Can Development Occur Within National Boundaries? Implications for Africa

Abstract

The modernization strategies that have been followed by African states since decolonization have integrated them ever more deeply into transnational economic systems whose reproduction is not centered in Africa itself. Current strategies emphasize being efficient and competitive within such systems by attracting capital from it, and exporting goods into it, for the most part never breaking even in terms of trade or payments balances. Thus Africa contributes to the evolution of global capitalism, while bringing ever more labor and natural resources from rural areas into cities and for export, to be at the service and mercy of global capital. This yields a minority class of national and global winners, and majorities of insecure middle and working classes, plus even greater numbers of informal and unemployed workers in urban settlements. The boundaries that shape economic futures are therefore between modes of production, as they supersede other boundaries of territory and ethnicity. African states preside over parts of global capitalism, with little say over its rules and little control over its flows. They also attempt to govern declining or fragile local modes of production left over from history, struggling informal urban settlements, and rural subsistence modes of production on declining agricultural land. Such hybrid national formations are modernizing and may even display modern infrastructure of roads, airports, schools, high-rise buildings, and hospitals. But they also display increased urban and rural poverty, environmental degradation, and unequal outcomes in health, education, housing and mobility. Modes of production reproduce and evolve, and not countries as such. Countries develop only to the extent that they foster and enclose sustainable modes of production that meet the essential human needs of residents. By shifting theoretical and policy focus to modes of production and their effects in class formation, technological and managerial mastery or backwardness, social solidarity or fragmentation, law-making, institutional governance, and the meeting of human needs, we may better diagnose the reasons for the failures of development, and prescribe the paths to alternate economic futures for African peoples. What are the whole entities, or human networks, that can develop? Upon what resource bases, with what technologies, with what capital, at what scales of operation can new modes of production be formed and reproduced? What political formations can govern them, with what bases of solidarity, participation and legitimacy? How can new formations grow out of the existing but dysfunctional formations, existing imaginaries, and existing interstate orders? These are the questions addressed in this contribution. It is suggested that the path to an alternate economic future for African countries lies in revolution by substitution: new, sustainable modes of production arising within states but beyond the reach and rules of global capitalism, that gradually replaces it in terms of employment, resource use and class power.