Thiago Lima, Atos Dias, Igor Palma, Igor Palma  & Lucas Amorim

As in historical times, the catastrophe that unfolds with the outbreak of a pandemic such as the COVID-19 has a great propensity of triggering   isolationism, protectionism and unilateralism while at the same time threatening the stability of the International System. It is with this in mind that Director-Generals of the largest United Nations (UN) agencies namely the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Health Organization (WHO) – and the World Trade Organization (WTO) issued a joint statement, raising concerns about the international food security situation.

In remarks contained in a joint statement issued on the March 31st, entitled “Mitigating Impacts of COVID-19 on Food Trade and Markets” they caution that the pandemic may exacerbate already existing challenges in the global food supply chain if governments globally begin putting in place export barriers on food crops as an attempt to preserve food supplies and to avert looming domestic food shortages. Resultantly, this would in their view cause distortions in food prices making food access almost impossible for the majority of the people in countries which are generally food importers.  Potentially, such protectionist measures will also negatively impact the formation of national food stocks for emergency situations making the purchase of food for humanitarian aid   by the World Food Program (WFP) difficult.

Urgency for international cooperation

From an International Relations perspective, we are reunited with an old acquaintance: uncertainty at an anarchic international system. According to the   Directors the “uncertainty about food availability can spark a wave of export restrictions, creating a shortage on the global market” and  “it is at times like this that more, not less, international cooperation becomes vital.” Issues like minimizing uncertainties and ensuring that governments keep their economies’ role in the global agri-food value chain operational are quite critical from the Director’s point of view.

As observed   during the 2007/2008 food crisis, several states restricted food exports as a strategy to avert national shortages. In practice, this contributed to shortages in other countries, especially the poorest. Unlike that crisis, however, there is currently no production shortage in sight. The greatest risk relates to breaking the logistics chain   for the most basic foods and animal feeds including grains such as wheat, corn, soybeans and rice. This will occur, mainly, because of the restrictions   placed by different countries on the movement of people and the flow of commercial activities, as well as by the drop in demand resulting from the brutal slowdown in economic activities.

Thus, abroad international cooperation effort is critical by different countries  to identify   stages of  production and logistics chains in the agri-food sector’s to be classified  as essential services. This would eventually exempt these from movement restrictions that aim to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus. As the leaders of the UN agencies state: “In the midst of the COVID-19 lockdowns, every effort must be made to ensure that trade flows as freely as possible, specially to avoid food shortage (…) Now is the time to show solidarity (…)”.Likewise, governments and banks should guarantee resources so that demand does not collapse and logistical bottlenecks can be widened at this critical moment.

The international community’s inaction in the face of the crisis

The appeal for greater cooperation by the leaders of the International Organizations comes up in the face a huge barrier: the United States’ anti-multilateral policy of the Trump administration. Some international cooperation theories argue that liberal arrangements tend to emerge and be kept when the most powerful actors assume disproportionate costs in maintaining the system. Yet, this is a role Washington does not intend to play today.

In the most recent crises such as the Ebola outbreak of 2014 and the financial crisis in 2008, the USA assumed a leading role, a position that it is not playing under the current crisis. What has been witnessed in the past few days has been an expression to withdraw from key institutions such as the World Health Organization.  Neither has Beijing been able, or willing, to defend the liberal international order at this time. The European Union has also not called this burden on itself. Previously, the EU countries, at most, have normally sent aid to ex-colonies – and such aid has not been received without criticism, or distrust by some analysts. According to Yuval Noah Harari , the international community seems to be collectively inept in the face of the current threat, and, using his own words, “there seem to be no adults in the room”. One of the symptoms of this reality is the absence of emergency meetings among global leaders to build an action plan capable of combating the pandemic efficiently.

In this context, an element cannot be lost sight of. The great powers are, almost all of them, relatively food self-sufficient at the current moment. In addition, they also have financial and logistical resources (merchant marine, for example) to purchase food in open markets or to take it by force using primitive accumulation. Therefore, they have much lower food vulnerability when compared to developing countries, especially the poorest ones, if the international agri-food interdependence is severely shaken.

The vulnerability of developing countries

What about developing countries? Since the 1990s, dependence on food imports has been growing in these countries. This has been fuelled by the neoliberal agenda which has been encouraging these governments to produce for exports thereby discouraging food production for domestic consumption. According to the advice from the World Bank and the IMF food grains should be imported from international markets, at a cheaper price. In addition, there was an incentive for countries to dismantle their national food stockpile systems, both to monetize the sale of products and to save on the cost of maintaining equipment and food. Thus, they would pay part of their debts and avoid future indebtedness. One effect of this was that, in the 2007/2008 crisis, this worsened world hunger. Since then, it seems that there has been no significant change in this model.

In Brazil, for example, the Bolsonaro administration has started dismantling CONAB, the National Food Supply Company, a state-owned entity that manages national food stocks. Furthermore, Brazil became a net importer of beans and returned to the FAO Hunger Map.

Therefore, if International Organizations continue to press for the maintenance of the functioning of the international agri-food chains as a strategy of guaranteeing  the global food security in a context of a very serious economic crisis – which seems correct in this immediate conjuncture – it would  even be more important for these bodies to come together and defend, in the short and medium term,  agrarian reforms, reducing dependence on food imports, creating food stocks to cope with eventual shortages, as well as socioeconomic programs that strengthen the resilience of  rural populations. It is worth remembering that, as a rule, the hungriest people in the world are those who live in rural areas. Therefore, if more local people consume food from their vicinal rural areas, the more they will contribute to mitigating hunger in their countries.

It is still too early to talk about the collapse of the international agri-food system. In several parts of the world, however, evidence is beginning to emerge from agricultural producers who throw their production away, or feed animals with fruits, because there are no markets. The question now is whether economic globalization can still represent a card up the sleeve for the heads of state. On the other hand, it would be very useful for a deglobalization project to be mapped and executed with broad international cooperation, aiming to create food sovereignty wherever possible.

About the Authors

Thiago Lima is a professor in the Department of International Relations and faculty member of the Postgraduate Program in Public Management and International Cooperation at the Federal University of Paraíba, João Pessoa, Brazil.

Atos Dias is a PhD student of Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil. He graduated with an MA in Public Management and International Cooperation and a BA in International Relations from the Federal University of Paraíba.

Igor Palma is an MA student of Political Science and International Relations at the Federal University of Paraíba and graduated with a BA in International Relations from the same institution.

Lucas Amorim is an MA student of Political Science and International Relations at the Federal University of Paraíba. He graduated with a BA in International Relations from the Federal University of Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

All authors are members of FomeRI – Research Group on Hunger and International Relations at UFPB

Tribute to Samir Amin: The Return of Fascism and the Challenge of Delinking

This special issue is a tribute to Samir Amin, who left us in August 2018. Amin was a dear friend, inspiring teacher, and comrade who was on the frontlines of the most decisive political and ideological battles of our times. Born in Egypt in 1931, he came of age in the aftermath of the Second World War to become a leading light in the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles of the ensuing decades. He was an organic intellectual with a unique capacity to maintain links to liberation and revolutionary movements all across the world, while exercising his powerful acumen to enrich Marx’s thought and even rewrite fundamental aspects of historical materialism. Indeed, there are few scholars in his league, and we are honoured to have received his support in the making of the Agrarian South Network.

Amin was on the International Advisory Board of this journal since its launch in 2012, and contributed several articles over the years. In fact, our Editorial Board, in association with The Sam Moyo African Institute of Agrarian Studies, had decided in 2018 to invite Amin to proffer the Second Annual Sam Moyo Memorial Lecture in January 2019 in Harare, but alas the invitation could not be sent. Amin did, however, pay homage to our brother Sam previously by contributing an article to the special issue dedicated to Sam’s memory in 2016 (republished in our recent book, Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo, Tulika Books, 2020). Samir and Sam had a strong and solidary relationship stretching back to the 1970s, when Sam visited Dakar as a postgraduate student, and they collaborated, together with others on this Board, on the initiatives that Amin spearheaded over the years, including the Council for the Development of Social Science Research (CODESRIA), the Third World Forum (TWF), and the World Forum for Alternatives (WFA).

Amin left us with an autobiography, A Life Looking Forward: Memoirs of an Independent Marxist (Zed Books, 2006), and other retrospectives on his intellectual trajectory, such as his Re-reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary (Monthly Review Press, 1994). A second volume of his memoirs, The Long Revolution of the Global South: Toward a New Anti-imperialist International, was published posthumously by Monthly Review (2019). We will not review here his vast contribution, but only take inspiration from his works to advance the analysis of the present. One of Amin’s greatest insights was that Marx’s expectations on the development of capitalism – as manifest in Marx’s famous remark, ‘de te fabula narratur’, in the first preface to Capital, by which he warned late developers of an impending capitalist trajectory in the image of the leading capitalist country – could not be vindicated, given that capitalism was imperialist in nature and thrived on global polarization. There was no chance of a generalized ‘catching up’ for the Third World. This diagnosis was reinforced by the alternative experience of the Chinese Revolution which led Amin to conclude that ‘delinking’ from the worldwide law of value was the only plausible path to development in the peripheries of the world economy. We bring attention to this insight and exhort our readers to keep it in their sights as we look ahead in these troubled times.

We must also take stock of the long attrition wrought by neoliberalism on the Third World, a policy framework which has persisted for four decades now and which has undermined national sovereignty and stoked fascistic tendencies in many of our societies. The bourgeoning of labour reserves to unprecedented proportions, the scarcity and instability of wages and peasant incomes, and the perpetual crisis of social reproduction have all combined with the decay of the liberation promise to created fertile ground for the spread of backward-looking movements. Religious and communal fundamentalisms have spread all across Africa, Asia and Latin America during this long period. Amin was a most astute critic of Islamic fundamentalism in particular, and his insights apply to extremist movements that prey on followers of Christianity and Hinduism as well. Amin insisted that such fascistic forces in the peripheries are essentially subservient to imperialism and inimical to delinking. We require a fuller grasp of such reactionary dynamics, which explains the main concern in this tribute.

This special issue brings together close associates of the journal who were touched and inspired by Amin, some of whom collaborated with him over many years. Beginning with Issa Shivji, his article discusses the crisis of the liberal democratic form and its manifestation in the rise of the far right and the popular resistance to it. These developments have recently found their concentrated expression in Latin America which has witnessed swaying of the pendulum from dictatorship to radical populism through the episodic detour into liberal democracy and back to endemic popular revolts with historic participation of thousands and millions of working people, indigenous communities, and sections of the middle classes, in particular students. Shivji briefly surveys the Latin American scene because of the important lessons that it has to teach the international left, but also because it opens up a possible trajectory of political developments in Africa.

Prabhat Patnaik argues that although fascist, semi-fascist, proto-fascist, or neo-fascist movements exist in almost every modern society as fringe phenomena, they must be distinguished as movements from the general right-wing parties and movements of different hues. The latter, Patnaik argues, would no doubt appear to shade into the former; nonetheless, the sui generis character of the former must be underscored. The article explores the characteristics specific to these movements and poses the following questions: under what conditions do these fringe movements come to occupy centre-stage? What is the class-basis for their coming to power? How do we explain the rise of these movements in contemporary times? And how can we visualize, in the current conjuncture, the further journey of these movements in situations where they happen to have actually come to power?

Amiya Bagchi provides a brief overview of Samir Amin’s intellectual trajectory to understand his development as a fiercely committed Marxist who throughout his life was dedicated to changing the world. Bagchi notes that all the disappointments and defeats of the cause that Amin espoused only sharpened his determination. The article traces Amin’s experience in economic planning in West Africa and some of the key concepts that he elaborated in the interest of social change, including eurocentrism, the law of worldwide value, and maldevelopment. Bagchi then turns to Amin’s concern with political Islam, which he was saw as an accessory to imperialism.

Ng’wanza Kamata revisits Samir Amin’s influence on the debates among students at the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1980s. This was a generation of students, Kamata argues, that joined the University in its final years of glory as a site for critical thinking and a culture of free-flow of ideas. There were many contradictions during that time on campus, which ranged from demands for increasing funding for higher education to pressures to review the syllabus on various subjects, especially in social sciences, in order to accommodate and create more space for bourgeois ideas. Amin’s innovative ideas regarding modes of production, the capitalist world economy, dependency and delinking inspired students and has left a legacy which needs to be taken forward.

Paris Yeros and Praveen Jha celebrate Amin’s contribution by advancing the analysis of the long crisis of monopoly capitalism. This article takes issue with reductionist and ahistorical theories of crisis to grasp the terminal systemic crisis, which has played out in the long transition from colonialism to neo-colonial rule. The authors note that Kwame Nkrumah had foretold of the destructive nature of this transition, and had astutely seen in it ‘the last stage of imperialism’. Late neo-colonialism represents, they argue, the stalemate of this transition; its elements include, on the one hand, the collapse of the Bandung movement and the Soviet system, and on the other, the permanent crisis of monopoly capitalism. Today the concentration and centralization of capital persists hand-in-hand with the escalation of primitive accumulation and war, while national sovereignty continues to fray in the peripheries, where a series of countries, it is argued, succumb to a new semi-colonial situation while others fall prey to fascism.

This tribute to Amin has one further and more lasting commitment to his legacy, which is the inauguration of the Samir Amin Young Scholars’ Prize in Political Economy of Development. The prize 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 circulated. 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 Young Scholars’ 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!

In closing, we must also add, on a sad note, that besides the loss of Samir Amin, our journal has lost two more members of the International Advisory Board over the last two years. They include Theotonio dos Santos (1936–2018) and Reginaldo de Moraes (1950–2019), both Brazilian, great thinkers, inspiring teachers, and big-hearted human beings. Theotonio was best known for his contribution to Dependency Theory and his outstanding role in advancing Latin American social sciences. He was Professor Emeritus at Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro and UNESCO Chair in Global Economy and Sustainable Development. Reginaldo was a versatile thinker, a philosopher by training, who interrogated the inner workings of neoliberalism over many years. He was a devoted teacher who taught generations of students in political science and international relations. He was Professor at the State University of Campinas in São Paulo. Agrarian South intends to honour their contributions in due course.

Editors

Late Neo-colonialism: Monopoly Capitalism in Permanent Crisis[1]

 

By Paris Yeros and Praveen Jha

Forthcoming in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2020, Special Issue, ‘Tribute to Samir Amin: The Return of Fascism and the Challenge of Delinking’.

Abstract: This article celebrates the lifelong contribution of Samir Amin by advancing the analysis of the long crisis of monopoly capitalism. It takes issue with reductionist and ahistorical theories of crisis to grasp the nature of the present as a terminal systemic crisis which has played out in the long transition from colonialism to neo-colonial rule. Kwame Nkrumah had foretold of the destructive nature of this transition for both North and South, and had astutely seen in it ‘the last stage of imperialism’. Late neo-colonialism represents the stalemate of this transition. Its elements include, on the one hand, the collapse of the Bandung movement and the Soviet system, and on the other, the permanent crisis of monopoly capitalism. The neoliberal assault on the peoples of the South in particular has not brought resolution to the profitability crisis. The concentration of capital persists today hand-in-hand with the escalation of primitive accumulation and war, while national sovereignty continues to fray in the peripheries, where a series of countries succumb to a new semi-colonial situation while others fall prey to fascism. The crisis of monopoly capitalism will only be overcome when genuine solidarity takes root among North and South and the socialist transition takes hold – as Amin so fervently defended.

Introduction

Samir Amin was a giant of our age, a scholar of rare intellect and courage who left an indelible mark on the social sciences. He has to his name no less than the rewriting of key aspects of historical materialism and a lifelong contribution to the building of Pan-Africanist, South-South, and global solidarities. Amin epitomized the intellectual emergence of the South on the tide of the liberation movements that rolled across the Third World to bring to an end five hundred years of European colonial domination. He made singular contributions to the new civilizational project forged at Bandung, making it his mission to update and renovate the Marxist critique of political economy so as to illuminate the historical significance of the present. Amin became a source of inspiration to generations of students and activists, through whom he lives on. His contribution will continue to illuminate our struggles ahead.

In what follows, we take our cue from Amin’s final writings on democracy and fascism (Amin, 2011, 2014) and others on the world economy to advance our analysis of the long crisis of monopoly capitalism. The historical transition that brought colonialism to an end is the stage on which this long act has played out. The transition gave way to a new sovereignty regime, full of promise for the peoples of the South. Yet, the limitations and contradiction of this transition were clear from the beginning. Kwame Nkrumah (1965) most famously denounced it as a neo-colonial situation, ever more dangerous for North and South, foretelling its course as ‘the last stage of imperialism’. Today, national sovereignty continues to degenerate under a protracted neoliberal order, the escalation of imperialist aggression, and the rise of fascism. We may speak of a late phase of neocolonialism, and affirm, with Nkrumah, that from this, monopoly capitalism will not rise to see another day; it will remain in permanent crisis until a socialist transition takes hold. Capitalism, as Amin (2003) observed, is an obsolescent system.

The permanent crisis of monopoly capitalism

If we take Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall ipsis litteris, we could easily reach the conclusion that the current crisis of capitalism is essentially like any other. In fact, a spate of literature has fallen into this trap, focusing solely on the trajectory of the rate of profit and attributing its decline over several decades essentially to the growing organic composition of capital (Shaikh, 2010; Carchedi & Roberts, 2013; Kalogerakos, 2013; Roberts, 2016). This line of argument is appended with a critique of the ‘financialization hypothesis’ (Mavroudeas, 2018), seen as a mystification of the real contradictions of capitalism located in the productive sphere.

What do the estimates by the authors above tell us of the rate of profit? Overall, there has been a long-term decline of the rate of profit in the productive sectors of the leading capitalist state. This decline began in earnest in 1965 and persisted all through the 1970s. Then, a partial recovery occurred from 1982 to 1997, at roughly two-thirds the 1965 level. This was followed by another drop after 1997 and then another recovery in 2006, back up to 1997 levels. But this was then followed by a sharp fall in the course of the 2008 crisis, which took the profit rate down to roughly one-third of the 1965 level. Thereafter, another weak recovery ensued. This, indeed, makes for a long crisis – and on this we can agree. It has been a long systemic crisis punctuated by crashes, recessions, and even depressions in some countries, particularly in the peripheries and semi-peripheries, including inside Europe. Indeed, it is no longer odd to encounter conditions comparable to those obtaining among advanced countries after 1929, with dramatic losses in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of up to 30 percent and unemployment levels surpassing 20 percent.

Yet, this is not a crisis essentially like any other, nor is its primary contradiction reducible to that between capital and labour. Some historical and analytical perspective on the long transition remains in order, for a fuller explanation of what is at stake. We are witnessing not just a re-run of capitalist crisis, but the dramatic denouement of a five-hundred-year-old social system. We cannot agree with Roberts (2016: 6) that ‘there is no permanent slump in capitalism that cannot be eventually overcome by capital itself’. This can only become clearer if we illuminate the mechanisms of systemic crisis by building on the original formulation of Marx’s law. For the exclusive focus on technological change and the construal of crisis exclusively to the organic composition of capital obscures the operation of imperialism and its modes of rule, reducing imperialism to a mere add-on – when considered at all. Even in Marx’s time, the connection between technology and profits was perched on a colonial relationship of primitive accumulation; this was observed, described, and denounced, but never properly theorized (Williams, 1944; Rodney, 1973; Amin, 1976; Patnaik & Patnaik, 2016; U. Patnaik, 2020). We would be remiss if we persisted with this flaw.

Marx’s context predated significant transformations, including the rise of monopoly capitalism and organized labour, and the rise and fall of a new imperialist partition of the peripheries. One may wish to conclude that in those prior conditions of ‘free competition’ there was a more immediate relationship between technology and profits, but this would still fall short of perspective, given the sheer drain of wealth that colonialism entailed (Patnaik & Patnaik, 2016). The rise of monopoly capitalism also recast the technological dynamic, by shifting the main focus of competition from sale prices to production costs. In this shift, technology itself gained a new role in accumulation (Baran & Sweezy, 1966), as did production and consumption in the peripheries which continued to evolve under the weight of the monopolies (Patnaik & Patnaik, 2016). Colonialism and monopoly capitalism remain the proverbial ‘elephants in the room’, recognition of which is essential to understanding the permanent crisis of the capitalist system and the nature of its contradictions.

This crisis matured in the unprecedented conditions of systemic rivalry after the Second World War, when monopoly capitalism confronted both Soviet planning and an emergent Third World (Moyo & Yeros, 2011). The colonial basis of monopoly profits was collapsing, just as the Soviet bloc was digging in (Amin, 2003). Monopoly competition was also intensifying across the Triad (United States, Europe, and Japan), just as organized labour was entering a new period of unrest (for some of the contours of these contradictions, see Brenner, 1998, 2003; Arrighi, 1994, 2007). Tectonic plates were shifting. To make matters worse for monopoly competition, controls were in place on capital movements and financial markets. If at existing levels of productivity and profits it was impossible both to absorb production at home and curtail the welfare state, it was also impossible to escalate primitive accumulation abroad or vent off the surplus among peasant populations. Indeed, much of the Third World was seizing control over its own natural resources and agricultures at this time, in pursuit of higher levels of production and reproduction via import-substitution policies. Whether one wishes to see this conjuncture as a new overproduction crisis or an historic trend of underconsumption, from the point of view of capital it was a profitability crisis with no historical equivalent in its contradictions.

In fact, the first response was neither to embark on a massive destruction of asset values at home or massive credit expansion to stimulate consumption, but to escalate imperialist aggression against the Third World. War spending increased to contain the emerging peripheries, and Vietnam in particular. The unintended consequence was a dollar glut in the world economy and an inflationary spiral which destabilized the whole of the monetary system. As the monopolies continued to push for market opening, blows were dealt by President De Gaulle, who demanded gold for France’s dollar holdings, and Third World oil exporters who hiked prices overnight. Together they succeeded in unhinging the prevailing agreements of the monetary and financial system. The measures taken thereafter to recuperate profits, with some success in 1982–1997, also reveal much more about the mechanisms of monopoly capitalism than the ‘free competition’ assumptions invoked. In response to the stagflation of the 1970s, a Herculean effort was undertaken on all fronts, in an epic exercise encapsulated in the term ‘neoliberal globalization’. It is worth briefly recalling its key elements.

First, the Bretton Woods agreements on capital controls and monetary relations were dismantled, with the exception that the US dollar retained its position as the key currency with a new relationship to gold. The dismantling of the agreements was always a requirement of the monopolies in their search for room to maneuver, as by the US state as the situation evolved. The end of Bretton Woods thus served three immediate objectives. It freed US corporation in their outward expansion by enhancing their sources and volumes of finance in the bourgeoning capital markets. It also freed the US dollar from its prior obligations to other currencies, transforming it into a mere claim on US debt, impossible to redeem yet still extraordinary in its capacity both to impose discipline on other currencies and absorb the world’s savings. Pace Patnaik and Pantaik (2016: 130–137), we actually can speak of a re-run of the colonial drain of wealth on neo-colonial terms, if we consider the extent to which both the world’s reserves, surplus capital, and debts are channeled either through US Treasury bills or Wall Street institutions to cover US trade and budget deficits. Thus, the end of Bretton Woods also positioned Wall Street to recycle global capital flows far above all other financial centres and consolidated the capacity of the leading capitalist state to finance its deficits and it monopolies with hardly any constraints.

Second, capital exports by the monopolies surged amongst advanced economies, but also – and more remarkably given historical precedents – to the peripheries, where today the bulk of industrial labour takes place – especially in two countries, China and India. Third, rapid technological leaps were realized via the so-called third and fourth industrial revolutions, which boosted overall the organic composition of capital, such as via robotics and artificial intelligence, while also creating the logistical and communication capabilities to extend and deepen global values systems across industry and agriculture (Jha & Yeros, 2019). Fourth, this has been accompanied by the acceleration of mergers and acquisitions across all sectors – industry, agriculture, mining, banking, insurance, communications, and other services – with monopolies gaining ground upstream and downstream of production to establish what Samir Amin called ‘generalized monopolies’ (Amin, 2019).

Fifth, the financialization of profits has taken hold in an unprecedented manner. Industrial firms have become dependent on financial profits, even against industrial profits, and debt has ballooned among corporations, governments, and households, with the United States at the forefront and with the active support of monetary authorities. This policy has reached the point today of obtaining negative interest rates across the Eurozone, Japan, and the United States (in real terms) – to no good effect. We can, indeed, speak of the establishment of an enduring, systemic financialization logic, or monopoly-finance capital (Foster, 2010), whose great feat has been the perpetuation of a ‘wealth effect’ by the systematic inflation of asset prices, against falling profits in production. This has placed monopoly capitalism on life-support and explains its perseverance, if not also the magnitude of its foretold collapse.

Financialization also explains the sixth, and even more cricual, element of concern here: the escalation of primitive accumulation, most devastatingly in the peripheries. This is, after all, where the value of the world’s key currencies is anchored and which constantly threatens to squeeze profits, puncture bubbles, and bring the wealth effect to an end (Patnaik and Patnaik, 2016). Primitive accumulation takes a number of forms: from the more visible land, water, energy, and forest grabs (Moyo, Jha & Yeros, 2019); to the privatization of the commons, public services, and genetic material; to the deepening of super-exploration by the offloading of the costs of social reproduction unto the expanding labour reserves themselves, and unto women and the most oppressed social layers in particular (Moyo & Yeros, 2005; Tsikata, 2016; Prasad, 2016; Naidu & Ossome, 2016; Jha, Moyo & Yeros, 2017). This is a system which depends more and more on labour that is exchanged on non-equivalent terms, especially unpaid labour expended on social reproduction. This is a massive subsidy to monopoly profits: if the organic composition of capital is growing and profit rates are shrinking, the appropriation of labour by other means must also grow to keep profits from dropping further.

If we interrogate more closely the structure of peripheral social formations today we will see ongoing tendencies towards proletarianization, but also the growth of ‘own account’ labour in the informal sectors, together with a scramble for social reproduction, which can only proceed by the intensification of gender, race, caste, and communal hierarchies. We will encounter a workforce with an unstable, periodic, and episodic relation to wage labour, in constant flux, with no chance of obtaining waged stability, or making a clean break from agriculture (see, especially, Jha, Moyo & Yeros, 2017). This is what we have sought to conceptualize as a semi-proletarianised social formation (Moyo & Yeros, 2005; Editorial, 2012; Moyo, Jha & Yeros, 2013), drawing on classic insights on transitions to capitalism (Lenin, 1964[1899]; Mao, 2004a[1926]; Fanon, 1968[1961]).

The seventh and final element that needs to be highlighted in this epic exercise to recuperate monopoly profits is the escalation of war-spending and war-making, even after the end of the Cold War. It is, in itself, a contradictory exercise, creating huge stockpiles of equipment with no productive purpose, at the same time as it propels technological innovation and bolsters geo-strategic security for the monopolies in all corners of the earth. The United States spends far more on ‘defence’ than all other major military powers combined. In 2018, the US defence budget reached USD 645 billion, against the sum total of USD 575 billion among China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, India, United Kingdom, France, Japan, and Germany (IISS, 2019).

Needless to say, the neoliberal assault of the last half-century has not resolved the long systemic crisis. Monopoly capitalism subsists on life-support by a combination of high-tech production and primitive accumulation, facilitated by financialization and war. The nature of the contradictions can be further elaborated by looking at the evolving modes of political domination, or modes of rule, under monopoly capitalism.

Neo-colonialism – early and late

It is important to acknowledge at the outset that, even in the centres of the system, liberal democracy with universal suffrage does not have a long history. This mode of rule entered gradually into force after the First World War with the expansion of women’s suffrage, and reached its apex after the Second World War by the consolidation of the welfare state across the North and the end of Jim Crow in the United States. Liberal democracy is now in deep crisis, as fascism claws its way back to state bureaucracies and parliaments. If liberal democracy marked an historic victory for the working class, it has been limited in its capacity to serve monopoly capitalism. Indeed, its contradiction with fascism is non-antagonistic, given that monopoly capital has only superficial commitment to liberal democracy. Under liberal democracy, monopoly capital does oppose fascism but typically via the theory of the ‘two extremes’, whereby it defends liberal democracy as the solution not only to fascism but also to the radical left. Yet, it is only the radical left that presents a challenge to monopoly capitalism. Hence the tolerance that monopoly capital and its supporting classes tend to show toward fascism when push comes to shove, and hence their typical swing to far-right positions, especially on immigration and war, as they compete with fascism for votes.

However, liberal democracy is hardly the main mode of rule under monopoly capitalism. Monopoly capitalism has relied for its survival not on liberal democracy, but on colonial modes of rule, including colonies of exploitation, colonies of settlement, and semi-colonies – these being the three basic modes of colonial domination. Until the 1960s, liberal democracy at the centre – at its historic apex – had a very direct relationship with colonialism. Recall that the North Atlantic treaty (NATO, in 1949) and the European integration project (the Paris and Rome treaties of 1952 and 1957), which backed up economic reconstruction and liberal democracy in its social democratic phase, were launched on the basis of a colonial regime still in force. The conditions for a general transition to neo-colonialism had matured, nonetheless, such that it was feasible – and even preferable, under pressure – to retreat from direct control of the peripheries and rely on the economic mechanisms of the monopolies to preserve access to tropical agricultures, natural resources, and cheap labour. It is thus that neo-colonialism evolved as a political sub-system to the social democracies at the centre (Nkrumah, 1965).

We are in the position today to make a distinction between early and late neo-colonialism, so as to clarify the extended duration of this last stage of imperialism. In early neo-colonialism, independence was still a concession extracted from monopoly capitalism by the anti-colonial movements that waged political and armed struggle for over several decades. As these struggles persisted and entered a phase of radicalization in the Cold War, a strategic repositioning by monopoly capitalism became ever more necessary. The survival of the welfare state required a continuous drain of surplus to compensate the working class, while the retreat from direct colonial control would free the metropoles of responsibility for the consequences of this drain. In that strategic shift, social democracy, with few notable exceptions, gave systematic support to reactionary forces, settlers, and dictatorships against radical nationalisms in the peripheries, or indeed any nationalism that would not bow its head. In effect, US and Western European trade-unionisms played ‘good-cop, bad-cop’ with the liberation aspirations of the peoples of the Third World (Yeros, 2001).

Yet, in early neo-colonialism, a number of peripheral states – beyond the revolutionary states of China, Vietnam, and Cuba – were sufficiently radicalized to retain substantial autonomy and sustain an anti-imperialist posture in the spirit of Bandung, without succumbing immediately to the dictates of neo-colonial rule. And, in fact, nationalism in the liberated peripheries generally still showed a commitment to social and economic development, even if it remained deficient in democratic content, and even if when it gravitated to the Western camp. Its legitimacy stemmed from promises made and partly delivered to the large peasant populations, and from the restoration of national and civilizational dignity. Whether radical or moderate, the nationalist momentum was sustained for a considerable amount of time in some countries, especially those that had gained independence earlier. But the tables turned again in the 1970s, as world economic stagnation and debt crisis struck.

There was also a significant number of juridically independent peripheral states that did not make the transition to neo-colonialism at this time, did not participate in Bandung or share its ideals, even if they displayed interest in the development of the productive forces internally. These were the white-settler states of Southern Africa and Latin America, which remained in settler-colonial mode of political domination long after obtaining juridical independence from the British or Iberian metropoles. Generally, the neo-colonial transition in these regions dragged on for decades after the Second World War, until the defeat of minority rule and military regimes. In almost all cases, universal suffrage without any qualifications advanced only after the Second World War, but again most transitions were aborted by the hardening of white supremacism and serial coups d’etat. In most cases, the transition to neo-colonialism was only made possible under neoliberalism, in this late phase of neo-colonialism, with South Africa and Brazil in particular shaking off the settler-colonial stranglehold simultaneously (Yeros et al., 2019).

It is of great significance, furthermore, that the definitive end to five centuries of European colonial domination transformed the peripheries of the world economy not just into independent states but also into conflict zones – as Nkrumah had predicted – both in the Cold War and after. Properly speaking, this transition has been an ongoing Third World War, in both of the possible senses of the term: a third imperialist World War and a war against the Third World. Often such wars are ‘low intensity’ by their limited nature in terms of the geographic spread of warfare and the conventional weapons used. Yet, the outcome has been an escalation of imperialist aggression, especially after the Cold War, leading to a series of fractured and occupied states, a reality which has taken hold across whole regions. Under these conditions, we can clearly discern the return of a semi-colonial form of political domination (to which we will return).

Finally, one must still emphasize that in that global systemic rivalry between East, West and South, the Bandung movement was the most basic force against colonialism and imperialism. Born as a world peace and justice movement in the ex-colonies of Asia and Africa, and despite the inevitable shifts towards armed struggle in the 1960s, the Bandung spirit, and the Non-Aligned Movement that incarnated it, remained the most basic civilizing force in the world of the time. Nkrumah was again correct to predict that the deepening of neo-colonial rule against the non-aligned states would have severe consequences for everyone, North and South.

Late neo-colonialism is the result of this historic stalemate. Its elements include the national sovereignty regime already in place, but also the demise of Bandung and the Soviet system and the permanent crisis of monopoly capitalism. Late neo-colonialism in the peripheries also corresponds politically to the neoliberal phase of liberal democracy at the centre. Under late neo-colonialism, monopoly-finance capitalism has escalated the drain from the peripheries, but with declining compensation to the working classes at the centre. Furthermore, it has continued to escalate its interventions and manipulate conflict situations in the peripheries, to invent strategic enemies anew to justify permanent war, now couched in the apocalyptic terms of ‘terror’ and ‘evil’. Late neo-colonialism has been marked by the degeneration of nationalism in the peripheries on the heels of the compradorization of peripheral bourgeoisies. The latter have essentially ‘seceded’ from the nation, as Prabhat Patnaik (1995: 2051) has put it. This period has been accompanied by accelerated rural exodus, the dramatic expansion of informal and vulnerable employment, intensification of the social reproduction crisis, and generalized semi-proletarianization. This now constitutes the peripheral social basis of a fraying national sovereignty regime.

Semi-colonialism and fascism

The return of fascism has been gaining significant attention today, but the semi-colonial situation, as such, has not. The semi-colonial situation is usually called a number of other things, without having been grasped as a phenomenon that pertains to this late phase of neo-colonialism. In a study published a decade ago (Moyo & Yeros, 2011), several trajectories of peripheral states were identified under neoliberalism, two of which were in retrospect clearly semi-colonial situations, although the conceptual stride was not then taken. Recall that Lenin and his contemporaries had used the term, but had not developed it (Lenin, 1963[1917]: ch. 6). It was to be understood as a ‘transitional form’ tending toward full colonial takeover, or a case of intense financial dependence. The concept received the most systematic exposition subsequently by the Chinese Communist Party in the writings of Mao (2004a[1926], 2004b[1939], 2004c[1940]), where the underlying patterns of accumulation and class formation obtained higher significance and were associated to the mode of rule. Among the various elements identified (see, especially, Mao, 2004b[1939]), two are most pertinent here:

• semi-colonialism is based on a specific pattern of accumulation based on extra-economic force and on exchanges not accounted for by the market mechanism, which in the Chinese case was understood as semi-feudal, not properly capitalist, even if capitalism had long taken root in China under the aegis of foreign monopolies and powers;
• beyond the various known economic, political, military, and cultural mechanisms known to be employed by foreign monopolies and powers, under semi-colonialism there is also partial seizure of territory by means of war of aggression, the imposition of unequal treaties, the stationing of military forces, and exercise of consular jurisdiction within the territory.

In Moyo and Yeros (2011), the four trajectories identified included ‘radicalized’ states, which have entailed a certain re-run of the Bandung type of anti-imperialism; ‘re-stabilizing’ states after crisis, by the return to the fold of the monopolies; ‘fractured’ states which lost their territorial-bureaucratic cohesion to armed rebels and warlords; and ‘occupied states and peoples’ which succumbed to imperialist war of aggression. The last two were conceived as especially permeable trajectories, given that state fracture easily leads to foreign intervention and, vice versa, foreign intervention easily leads to state fracture. The last two are, in fact, the modern-day semi-colonial situations convergent with the two basic characteristics indicated above. They are subject to the most intense primitive accumulation, albeit without the feudal conditions of the past; and they are subject to military intervention, stationing of forces, arrogation of consular privileges, and imposition of unequal treaties. Presently, West Asia, North Africa, the Sahel, the Horn, Central Africa, and the Caribbean, are regions where a number of countries can properly be understood as having succumb to the semi-colonial situation – including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Mali, Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Haiti – with several more possibly treading on this situation. This is a real tendency today, and one of the main outcomes of the fraying the national sovereignty regime in this late phase of neo-colonialism. It may still be seen as a ‘transitional form’, but not back to colonialism proper; the object of such transition, if it exists, remains the return to the neo-colonial mode of rule.

Meanwhile, within the neo-colonial situation, there has been an advance of fascistic forces, which also need to be interrogated closely. Generally, we can identify three basic elements constitutive of fascism, two of which are clearly noted by Amin (2011, 2014) and a third might be deduced from his analysis. First, fascism emerges as a political response to the problems of management of monopoly capitalism. When monopoly capitalism enters into sustained crisis, fascism emerges as a force against the institutions and practices of liberal democracy. Given that national situations and social plight may differ significantly, fascism may be averted or defeated here or there, and liberal institutions may be salvaged. Nonetheless, fascist forces, even when marginal, see their best opportunity in the course of protracted crisis and may even rise to offer monopoly capital its most viable strategy of accumulation. This is a fundamental starting point for the analysis of fascism.

Second, fascism consists in the categorical rejection of democracy. Fascism proposes to provide salvation against an evolving crisis by rescuing or reinventing traditions corrupted and undermined by liberal democracy. The traditions, at one level, pertain to those of the family and gender; at another, they seek recourse in racial, or caste, religious, and other communal differences that become subject to racialization, whereby exaltation of one group implies the subjugation and segregation or extermination of the other. As such, the enemies of tradition and the ‘master nation’ are to be isolated or removed, not just cooped or assimilated as under liberalism. Fascism is avowedly supremacist.

Third, fascism is a force in the imperialist drive for world domination. The fact that fascism at the centre is not carving out territories as in the colonial past, or that it has taken root even in the peripheries, should not illude us. Classical European fascism, under the prevailing imperial sovereignty regime of the time, consisted in a categorical rejection of national sovereignty among peripheral regions. If it does not appear categorical today, it is because monopoly capitalism has exceptional means to contain national sovereignty and need only suppress it sporadically; this, after all, is the essence of the neo-colonial mode of rule and the semi-colonial situation. Fascism at the centre can pursue the repartition of spheres of influence by other means. Nonetheless, one of the novel questions pertains to the specific service that peripheral fascism provides to imperialism today.

Peripheral fascism fills the void left by Bandung nationalism and is intimately linked to the escalation of primitive accumulation under the neoliberal assault. Yet, it is different from that of the center on at least three counts. First, it is limited to the nation or at most regional disputes, having no conditions to vie for world domination. But – and second – it seeks alignment for its own survival and expansion with monopoly capital at the center, thereby becoming an instrument in the drive for world domination. This explains why it remains so committed to neoliberalism in its economics. Third, fascistic forces take advantage of liberal spaces to gain ground on the new social and political terrain ushered in by generalized semi-proletarianisation. On these new conditions, the Bandung nationalism of the past is being overtaken by fundamentalist Christianity, Islam and Hinduism – across Africa, Asia, and Latin America – all of which seek and receive the support of monopoly capital.

Concluding remarks

The resurgence of fascism also advances at the centres within liberal politics and on the terrain of a degraded and insecure working class – the so-called middle class – which is essentially devoid of world historical consciousness. Even if not compensated to the extent that it was in early neo-colonialism, there is still great difficulty on the part of this working class to imagine or commit to an alliance on an equal footing with the working peoples of the South. But monopoly capitalism and its fascistic tendencies will not be defeated unless genuine solidarity of workers and peoples takes hold across North and South – with which Samir Amin had become intensely preoccupied in his later years. This very same lack of historical consciousness also imbues theories that reduce capitalist crisis to technological determinants and pure notions of conflict. The conflict between capital and labour is not a given in really-existing capitalism, it remains a political project of recognizing and overcoming the contradictions that prolong the life of this dying system. A good starting point would be the recognition that the destruction of the Bandung movement paved the way to the consolidation of neo-colonialism and the degradation of the alternative vision for a more civilized world order. It is this that has also paved the way for the resurgence of fascism at the centre itself. As Malcom X once remarked – anticipating Nkrumah’s warning by a couple years – ‘the chickens are coming home to roost’.[2]

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[1] Paris Yeros (parisyeros@gmail.com) is professor of international economics and faculty member of the Postgraduate Programme in World Political Economy, Federal University of ABC, São Paulo, Brazil. Praveen Jha (praveenjha2005@gmail.com) is professor of economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning and Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. A version of this article was presented by Paris Yeros at the R.N. Godbole Memorial Lecture, at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi, on 26 February 2020. We wish to thank the participants for their stimulating comments.

[2] The New York Times, 2 December 1963, https://www.nytimes.com/1963/12/02/archives/malcolm-x-scores-us-and-kennedy-likens-slaying-to-chickens-coming.html, accessed 30 December 2019.

 

Entretien avec Max Ajl

This interview was conducted by Selim Nadi and originally appeared in Contretemps in French.

You work mainly on agrarian political economy and your PhD is on Tunisian state agriculture development policy in the post-1980s period. But let’s go back to the Tunisian independence period: to what extent was the issue of agriculture a key issue in the debates within the Tunisian national movement in the mid-1950s? How did Bourguiba and Ben Youssef differ on the issue of land?

From the 1930s to the 1950s, agriculture was central to the discourse of the national movement. Publications, communiques, speeches, and other documents were salted with references to how colonialism drained the wealth of the land, and most especially how colonialism as a specific set of institutional mechanisms pushed small landholders into debt and hastened their transformation into a rural proletariat or a semi-proletariat. During the 1950s, the Neo-Destour was aware that independence was breaking over the horizon and began to speak more and more of the Neo-Destour’s holding within it all the classes within the Tunisian nation. His major priority was to maintain the integrity of the cross-class national front. That front enfolded large farmers, many of whom who were quietly funding the Neo-Destour or in its leadership, small farmers, the landless, slum-dwellers in the bidonvilles, and the massive UGTT – the nationalist, Western-aligned trade union. In many ways, the UGTT was the primary articulator of social issues during the 1950s, more so than the Neo-Destour which focused on the colonial-national contradiction. The notion that colonialism was a social machine which was damaging every class in Tunisian society was broadly shared, but it was left to the UGTT to articulate more specific grievances and programmatic solutions. The UGTT put a sharper and redder redistributionist edge on its nationalism, suggesting that agrarian reform was needed, but also frequently softened such calls by avoiding explicit mention of the liquidation of the large Tunisian estates. This was in part due to its own subservient incorporation into the nationalist front, which its own leader, Ahmed Ben Salah, thought would allow for a union-party fusion and thereby allow for the UGTT to push a harder economically redistributive line after independence – an ambition which shipwrecked on the shoals of Bourguiba’s late 1956 move to sharply subordinate the UGTT, remove Ben Salah from its leadership, and ensure that its economic ambitions could only take shape within parameters with the Neo-Destour delimited.

The question of land is most visible as refracted through the prism of nation and decolonization, and this was Bourguiba and Ben Youssef’s major line-of-difference. Before discussing that, it may be worth quickly noting in brackets that the peasant, herder, and semi-proletariat movements which propelled decolonization did not necessarily take political cues directly from Ben Youssef or Bourguiba at any stage, and the nationalist movement was a quite fissiparous entity, since leadership was frequently in prison, scattered across several continents, and the struggle was carried out under conditions of severe colonial repression.

That said, Ben Youssef and Bourguiba’s major distinction was that one called for full decolonization, and one did not. Ben Youssef’s call for full decolonization was not drawn from the well of Cabral-style clarions demanding to liberate the land and place the productive forces under the control of the land’s people. The difference was more sub rosa: since the June 1955 autonomy accords allowed for the French to retain control of tariffs, to maintain full Tunisian-French economic integration, and to keep their 800,000 or so hectares, much of it the most fecund soils in Tunisia, alongside the many mines and railways pocking and striating Tunisia, Ben Youssef’s opposition to that program and call for full independence was a call for the sovereign control of the country’s economic resources – but more by default than explicitly so. Ben Youssef was much more explicit about policies like tariffs and how they would prevent sovereign control of the country’s development path. In assessing Ben Youssef, we also have to keep in mind that he was in the gravity well of the radicalizing Bandung conference only late in his political career, in 1955, and left a comparatively scanty written political record. He left behind a much smaller paper trail than did Bourguiba.

You argue that while the peasantry made revolution in Tunisia, this revolution was robbed from them. Could you come back to this?

While working through the timelines of the dominant historiography of Tunisian decolonization, there were odd starts and stops which did not make sense to me, and certainly factors which seemed relatively de-emphasized. There is a tendency to counterpose Tunisia’s pacific decolonization to the violent decolonization which unrolled to Tunisia’s west, in Algeria, and it seemed to me this comparison was drawn too sharply. Furthermore, as I arrived to Tunisia, colleagues told me that the question of the Youssefites – the partisans or followers of Ben Youssef – was emerging more clearly as an object of political and historiographical contention in post-revolutionary Tunisia, both in political culture and through the Instance Verité et Dignité – Tunisia’s truth commission. The first half of my dissertation has been an attempt to make sense of these gaps. What I found was that, first, it was crystal-clear that the armed fellaga insurrection, in its first stage – from 1952 to late 1954 – drove the French to the negotiating table in the first place. The fellaga were armed brigades, created in some coordination with the Neo-Destour and the UGTT, and who came primarily from mixed herder-farmers of the South, at least at first. They spread elsewhere – to date-tree owners elsewhere in the oases of the South, people tending rain-harvested plots, those nearly landless due to the one-two of land alienation due to the settler-capitalist regime and successive shrinkage of plots due to inheritance, and also to those entirely ejected from rural production. Part of why they demobilized in November-December 1954 was Neo-Destour success in using them as leverage to force autonomy, and fear that Neo-Destour control of the fellaga was slipping, as the Algerian revolution had started to rage to the west, and Nasserism was increasingly compelling.

One of the fellaga, Lazhar Chraiti, refused to surrender his arms and was part of organizing an attempted cross-Maghrebi armed insurgency, drawing materiel from recently decolonized Egypt under the Free Officer’s government and some say, even Maoist China. By early 1955, he was creating plans for a new army, and the conflict burst out sometime after Ben Youssef split from Bourguiba – in a low-intensity manner from November 1955 to January 1956, and the really pitched battles afterwards. This army fought for full independence, sometimes mentioning land issues, sometimes not, but aiming to expel the French from Tunisian lands, and certainly influenced by the Arab nationalist vision of unity, anti-imperialism, and sovereignty beaming out over radio waves from Cairo. In fact, this armed insurgency was 50 percent bigger than the first, with a clearer line of demarcation: they fought for full decolonization against the June 1955 internal autonomy accords. Once again, it was the people of the South – then and now the poorest region of the country – at the core of the fighting forces, and they were herders, smallholders, and others who made a poor living from agriculture. They forced the French to allow what was mis-named a “full” independence in March 20, 1956, and then Bourguiba’s proto-national army and even more the colonial French forces inflicted several military defeats upon them, some of which were actually massacres of surrounded, surrendering, or wounded Tunisian guerrillas. Still, under the pressure they exerted, the government agreed to a 15 million old Franc a year allotment for developing the Center and South – a massive sum, which would have been close to a revolutionary redistribution of income if it had been implemented. Of course, it was not, and in this sense, the poor of the Center and South were thrice-robbed of their revolution: first, although they forced what there was of independence in 1956, it was the Bourguibist wing of the Neo-Destour which harvested the fruit of the military victory which the Youssefites had achieved by force of arms and martyrdom. Second, because the state was soon a neo-colonial state, and thus in material terms their victory was robbed from them, as the development project brought them only poverty. And thrice-over, as their lives and even their deaths were erased from history books and not allowed to be taught in schools, reducing the historiography of the nationalist movement into a hagiography of the Great Man Bourguiba, thereby robbing them of their claim to the state as the commonwealth of its people, and justifying the Bourguibist anti-peasant developmentalist project.

Some scholars have written that the transfer of power from elite to elite was central to the decolonisation process, and national liberation did little to disrupt Western dominance of the global economic order: How was this “Western dominance of the global economic order” expressed and how did it evolve, especially regarding the issue of peasantry and agriculture during the post-Independence era of Tunisia?

I would first say that this is reductive. Colonization lasted a very long time – in Algeria from 1830, for example, in India from even earlier. Pace formalist models of the origins of capitalism, capitalist development, and the Great Divergence, it is clear that the wealth France and the British looted from their colonial possessions was not the result of their dominance of the global economy, but in fact helped constitute that dominance, and it did not happen with a snap of the fingers – it took time. Since to build Western dominance took time, to unbuild it will take time, and while such statements are true in word, they are false in framing – it’s quite early to say that national liberation did little to break the Western supremacy in the global order. It also collapses national liberation into the formal and juridical process of decolonization. But these were not the same thing. Take, again, Cabral’s position, which saw national liberation as a complete shattering of Western control over the domestic productive forces, including as such control occurred through the neo-colonial state and accompanying sectors of social power. National liberation was an aspirational horizon. It was about the self-directed development of the productive forces. Political decolonization, as it was in Tunisia, was often a mechanism to short-circuit a more encompassing national liberation.

Furthermore, what has happened in China would bely even this formal statement. Even with the anti-Maoist counter-revolution, China has a massive economic weight in the world-system and poses a tremendous threat to Western dominance of the global economic order. This is explicit in Pentagon planning documents, for example. It is not clear what people are expecting vis-à-vis national liberation’s threat and horizons – colonialism took hundreds of years of stolen labour and its fruits and slowly transmuted that stolen labour into Western dominance of the global economic order. Why would anyone expect this to change immediately, or even within a period of one, two, three decades? It relativizes away the very real achievements of national liberation, which played a massive role in putting a stop in many places to colonial genocides and famines across Africa and Asia, and stopped the flow of drain, as Utsa Patnaik has shown in detail with respect to India. These processes were only stalled – and emphasis on stalled – amidst a massive militarized counter-revolution against every experiment in national development. So, when people say that the process of decolonization did not (yet) level out world economic hierarchies, they ought also say that the prospects for doing so were leveled by precisely those hierarchies. And still, the future is open.

Regarding Tunisia, this goes back to my earlier point about neo-colonialism. The post-colonial government under Habib Bourguiba was the major pendant of the US political architecture in the Western Arab world, and the West considered Tunisia a possible model for nominally non-aligned – in fact, entirely Western aligned – developmentalism. It poured in one of the world’s highest per capita rates of foreign aid in order to protect the Neo-Destourian government. Even then, across the government, elites and dirigiste planners were petrified of the prospects of a “demagogic” – their word – agrarian reform unfolding in Tunisia, as was happening in Algeria, Egypt, or China, a frequent bugbear. The framework of planning was to put in place an agricultural revolution in order to avoid an agrarian revolution – that is, to apply the faith of modernization theory and development-through-technological-diffusion to peasant agricultures and try to modernize them. This occurred through a cooperative experiment, which took place at first on the lands the state slowly nationalized in the late 1950s and early 1960s, then on another larger tranche of colonial lands the state nationalized in 1964, alongside lots of picayune minifundia clustered around these larger plots.

Now, what was central was that modernization took place within two parameters, both reflecting the Bourguibist outlook and Western imperatives: massive infusions of capital into farming and accordingly top-down attempted reworking and takeover of peasant life by the state; and until the late 1960s, respect for the large private property in Tunisian hands. The replacement of animal traction with imported tractors and other forms of mechanization, and also imported fuel, pesticides, and fertilizers to compensate for the broken nitrogen cycle, was massively expensive. It also ensured that the technological path these cooperatives took ensured a massive under-utilization of labor, and thus made them all the more difficult to economically sustain, while alienating and spurning peasant knowledge, and erasing peasants as both political and social subjects, turning them into the objects of planning. Alongside this project, the state put footloose labor to work in “work-groups” which were basically sustained by US aid. They were designed to absorb social pressure building on the neo-colonial state and allowed the state to avoid an agrarian reform.

By the late 1960s, two tracks were in motion. One was the first rumblings of a Green Revolution, sponsored by the US, which would further empty out the Tunisian countryside, increase rural differentiation, and decrease nutritional quality, as high quality durum wheats and barley, far preferred by the population, partially gave way to Green Revolution soft wheat and durum wheat hybrids. The second aspect, which was a partial challenge to the Western economic order, was a move by Ben Salah, by then the Planning Minister, to spread the cooperatives country-wide under the social use of land justification. This really accelerated from 1967-1969, while Bourguiba was quite sick. But in 1969, as large farmers made their qualms known to Bourguiba and amidst pressure from the World Bank, he terminated the cooperative program and switched to a state-supported medium-to-large-farmer commodity-production capitalist rural order. This was enabled by US-supported cereal breeding programs and massive input subsidies to assist the larger farmers – the only ones who could afford such capital-intensive imported inputs, even if we put a parenthesis around the long-term ecological effects of pouring such poisons into the soil and the water table. Thus, it is far less accurate to that that “national liberation” did not do much to shift Western dominance, but rather that national liberation was bridled if not broken in order to ensure that it would not disrupt, and would in fact buttress, Western economic dominance.

What was the position of what you call the “Tunisian school” regarding the question of food sovereignty? How did they regard the question of self-management? To what extent was there a Latin-American influence on Tunisian economists and agronomists concerning food sovereignty?

The “Tunisian school” was a loose cluster of economists, agronomists, and other researchers in alternative technology and dependency theory which developed in the mid-1970s to the early-to-mid 1980s in reaction to the tremendous social and ecological costs of capitalist modernization in Tunisia, and who put out a small book in 1983, Tunisie: Quelles Technologies? Quel Développement? I would say they were very much advocates of food sovereignty avant la lettre. The dominant lexicon in Tunisia was food security, but as with many such discourses under the developmentalist dictatorship of Bourguiba, so long as one adhered to the letter of the dominant framework, once could break from it in spirit. Thus, they used the discussion of “food security” to call for a return to the peasant vis-à-vis agricultural technology. That meant using native landraces, or the seeds of the region, to use native animal breeds in agriculture. That also meant a massive advocacy for native water-harvesting technics, made of earth and stone, in place of the massively expensive dam technology which cost so much while shattering one after another watershed’s water cycle, and delivering so little vis-à-vis irrigated land per dollar invested. These dams also incurred large loans and relied on foreign expertise to build – another mechanism of neo-colonialism. They wished to do all of this while reducing agriculture-related imports, reducing the use of hydrocarbons in farming, eliminating to the extent possible unneeded food imports, and setting in motion native programs to research camels, dates, barley – all the arid-land crops which neo-colonial technics had spurned. To be clear, none of this work deployed the words agro-ecology or food sovereignty, but the entire project looked, technically speaking, quite like what now goes by the name of food sovereignty within Via Campesina.

Essentially, this seemed to have occurred in parallel rather than by way of diffusion from Latin America – the “return to the peasant” was at that time occurring in much of the Third World in reaction to the wrenching dislocations of modernizing agriculture. I am doing some collaborative work with my colleague Divya Sharma bringing India and Tunisia into comparative perspective, and many countries in Latin America have their own genealogies of agro-ecology, which developed out of work to understand the ecology of traditional peasant farming systems.

The project of the “Tunisian school” was based on valorizing the technical capacity of Tunisian artisans, builders, and peasants. Their concerns went beyond food and agriculture – they drew on broader critical currents, from French and US technology criticism, to the appropriate technology movement which was blooming across the First World and also the Third, and also had a heavy influence from radical French agronomy, especially Rene Dumont, who extensively studied Tunisia and made many trips there. In this sense, they did not directly call for cooperatives or economic democracy, and only sometimes and guardedly called for agrarian reforms – recall that most of them could not so easily speak their minds given that they worked for a state which was in close alliance with big landholders. But the state was still purportedly the commonwealth of its people, and they could certainly call for redirecting state budgetary spending and research priorities towards the peasants, and even decentralizing planning itself so that it would follow instead of lead the peasants. Self-management was certainly an ambition vis-à-vis peasants and smallholders having a full and autonomous control of their own production cycle, and a similar process taking place at the national scale. But they did not call, for example, for co-gestion of the large farms, or the large factories – it seems to me such a call would have been enormously politically dangerous, even under the relatively more permissive Bourguiba regime. Under Ben Ali, of course, social scientific inquiry was asphyxiated.

Who was Slaheddine el-Amami and what was new in his thought regarding agriculture in Tunisia? How did he change the relations between agrarian technological advances and the Tunisian peasantry?

El-Amami was a Tunisian agronomist, who came out of the radical left student movement in the late 1950s, then began working his way through the Tunisian government research institutions. By the mid-1970s he ran the influential Centre de Recherche en Genie Rurale. In my reading, he essentially was the first to apply the methodology of dependency theory – that is, a theory which sought to understand the adjustment and damage done to peripheral and semi-peripheral economies as they were reworked by internal and external class forces to suit the needs of the core – to the agricultural sector. He also entirely infused that approach with state-of-the-art knowledge of ecology and agronomy. Essentially, he was the vanguard, and as far as I can see the pioneer, of the “return to the peasant” in the Tunisian context. From his perch at the CRGR, he carried out dozens of field investigations into indigenous water-harvesting systems, to evaluate how much salt content the indigenous land-races could tolerate, and other experiments, including looking at the uses of windbreaks – vital in the warding off the desert sirocco. The core novelty was that he looked askance on the merits of modernization in the agricultural sector and thought instead that what was needed was not an antediluvian traditionalism, but an alternative modernity based on building out from the existing strengths and technical knowledges of peasant farmers. This was revolutionary.

He sought to do several things technologically speaking. First, he wanted to put the national research institutions at the direct service of peasants and their landraces and technologies. That is, rather than evangelizing new technology, they would co-develop existing technologies – water-harvesting, seeds, and so forth, bearing in that, as Braudel pointed out, that agriculture is a technology – into more sophisticated forms, to make them more efficient, and more productive, without damaging human or ecology. Second, he sought to find ways to bring the insights of appropriate technologies to the Tunisian countryside – e.g. he was an advocate of solar power, and in one of his experiments sought to combine solar powered pumps with supplementary irrigation, as when the sun shone more intensely, water would flow for the suddenly thirstier plants. But this was an approach to technology which totally rejected the dominant model of technology transfer, which Amami knew had constituted Tunisia and the Third World as dependent entities. He refused to wall off technology from social relations, ecology from import dependence, but knew that the right agriculture, which is to say the right farming technics, based on valorizing peasant skills, could actually best serve Tunisia and provide the framework for a sovereign development model.

A famine is currently occurring in Yemen. To what extent is the food crisis in Yemen due to external factors? How is this crisis linked to the war?

In 1970, Yemen was essentially food-independent. In 2015, as the US war, under Saudi and Emirati branding, scoured Yemen, much of Yemen relied on imported food as a means for day-to-day survival. The shift from a country which could feed itself to a country which could not do so is at the root of the current crisis. Much of the previously subsistence production shifted to water-intensive and less calorically-dense crops, especially fruits and vegetables, and furthermore shifted to irrigated-based crops, which rely on expensive pumps to get at reservoirs. There is also a great amount of land devoted to qat, which relieves hunger and is also a commodity crop. These shifts are inseparable from the monetization of the Yemeni rural sector, wherein wages increased post-1973 as Saudi Arabia drew on its neighbor to supply the Kingdom’s proletariat. US food aid and Green Revolution technologies undercut local cereal production, both making cereals relatively cheaper, and replacing labor with capital. At the same time, since wage costs increased to match those in Saudi Arabia, people switched to more profitable rural crops, or left the countryside. Several consequences ensued. First, terraces collapsed without people being able to helm them. Second, national development itself became impossible as much of the skilled workforce, literally reared on the use-values of Yemen, went to Saudi Arabia. Both countryside and city became highly dependent on remittances and markets for food. When Saudi expelled those workers for Yemen’s decision not to toe the Saudi/US line vis-à-vis Iraq and the US presence in the region, Yemen’s remittances ran dry and there was suddenly ever-more-rural labor available. Rather than turning to the rural sector, Yemen’s government enjoyed a small oil boom, and used those monies to subsidize imported cereal consumption – a Yemeni decision, but also a US/European once, since excess cereals on the global markets is not due to that phantasm of fossil capitalism, “productivity” but because large producers of cereals receive massive subsidies, and they export their ecological costs for monocrop cereal production onto the rest of humanity, and onto the future.

Until the outbreak of protests in 2011, this process continued and even accelerated, as more and more land and water went to fruit and vegetable production for the protected internal market, even while less and less land went to cereal production. Imports made up the difference. This created two interlocked vulnerabilities. One, instead of the poor relying on their own production for survival, they relied on the market. And instead of that market being internal, it was tied to international commodity prices. Thus, when the 2015 war began in an attempt to destroy the anti-Zionist Houthi movement and to re-install a US-Saudi client, several dynamics interlaced to produce the famine. One was the direct targeting of agriculture, as meticulously documented by Martha Mundy. Second was the overall targeting of the economy, increasing poverty and thereby reducing families’ capacity to secure goods on the market on the demand side. Finally, blockades and destruction of import capacity has meant increased prices for purchasers. Here it is worth stating that famine even in this kind extreme case of extreme imperially-induced food dependence, is not due to lack of food to feed people inside geographical Yemen, but decades of stunted dependent capitalist development and imperialist development which has so immiserated people that they can no longer get the food which exists in the country. As for responsibility, that of the US is massive.

According to the Belgian specialist of China, Roland Lew, the peasantry is a “classe en trop” for Marxists – a class that they often prefer to forget about but that they cannot ignore. How would you characterize the current state of Marxist research regarding the relevance of the peasantry and of agricultural issues?

I might slightly redirect the question. In reviews like Journal of Peasant Studies, Agrarian South, Economic and Political Weekly, and in a slightly more popular but still extremely rigorous way, Monthly Review, inquiry into peasant and agricultural issues is not merely alive and well. It is flourishing – indeed, having a dazzling renaissance after a period of dormancy. The quality of the literature in these journals concerning peasant and agrarian issues is extremely high, ranging from revitalized inquiries into semi-proletarianization, food sovereignty, agro-ecology, the politics of peasant movements, the many agrarian questions of our day, matters of food, finance, and imperialism, work on the intersection of agricultural trade and imperialism, seed questions, and peasant matters across Latin America, South Asia, to a slightly lesser extent Africa, and to a far lesser extent the Middle East – North Africa region. It would be fair to say that not all of this literature is cast in the classic framework of Marxist analysis – much of it, for example, in JPS finds itself in the more catholic categorization of critical agrarian studies or political ecology – but it certainly applies a materialist method to the study of contemporary social reality in the world’s countrysides. I would worry less about the state of this literature (although certainly I would like to see broader conversations occurring between this field and Marxist approaches to economic development, and more openness to the national question and anti-imperialism in some places) and much more I am apprehensive that this literature is often not known by many in other Marxist traditions, where as you stated, they often “prefer to forget” about the campesinos. It would be gratuitous to name names, but clearly the problem is generalized, although with the caveats I mentioned.

Why is this the case? For one thing, most people in the Global North are not peasants or farmers, and these concerns may seem very distant from their lives – few academics have experience in factory labor, or in prisons, but at least those problems are closer at hand. Furthermore, few academic departments study peasants, even though the rural sector is absolutely central to development issues in North and South alike. There has also been a broader turn away from issues of development within Marxism, and that has brought with it a turn away from issues of rural development. I think also that there are residual or not-so-residual investments amongst many Marxists in the myths of modernity – the idea that what capitalism has produced is somehow progressive, and thus the agrarian question is an antediluvian remnant. One can see sentiments like this sprouting in many Marxist circles, open mockery of the role of peasants or smallholder production in a sustainable modernity, and even where it is not explicit, there is a comfortable turning-away from the kind of production which is central to the livelihoods of much of the planet, even though it is the most concrete of the many determinations which produce our contemporary world-system. In fact, it is remarkably underknown that smallholder farming produces at least half the planet’s food. On an energetic basis – that is, energy returned on energy invested – smallholder traditional farming systems are far more efficient than the industrial agriculture, dollar-cheap but entropy-heavy, which underpins contemporary urbanization and suburbanization. Smallholder production, however, is made invisible, because that labor is exploited to produce the semi-proletarianized labor reserves upon which capitalism rests. It seems to me that there is far more interest, for example, in logistics workers than massive vibrant social movements like the Landless Workers Movement, fighting for their survival and their future in Brazil, or other peasant-based revolutionary movements which are in fact criminalized by the US state. Some of this also has to do with the anti-peasant bias of Western ideology, which very often Marxists inherit.

Still, there are glimmers of changes – I think Marxism is having a return to ecological issues amidst global warming’s civilizational threat, and from ecology there is a very possible although far from inevitable turn to agriculture and agro-ecology. I would also hope that amidst recent turns to urban farming and forms of agro-ecological production in Europe and the US, alongside what seems to me to be the unarguable fact that the agrarian question is the question for the Global South’s escape from poverty for this century, the current situation could change, and we could see a renewed engagement with these questions amongst the Marxist journals.