A Glance at Africa

In a Quiz Night yesterday the teams were each given a map of Africa with just the coastline and the boundaries of states shown. The object of the exercise was simply to identify twelve of the very many states that now litter the continent; but the impact of the map was to cause serious reflection about a whole range of issues.

One person emphasised how few straight lines there are, other than the borders of Egypt. This is such a contrast with the boundaries of the majority of states in the USA, where straight lines seem to predominate. Thus arises the observation that although the borders were mostly set in colonial times they tend to follow geographical features, notably streams and rivers [which objectively exist, and cannot readily be shifted] to save all the hassle of establishing and maintaining artificial boundary markers. Donald Trump's wall would be an inconceivable project even along a small length of frontier in Africa.

The next obvious observation was that the borders were very rarely drawn to grant territorial integrity to some ethnic group: all over the continent ethnic groups [even quite small ones] are split between states, and most states have complex ethnic composition which makes political and social compromise difficult - sometimes impossible. The world paid attention - briefly - to the trouble attendant on the two recent attempts to run a fair and free election in Kenya, which is a reasonably sophisticated state with strong institutions and functioning [though anachronistic] legal system. As the frontiers are drawn, the Kikuyu are very clearly the dominant ethnic group: therefore they have a majority in parliament. One hereditary opposition leader drawn from another tribe, whose advancing age makes it impossible that ethnic change would occur to enable his tribe to predominate, has asserted that the system is simply undemocratic and withdrew from the second-run of the election. In his terms, Kenya cannot ever be a democracy in the sense that there is an alternation between parties of government. It may be possible to form some sort of coalition, provided the subordination of the smaller populations is inbuilt into the mindset of the participants.

Some states in Africa come close to being genuinely democratic, with stable governments [think Botswana and Namibia]; but the majority do not. In some, dictators [some of them second-generation] rob the country of wealth for their own gratification; in others war lords control massive swathes of land with conscripted armies that exploit the population to grab the resources that provide the funds with which their guns and bullets are to be replaced.

For the last few decades while the Soviet Union maintained the mission to spread Communism around the world various regimes and guerrilla movements were supported; while South Africa and Rhodesia [as long as they existed in their ugly, racist form] sent expeditions and counter-guerrilla units to oppose them. The further such operations were conducted north of the Limpopo River, the more secure were the governments in Pretoria and Salisbury that armed uprisings were little threat to them. The former colonial power, Britain, ultimately intervened to close down the beleaguered Rhodesian government and force the whites there to accept black majority rule. A democratic constitution was bequeathed to the local politicians, of whom the most powerful were those who had led the various exiled armed groups. For only a couple of years, there was a semblance of following the constitution: then the largest ethnic group [the Shona] grabbed control. The Matabele, who had collaborated most effectively with the white settlers, suffered most as a brutal policy of 'Africanisation' was imposed. White settlers' farms, especially the large ones that were among the most successful businesses in Africa, were occupied and ruined. From being a major exporter of crops, the new Zimbabwe [named after a set of ruins that had been ascribed to a forgotten African 'superpower'] became a net importer of food and the economy collapsed. The president who presided over this disaster was - still is - Robert Mugabe, who is honoured all over Africa as a former freedom fighter. His position is unassailable.

Britain could not make the ex-Rhodesia a democracy. A large army from any of the former colonial  'powers' could not bring peace to Libya, the end to ethnic tension in Kenya or a terminus to any of the other conflicts and stresses to which Africa is prone; and none of the former colonists would think it worth spending scarce resources on political reconstruction in Africa. Even China has recognised the limits of its formerly-aggressive 'economic colonisation' of parts of the continent. The general opinion in even the most democratic and high-minded advanced countries is to leave the Africans to stew in their own problems: and to sell them such military equipment and luxuries for the ruling elites as they can buy, cash-on-the-nail. Nineteenth-century European children were told of their countries' 'civilising mission' in spreading their imperial control over the 'dark continent': twenty-first century  children are told virtually nothing about an embarrassing post-colonial inheritance. And there the matter is left to lie.

Capital, Capitalism and Humanity

No economy can function without capital: buildings, utilities, transport facilities, machinery and the cash float that is necessary for any household or firm to operate. This fact was recognised early in human history, and by 1800 it had become part of a systematic theory of Political Economy as one of the 'Factors of Production': Land, Labour and Capital.

The young Doctor Karl Marx absorbed Political Economy and combined that with a voracious acquisition of facts, and believed that he had found a more profound truth. This was his perception that a class had emerged in the modern economy who were not any part of the ancient classes of people as they had become segregated by economic role and circumstances over the centuries: farmers, handicraft workers, landlords, soldiers, priests and civil servants. This class was the capitalists. Marx reckoned that this group collectively aimed to seize control of capital and use it for their own purposes rather than for the general good of humanity. He assumed that the capitalists would use the capital that they brought under their control to expand industrial production [including ultimately production on factory farms] and that this would be taken to extreme lengths. As industry expanded and machinery improved, output would increase; but then would occur a crisis. The  capitalists would have expanded productive capacity  to a point where there was not enough demand to meet the output. So the capitalists would cut costs and, as their priority was to carry on buying more more-intensive machinery, the obvious economy that they could make would be to reduce the cost of labour. Some workers would be sacked and the others offered lower wages: there would be plenty of unemployed available to take the jobs if the remaining workers would not accept the lowering of wages. Meanwhile the natural increase of population would produce large numbers of relatively healthy young people looking for work on any terms.

Marx presented capitalism as a machine that would inevitably generate excess production, lower living standards and create a growing 'reserve army of the unemployed'. This did not happen.

For a century and a half after Marx's death economic growth produced a diversification of products and a rising general living standard in the relatively free economies of Europe and the Americas.  Owners of businesses accepted being known as capitalists, and there was a consensual acceptance of the term 'capitalism' to mean 'an economic order in which a least a major portion of industry and commerce belongs to companies and to individuals'. Meanwhile the Russian Empire was captured by revolutionaries who claimed to be Marxists [and whose dogmas spread to central Europe and China after the Second World War] and those people made a disastrous mess of managing their economy by authoritarian means that were asserted to be leading towards the blissful condition of 'communism' that Marx had envisaged. Largely because Marxism failed, the people in the [relatively] free countries accepted their environment being described as 'capitalist'. But the term capitalism has no clear meaning, other than the pejorative term that Marx coined .

The fact that the members of a 'capitalist' society have no clear understanding of what they mean by the term has had disastrous consequences. If there had been acceptance of a definition of 'good' capitalism as an economic system that recognises the importance of managing capital investment effectively the present economic crisis could not possibly have arisen. Individuals in their various roles as politicians, business leaders, investors, voters, workers, pensioners and consumers would have seen that the crazy combination of de-industrialisation with untrammelled credit-creation and house-price inflation that built up after 1980 was preventing a rational allocation of capital from taking place. The survivability of the economy was being undermined in an orgy of imported consumption funded by borrowed money. Financial phenomena - mostly invisible in the internet - absolutely dominated the economy: and the creators and managers of those phenomena included many of the brightest graduates in maths, science and engineering who could have used capital to lead into new worlds of physical output, energy generation and medical science.

It is precisely because politics and society allowed the economy not to be capitalist in any rational sense that the crisis now exists. It is not a 'crisis of capitalism': it is the consequence of the economy ceasing to be capitalist.