African Struggles Today. Peter Dwyer
movement has both challenged the inequities of the present world system and articulated a compelling vision that “another world is possible.”
African social movements have been active participants in this global anticapitalist movement. Its analysis of modern global capitalism’s capacity to undermine state sovereignty and commodify the “commons” resonates with Africans’ firsthand experience of imposed economic liberalization and choiceless democracies, as well as the continent’s long history of globalization in the forms of the Atlantic slave trade and forced integration into the empires of European powers. Many African activists have found in the anticapitalist movement not only established networks of campaigns, advocates, and comrades, but also an international framework that enables them to break from a purely national or local analysis. However, this chapter also suggests limits to the relevance of the anticapitalist movement to the African context. It details the experiences of Social Forums held in Africa and attended by the authors, focusing in particular on the World Social Forum held in Nairobi, Kenya, in January 2007. Drawing on personal experience as well as interviews with participants, the authors argue that the inequalities and contradictions inherent in the global anticapitalist movement find their clearest expression in the African context, where its inability to fully incorporate African experiences and analyses arises directly from the very structures of this apparently structureless movement.
The January 2011 revolutionary upsurge has, among many things, posed much more urgently some of the practical questions with which activists had begun to grapple in the Social Forum milieu; the “who are we, who are they, what can we do about it” questions that go to the heart of any of the discussions about strategy and tactics that swirl inside social movements. The answers cannot be prefigured in advance or through abstract contemplation but can be found only in the cut and thrust of movements in motion. Yet we believe that the movements and issues discussed here offer lessons from the sharp jostle of experience.
The book concludes in chapter 8 with a comparative analysis of the role of social movements in Africa, both historically and in the contemporary period. It identifies important lessons drawn from the findings of the study and suggests ways in which social movement approaches may strengthen the activities of civil society and non-governmental organizations on the continent as well as internationally. The revolutionary process that is still developing in North Africa and igniting movements in parts of the Middle East is testament to the continued vibrancy of social movements across the continent. Indeed, one of the primary reasons for writing this book was to insist that we cast our gaze on the continuing organic development of these movements that demand our attention, solidarity, and celebration. This book seeks to develop and deepen the search for political alternatives for those who want to see a world not dominated by neoliberalism, austerity, and underdevelopment.
Chapter 2
Social Movements and the Working Class in Africa
This chapter seeks to establish the analytical framework that will be utilized in the more empirical chapters that follow. Drawing on some of the most important analyses of social movements within and outside the continent, it explores how a social movement approach can shed new light on the nature of popular struggles and resistance to state power, social and economic injustice, and exploitation in Africa. It critiques the ways in which popular movements have been understood—and misunderstood—by analysts of postcolonial African politics and society. Finally, it seeks to locate the role of social movements in broader movements for political change in Africa, and more widely, against the worst manifestations of neoliberal capitalism and for a deeper democracy and greater social justice—ultimately raising, in the words of the anticapitalist movement, the possibility of another world.
Conceptualizing social movements
The idea of understanding societal and political change through the prism of social movements is not a new one, but it has been applied more commonly to Western society than to Africa, and is generally linked to the development of modern nation-states. What do we understand by “social movements”? In much of the scholarship, social movements are perceived as a series of largely unconnected and distinct campaigns, civil society organizations (CSOs), and pressure groups.1 In contrast, we see social movements as both a unified and differentiated totality. While there are distinct “movements” and different and competing layers within social movements, these continually interact, connect, and conflict. Social movements may start out with distinct and limited goals but be drawn into broader struggles that change societies. We see working-class politics as an important component in social movements both internationally and in Africa. In this chapter, and the book more generally, we explore the historical and contemporary development of a politics that derives from the working class and the wider African urban and rural poor. At the same time, we understand and explore the serious constraints on the development of such a politics within social movements, specifically an unpromising political and economic structural context. Our “social movements” approach stresses the agency of the popular classes’ subalterns in shaping their own future, while not in any sense neglecting or playing down the powerful structural factors which militate against their capacity to do so.
In the early nineteenth century, a qualitatively new form of protest movement developed in Europe. Charles Tilly demonstrates how, with urbanization, industrialization, mass literacy, the extension of the franchise, and the development of states ostensibly committed for the first time to the improvement of their peoples, new social movements mobilized in relation to both that commitment and to grievances that arose from the rapid processes of social change that were taking place. Through a range of tactics focused on displaying their numbers, such as demonstrations, petitioning, and protests, these new social movements, which claimed to speak for some or all of the people, asserted themselves towards the new states. These were not generally movements that aimed to overthrow or replace the new states or their rulers, but rather to influence their policies or practices. Although social movements did sometimes find themselves in conflictual or confrontational relationships with rulers, modern political systems were supposedly characterized by their capacity to incorporate dissenting movements and enable them to influence policy. Social movements should, according to Tilly, therefore be understood as part of the panoply of the modern state, with its burgeoning democratic spaces and opportunities.2
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels provided a broader concept of social movements. They used the concept to describe revolutions, trade unionism, the struggle for suffrage, resistance to imperial occupation, and the emergence of alternative and utopian projects and ideas. These processes of revolt and protest could be conceptualized as a single totality that included the working classes, but also “plebs,” the “poor,” and others engaged in the “social question”—that is, the struggles and lived experiences of the exploited and the oppressed in their entirety. “Social movement” thus described an entire space of political and social contestation involving trade unionism, labor politics, national independence, and “localized” forms of oppression. Marx and Engels privileged the politics of the working class as holding the potential to solve the social question by challenging capitalist exploitation, but they saw class struggle as only one element of a differentiated social movement.3
Marx and Engels were in this respect consistent in their support of any group that fought oppression, including in what they regarded as feudal or “backward” societies. Both wrote extensively on the revolt of indigenous communities against imperial and national oppression. Their support for struggles in India is typical. During the Indian Revolt of 1857, Marx praised the “great revolt” and Engels wrote at length on the military tactics that the insurgents might use to defeat the British.4 This resistance to colonialism was “celebrated in the same lyrical cadences as they would deploy in celebrating the Parisian communards.”5 The struggle in India and the emancipation of the English working class, for example, were therefore both part of the “social movement in general.”
It should already be clear from analyses of such movements that the social forces that existed within them, the ideas and activities they generated, and the outcomes they brought about varied enormously. This clearly demonstrated that social movements were and are inherently heterogeneous and contradictory, tending to incorporate a number of movements or elements as part of a differentiated totality.