The true meaning of Renaissance

If the argument that globalistion is a deliberate policy by the Empire has credence, then it is obvious that there is no renaissance for Africa from within the capitalist system.

Those who seek a capitalist paradise live in an eternal false hope. Africa’s renaissance and capitalism are inherently contradictory. To be sure, capitalism has opened the door to a few thousand millionaires (even billionaires) in and from Africa, but for the vast majority of its population there is no pot of gold at the end the capitalist rainbow.

Such good luck, for the majority of Africa’s population, is ruled out historically. How is it possible for Africa to redeem itself within the capitalist nexus when the capitalists from the industrialised countries are themselves in crisis? How is it possible for Africa to win in a world where the downward pressure on profits compel corporate capital to seek its own delivery by broadening and deepening their control over Africa’s markets, resources and, indeed, even governments?

The alternative conception of Africa’s renaissance lies in Africa taking its own destiny in its own hands. Whether this will take the form of socialism or some other system, nobody knows. It is foolish to be dogmatic about this, for the first task of African leadership is to liberate the people from the forces of capital-led globalisation and oppression. This is the true meaning of renaissance. When Europe emerged out of a thousand years of darkness under the rule of a feudal system backed by the Church doctrine, its renaissance (beginning in the fifteenth century) was rooted in challenging the entire system of exploitation and oppression and exposing the Aristotelian systems of thought to the refreshing winds of science and reason. It is ironic that when NEPAD seeks "renaissance" for Africa, it is not on the basis of challenging the received body of thought or the system of the hegemonic Empire, but on the basis of integrating into that system even further. What kind of "renaissance" is that?

Globalisation as a deliberate policy by the Empire All systems sustain themselves primarily on the basis of an ideological construct. Force, or the exercise of state power, is used mostly in the periphery of society, and mostly to suppress social dissidence. For the large part, the marginalised sections of a society (and this applies equally to national and global societies) accept their situation either because they are made to believe that it is part of the most “natural” or “inevitable” order of things, or because they believe that they have a “chance” or an “opportunity” to benefit from the system, or because they give up trying to challenge the system. Thus, for example, globalisation is fronted by its ideologues as “inevitable”, or, like gravity, as a part of the “natural” order of things.

But globalisation is not what its apologists like us to believe it is. It is one of the principal means for the system of capitalism to get itself out of its recurrent cyclical and systemic crisis of profitability. One of the clearest manifestations of this crisis is the inherent tendency within capitalism to replace labour with capital (i.e. capitalisation of production), which has a twofold effect. The first is that it leaves millions of people unemployed; capitalism is not the answer, at the global level, to the crisis of unemployment that is built within the system itself. The second effect of this tendency is that since capital forms a larger and larger proportion of production in relation to labour, there is a continuous downward pressure on profits per unit of capital.

Globally, capitalists seek to contain this downward pressure on profits through several measures, some in their own countries, such as dismissing workers or through mergers and acquisitions, but a very large part of the "corrective" actions against declining profits are taken in relation to the countries of the South. The dominant capitalists use their control of global production and marketing to pry open the markets of the South in order to conquer those markets for their own goods and services using the power of the dominant states and rule-making bodies such as the IMF and the WTO. They also use these agencies to liberalise capital markets so that their capital can move freely, unhindered by restrictions that the formerly colonised countries might want to introduce to generate indigenous growth.

The battle in the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF is all about markets for goods, services and investment capital. In the process, the dominant capital, the dominant states and the multilateral rule making and rule-enforcement agencies seek to limit the freedom of the countries of the south and constrain their policy options. Their aim is nothing short of bringing the countries of the South (that had gained a degree of independence from the 1960s to the 1990s by serving global capital) back to the domain of the rule of global capital.