Abstract
The aim of this article is to examine the interactive dynamics of "Africa" and the "world economy" over the past half century. By relating the overarching developmental trajectory of the continent to the long-wave rhythms of the world economy, the article identifies three relatively articulated periods in the political economy of postcolonial Africa. The first, from circa 1960 to the late 1970s, was a period of state-led developmentalism enabled by the long postwar boom in the world economy and the embedded liberalism of the Bretton Woods system. A second period from circa 1980 to the turn of the new century was conditioned by the long downturn in the world-economy and a neo-li beral regime of accumulation that sought to re-structure and re-integrate Africa into a deregulated world market. The turn of the new millennium constitutes a new period in which neither the deep structural springs of the long downturn nor the neo-liberal project as such have been overcome; but their impact on Africa has been relativized by the emergence of East Asia as the new center of accumulation in the world economy. The resulting de-synchronization of the long-wave rhythms of the world economy has permitted a modest economic expansion in Africa within a largely extractive regime of accumulation and a wave of new enclosures that are profoundly reconstituting the social universe of Africa's primary producers.
Highlights
The aim of this article is to examine the interactive dynamics of "Africa" and the "world economy" over the past half century
To suggest that the processes that constitute this condition have to be situated in relation to the historically constituted transnat ional arrangement of geo-political and economic relations that causally impinge on their specific forms and dynamics, is to risk scorn for presumably offering a defensive apologia or refusing to confront hard, if inconvenient, facts. In contrast to these essentialist or reductionist accounts, the anniversary celebrations provide the occasion for a dispassionate analysis of the overarching trends in the political economy of post-colonial Africa set within the relational context of an evolving international capitalist order
The range and density of these relational processes have varied over time, but no consideration of the political economy of the continent can be plausible without taking this world-historical relationship into account
Summary
The categories "Africa" and the "world-economy" are not self-evident units of analysis and each poses its own set of conceptual problems. It is only through a more differentiated conception of the spatio-temporality of capitalist development, in which processes of capital accumulation are not just discontinuous but internally heterogeneous as well, that it becomes possible to appreciate the uneven and interwoven forms of socio-economic transformations From this perspective, the world economy can be understood as a relational whole whose contradictory dynamics generate reciprocally determining social and political forms. As it moved from being the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor, it was obliged to give up the gold standard in 1971, and two years later the international system of fixed exchange rates and control over capital movements were abandoned This unleashed a speculative boom that fostered extreme instability in currency markets, and as stagflation set in, the price of primary commodities plummeted, ruining producers and states in Africa that were heavily dependent on raw material exports. In 2010-11 there were some three million Africans with tertiary education in the European Union (OECD-UNDESA 2013: 3)
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