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........

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