COVID-19 and Food Systems
2. Land, food and agrarian questions
3. Climate change, mitigation and adaptation
4. Public health and social protection systems
5. Global value systems and labour processes
6. Gender, labour and social reproduction
7. Race, caste, ethnicity and indigeneity: challenges to the national question
8. Land and labour questions in the urban areas
9. Migration and rural-urban relations
10. Alternative paths to industrialization
11. Redistributive rights on and use of nature
12. Cooperativism and planning for development alternatives
13. Social movements and international solidarity

The SMAIAS/ASN Summer School values diversity and promotes dialogue between academia and civil society. It brings together young and veteran scholars and civil society activists from all continents, especially from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and provides for collective reflection and learning. Interested scholars and activists are invited to submit paper proposals (abstracts) of up to 300 words, no later than 31^st July 2020. Proposals should be submitted to Dr. Walter Chambati at walter@aiastrust.org, with copy to Prof. Paris Yeros at parisyeros@gmail.com.The selection of proposals will be published by the end of August at http://aiastrust.org/ (the results will not be communicated individually). Authors of selected proposals will be requested to develop their full papers by 31^st October, and will be invited to participate at the 2020 Summer School in Harare. Fundraising is in progress and travel support for selected abstracts is not guaranteed. Selected participants are encouraged to seek own institutional funding. Some of the articles may eventually be selected for publication in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, subject to normal peer review process.

The Summer School is normally held in the third week of January. Should adjustments be required for the 2021 session due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these will be communicated via our social media, @AIAS_trust and @Agrarian_South, and websites, http://aiastrust.org/ and http://www.agrariansouth.org/news/.

The Samir Amin Young Scholars’ Prize in Political Economy of Development has been instituted by the Editorial Board of Agrarian South in honour of Amin’s exemplary intellectual courage and path-breaking contribution to the study of the capitalist world economy and the challenges faced especially by the peoples of the South. The prize was announced in 2019 and an invitation for previously unpublished articles was publicised. Eligibility for the prize was limited to Masters or Doctoral students, or those who had received a Doctoral degree within the last five years. Nonetheless, the receipt of adequate articles was not forthcoming, which behoved us to change strategy and adopt the common practice of awarding the prize to eligible authors whose articles have already obtained publication in the journal. We thus resolved to consider articles published in Agrarian South over the last two years by authors who fit the eligibility criteria – and to establish this as the definitive selection procedure. From now on, the Prize will be awarded every two years to an author whose article has been published in our journal and is either a postgraduate student or received a Doctoral degree within five years of publication of the article.

 For the first Samir Amin Prize, the Editorial Board considered six eligible articles. We are pleased to announce that Editorial Board has awarded the Prize to Manish Kumar, a Doctoral student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, for his article entitled ‘India’s Rice Export: What is in it for Farmers’, published in the special issue on Global Agricultural Values Systems: Trends and Alternatives (Vol. 8, Nos. 1–2, 2019). Kumar’s article provides a conceptually refined and empirically rigorous study of the economic impacts of rice exports on farmers and other actors involved in paddy value systems in India. He notes the importance of India’s rice exports, which command the highest share in the country’s total agricultural exports, and paddy cultivation, which involves almost half of India’s agricultural households. Kumar analyses the production trends of basmati and non-basmati rice since trade liberalization and demonstrates the differentiation of each crop among classes of producers, as well as the vulnerability of excessive specialization manifest in the reduction of buffer stocks and exposure to volatile world prices. Kumar demonstrates in detail the mechanisms by which small producers get squeezed in these values systems, providing strong evidence of the perverse effects of exposure of small producers to the influence of world market forces. Our congratulations to Manish Kumar!