Photograph Source: 内閣広報室｜Cabinet Public Affairs Office – CC BY 4.0

At the close of a year in which Africa’s underlying economic problems continue to worsen, the Johannesburg G20 summit on November 22-23 utterly failed in its mandate to cut the continent’s foreign debt and assure that appropriate climate-finance grants will be available. Nevertheless, even while the world economy’s value chains suffer disfigurement thanks to Donald Trump’s whimsical tariffs, ambitions for Africa’s long-overdue industrialization are regularly articulated based either on copying an East Asian sweatshop-based strategy replete with Special Economic Zones, given the continent’s large, young, desperate workforce; or on adding value to local raw materials.

In both cases, hope is sometimes expressed that, as U.S., British and European Union (EU) aid shrinks and trade barriers rise, the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) economies will come to the rescue, especially because a benign sponsor – Beijing – is standing by, quite capable of reversing current trends.

Writing in early December, Tricontinental research institute leader Vijay Prashad recalled how, “At the 2015 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Chinese government and fifty African governments discussed the problem of economic development and industrialization. Since 1945, the question of African industrialization has been on the table but has not advanced due to the neocolonial structure that has prevented any serious structural transformation.”

True, colonial-era and immediate post-colonial African dependency relations persisted thanks to Western economies’ power over the continent’s exports, over global commodity markets and over nascent value chains through the fragmentation and extension of corporate production systems. Only a few sites of durable capital accumulation emerged in Africa via productive forces associated with manufacturing.

Prashad explains: “The most industrialized countries on the African continent are South Africa, Morocco, and Egypt, but the entire continent accounts for less than 2% of world manufacturing value added and only about 1% of global trade in manufactures. That is why it was so significant for FOCAC to put industrial policy at the heart of its agenda; its 2015 Johannesburg Declaration affirmed that ‘industrialization is an imperative to ensure Africa’s independent and sustainable development’.”

These are fine aspirations – and they are also expressed regularly in African elite meetings with Western imperial powers, such as in Angola last month when 76 leaders of the EU and African Union met for a major summit aiming to “Strengthen continental and regional economic integration and accelerate Africa’s industrial development.” Yada yada.

In practice, such sentiments tend to be overwhelmed by the capitalist mode of production’s laws of motion; today, especially by the unregulated, increasingly desperate drive for profit and commodity access by Chinese firms. A new book makes that case (with free download here): The Material Geographies of the Belt and Road Initiative, edited by Elia Apostolopoulou, Han Cheng, Jonathan Silver and Alan Wiig.

(For dialectical curiosity, here’s a completely different approach, from a neoliberal podcaster arguing that China’s ‘curse of overproduction’ is not capitalism’s fault but is due to “government’s heavy intervention, weak market mechanisms, and lack of legal frameworks perpetuate inefficiencies, with local governments chasing GDP through subsidies and projects.”)

In a more critical – but nationalistic (and non-solidaristic) – spirit, one of Prashad’s leading allies here in Johannesburg, Irvin Jim of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), made a heartfelt appeal last month against “the dumping of cars from India and China” whose automakers have increased their market share here by a factor of 25 since 2018.

Hence, insists Jim, “it is about time that we must increase tariffs.” His grievances about massive job losses caused by imports – to be discussed in detail in the next essay – suggest Prashad is not yet attuned to deindustrialization damage done by the Chinese state and its capitalists in recent years. Moreover, at a time the West has shrunk its own (inflation-adjusted) aid-debt-investment packages, the FOCAC commitments made in 2015 – amounting to about $22 per African citizen – were chopped nearly in half by 2024.

Relentless Western abuse of Africa

Of course, Washington should mainly be blamed for the continent’s most current wave of social misery and economic degradation, which in the second half of 2025 contributed to Gen Z social uprisings in Kenya, Tunisia, Morocco, Madagascar, Zambia and Tanzania. The mix of Western economic attacks on Africa and greedy resource grabbing should not disguise how imperial interest at the White House and State Department is waning: Trump last week recalled 15 career-professional U.S. ambassadors from African countries, to be replaced by America-First political hacks.

Exceptions to that disinterest in Africa may arise, such as the Lobito Corridor extraction route for $2 trillion worth of minerals to be spirited out from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) via an Angolan port. In a ‘peace deal’ earlier this month brokered by Trump between corruption-accused DRC leader Felix Tshisekedi and Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame – one immediately violated – the U.S. president announcedhe would soon be “sending some of our biggest and greatest companies over to the two countries… we’re going to take out some of the rare earth and take out some of the assets and pay… and everybody’s going to make a lot of money.”

Except the African people and ecologies, yet again victims of what can be termed ‘unequal ecological exchange.’

Already in February, Trump and his ex-South African sidekick Elon Musk had wiped out most U.S. emergency food, medical and climate-related aid to Africa, with a special cut for all South African contracts. Washington’s $64 billion US Agency for International Development was shuttered by Musk, fed “into the wood chipper,” leaving many millions of lives at risk (although some AIDS medicines spending was later revived).

Then came Trump’s devastating tariffs – in February, April and again in August – followed by the September demise of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) which since 2000 had given dozens of African countries duty-free access to U.S. markets. Notwithstanding a deeper context of dependency relations associated with AGOA – for as political economist Rick Rowden points out, “gains were largely due to African exports of petroleum and other minerals, not manufactured goods” – these latter trade-curtailing processes were exceptionally damaging, wiping out 87% of auto exports from South Africa in the first half of 2025.

The World Bank concluded of 2025’s tariff chaos, “industry-level impacts may be significant in global value chain–linked activities, notably, textiles and apparel as well as footwear (Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, and Mauritius) and automotive and components (South Africa)… Loss of the AGOA would sharply reduce exports to the United States. On average, exports would decline by 39% if a nation were suspended from AGOA benefits.”

(A House of Representatives bill may gain support to resume AGOA in 2026 but without the main industrial beneficiary, South Africa, due to Trump’s irrational hostility. Exports of autos, steel, aluminium and many agricultural products to U.S. have collapsed.)

Moreover, other Western sources of demand for African products will also soon decline, according to the World Bank, thanks to Europe’s “new regulatory measures, such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and the EU Deforestation Regulation, [which] impose stringent compliance requirements on exporters of cement, metals, and agricultural products” starting in early 2026. The Bank admits both that a “global shift toward ‘friendshoring’ in strategic industries, risks marginalizing African suppliers” – thus undermining its export-led ‘growth’ mantra.

On the class-struggle front, the Bank continues, “The growth of the labor share in national income registered a negative contribution in 2000–19: it declined at an annual rate of 0.1%. This decline reflects the adoption of more capital-intensive technologies, increased participation in global value chains, reduced (relative) bargaining power of workers, and greater market power of large firms in concentrated product markets.”

Too much is being produced, mainly by China

Still, the overarching crisis affecting the world economy, not just Africa’s, can be termed the ‘overaccumulation of capital,’ which Karl Marx had in Das Kapital identified as the core internal problem capitalism faces, due to the tendency to overproduce relative to market size. From that process, we can understand geopolitical tensions much better.

As world-systems sociologist Ho-fung Hung recently suggested, “Today’s intensifying........

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