Capitalism in Africa: mutating capitalist relations and social formations

Abstract

SUMMARY This debate examines the question of whether African societies are capitalist or not. The debate is currently taking place on the ROAPE website (www.roape.net), addressing the question of whether African societies have persistently managed to elude the irresistible forces of capitalism.

Common Challenges for All? A Critical Engagement with the Emerging Vision for Post‐pandemic Development Studies

“…This is a significant weakness given that across much of the global South, the idea that there are signs of a move towards a post-capitalist future is at odds with and detached from the reality of an expansion, deepening and intensification of capitalism, i.e. a highly institutionalized, locked-in neoliberal and often neocolonial capitalism (Cahill and Konings, 2017;Chitonge, 2018;McMichael, 2017;Wiegratz et al, 2018). 21 In this context, we would instead urge the importance of returning to and advancing -rather than jettisoningintellectual lineages anchored in the non-Truman understanding of development as a project of Southern emancipation from colonial, imperial and structural subordination to Northern capitalist logics and exploitation.…”

Engaging Stakeholders Through Corporate Political Activity: Insights From MNE Nonmarket Strategy in an Emerging African Market

“…Nonmarket strategy, as manifest in CPA, hence emerges again as a fundamentally important dimension of strategic management, with the potential to shape the version of the free market economy most suitable in Africa. In relating with diverse actors at various institutional levels, from sub-national to national and ultimately to supra-national and global, and discovering how to best align market and nonmarket strategies, various MNEs were effectively contributing to constructing an emerging African capitalism or a free market model adapted to local conditions (Chitonge, 2017). A key element in this model was the co-existence of both formal and informal institutions in a way that related with highly informal cultures (Williams et al, 2017).…”

Africa's Next Debt Crisis: A Relational Comparison of Chinese and Western Lending to Zambia

“…Thus, Zambia acts as a signal case for a wider discussion of the relations of force surrounding national external debt while we remain attentive to the specific Zambian conjuncture and avoid the reductive Africa‐is‐a‐country approach (Faloyin 2022): without positioning Africa as peripheral to the functioning of financial circuits but situating Zambia as a significant actor within a global “whole” (Hart 2006). Theorising the extension of capitalist social relations in Africa as a uniform project would be to understate the contingent see‐saw nature of economic logics that often seem contradictory on the surface (Chitonge 2018; Ouma 2017). Thus, as Corbridge (1993:197) notes elsewhere, a “case‐by‐case approach to debt management is misleading insofar as it fixes upon one symptom of this deeper malaise and not upon others”.…”