‘Commerce and Coalitions’ II: Cold War-era Southern Africa

In my previous post on Ronald Rogowski’s Commerce and Coalitions, I said that I would look at the somewhat peculiar case of Cold War-era Southern Africa and try to apply what I know about that region in that era.

I will admit I am no expert on Cold War-era Southern Africa, but reading Commerce and Coalitions it has come to increasingly strike me as a peculiar, even sui generis, case that Rogowski undoubtedly could have covered with the information he had in 1987 to 1989 when the book was written.

Following from Thomas Aquinas McMahon in Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons of Annual Flows and Peak Discharges, we can define Southern Africa politically as Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa, Swaziland (now Eswatini) and Zambia. By Rogowski’s criteria, the entirety of Southern Africa was (and is) a backward region with very high land/labor ratios, in which only agriculture (and mining) would benefit from free trade. [Malawi (formerly Nyasaland), politically linked to Rhodesia before independence, would qualify as labour-rich, for its uncorrected land/labor ratio is only one-third the lowest in Southern Africa proper.] Under expanding trade, it would be expected that traditionalist politics would come to dominate the region in opposition to the urban sector.

However, despite Rogowski classifying the Cold War era as a period of trade expansion, this was not applicable to Southern Africa. Rather, the region — excluding Botswana — was during this era dominated by externally imposed sanctions that severely restricted trade. No region has been subject to sanctions to a comparable degree, and apart from Israel no region has had so long a period of collapsing trade in modern times. In fact, omitting regions unexplored or permanently closed off, the prolonged contraction of trade in Cold War-era Southern Africa is unparalleled since the declining Roman Empire. Under a condition of restricted trade, we expect that agriculture and mining would lose ground to the urban sectors of capital and labour.

Rogowski argues in his discussion of sub-Saharan Africa after World War II (page 117) that the basic political cleavage between the peasantry and the urban sector tended to favour the latter. He gives no examples for Southern Africa, but here the patterns were completely different. In Botswana — both the most land-abundant nation and the only one participating in the postwar expansion of trade — we did observe the predicted landed control of politics and hegemony over capital and labour. As David Ariel Steinberg noted in his 2010 thesis ‘The Politics of Exchange Rate Valuation in Developing Countries’, Botswana’s politics since independence has been completely dominated by cattle exporters (page 223) with urbanites having no influence. Elsewhere, sanctions imposed by the Eastern bloc and Non-Aligned Movement against the Portuguese Estado Novo (who ruled Angola and Mozambique until 1975), apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia blocked trade, and a completely different pattern prevailed. Whereas capital and labour would have been expected to ally, labour actually became radicalised, and Marxist parties (MPLA, FRELIMO) emerged as the chief opposition to the Estado Novo’s rule. In South Africa and Rhodesia, there was major radicalisation of black workers, and although the illegal Communist Party did not emerge as the focus it did in the Estado Novo colonies, the imprisoned Robert Mugabe was at this stage strongly influenced by Marxism. Kautsky’s 1968 prediction agrees with Marxist-Leninist parties being strongest in the Estado Novo colonies where the colonial state was closely linked with the Catholic Church, but even elsewhere the militancy of labour is quite different from the eastern areas of the declining Roman Empire, and far beyond what happened in Australia and the Western Hemisphere during the collapse of trade after World War I.

This radicalisation of workers is unique for a land-rich society, and quite different from the most land-rich parts of the declining Roman Empire (although these were not nearly so relatively land-rich as Southern Africa, and their decline in trade smaller than in the western Empire). The most logical conclusion is that, because the falling trade was driven by external sanctions, workers could identify with the foreign sanctioners rather than the local rulers. This permitted powerful radicalisation in the form of unified internal and external opposition to Southern Africa’s white rulers, and support for continued blocking of trade. Capitalists, rather than moderating the radicalisation of workers, were largely passive. One might conclude that capital and labour did not cooperate because they were racially divided, which further strengthens the case for effectiveness of sanctions whose purpose was to strengthen the ability of blacks to protest against white minority rule.

Two significant final points:

1. unlike Cold War Southern Africa, even longer-lasting Arab sanctions have affected Israel in the predicted way:
• land in the form of synagogues and rural communes has been strengthened at the expense of Israel’s abundant factors of capital and labour
• Israel very strongly resembles medieval Europe in its response to prolonged declining trade in a capital- and labour-rich, land-poor country — religion and agriculture have been strengthened
• as I noted in my original review, medieval Europe and modern Israel illustrate how powerful religion in a labour-rich society requires isolation from world markets, as otherwise labour will largely eliminate religion’s influence
2. similar efforts at sanctions against other land-rich, capital- and labour-poor societies in Iran, Libya, Sudan and Syria have not had the same effect as in Southern Africa. There are several possible reasons for this:
1. these nations are less labour-poor and more capital-poor, so sanctions radicalise owners of capital much more than they do owners of labour
2. the sanctions have been imposed by fewer countries and thus are less effective at reducing trade (in these cases, few nations have joined the United States in imposing sanctions)
3. the political influence of the Gulf States where labour is devoid of political and social rights blocks labour when it gains from reduced exposure to trade
• in this context the Gulf States absorb labour even from relatively land-rich adjacent nations, weakening the organisational ability of those nations’ workers

Which of the three prevents sanctions being effective probably varies between those four nations, and is beyond the scope of this post.

A fascinating and revealing book despite its age

Recently, through an accidental discovery, I have been heavily reading a 1989 book by still-active Professor Ronald Rogowski titled Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affects Domestic Political Alignments.

Ronald Rogowski’s 1989 Commerce and Coalitions remains a widely-read and very revealing textbook despite its age and absence of updates

Rogowski, plainly, argues that trade affects politics by increasing the power of owners of abundant factors, and decreasing the power of owners of scarce factors. Contrariwise, falling trade benefits owners of scarce factors and hurts owners of abundant factors. He also demonstrates that, fundamentally, countries and societies divide in two ways into four groups:

1. land/labor ratio
2. endowment of capital

Rogowski argues then that political cleavages depend on:

1. whether capital allies with land or labor
2. chiefly, whether each group favour freer trade or more restricted trade
• Rogowski only considers cases where trade is restricted endogenously by tariffs or other controls, or unsystematically by dangers to travel. Instances of exogenous trade controls as found with Israel or Cold War-era Southern Africa are not discussed

Rogowski does a good job of illustrating his conclusions over varying periods since Classical Greece. The details are done well, and the necessary statistics of relation of population to productive land are explained very well. Commerce and Coalitions illustrates the contrast in development between humid Eurasia on the one hand and the Western hemisphere on the other, with militant socialism being confined to Eurasia. Rogowski argues that socialism cannot ordinarily develop in a land-abundant economy because workers lose economically from expanding trade and will tend towards nationalism and imperialism. Socialism ordinarily develops in labour-abundant economies where workers gain economically from expanding trade and (attempt to) translate this power into expanded political influence at the expense of landowners, mineowners and priesthoods. Rogowski contradicts Karl Marx when he says that militant socialist movements are extremely unlikely in advanced countries, because  labour either:

1. loses from expanding trade if land-rich or
2. is too allied with capital if labour-rich

Following John Kautsky’s Social Democracy and the Aristocracy: Why Socialist Labor Movements Developed in Some Countries and Not in Others, one might argue that in advanced labour-rich countries militant socialism can develop via opposition to land, as occurred in northwestern Europe in the late nineteenth century. However, Rogowski may be correct that without a significant priestly power to oppose, worker militancy is unlikely in a labour-rich advanced nation. Rogowski also believes militant socialist movements will fail to develop anywhere during periods of falling trade. This also opposes the predictions of many Marxists who see militant socialism as most likely during economic crises.

There are some interesting details that are not often heard — for instance how abolitionism in the United States was necessarily linked with protection and how Nazism and Fascism gained their primary support from landowners and peasants who gained via loss of competition from Australia, Africa and the Western Hemisphere.

Two flaws in the book are that:

1. it has not been updated to take into account the expansion of trade following the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe, which was much larger and more widespread than after World War II, and
2. owners of mineral resources are largely neglected in favour of owners of farmland, although typically in land-rich economies owners of mines are more intensely affected by changing trade than those of farmland
1. in this context one wonders whether land/labor ratios could be adjusted to take into account the abundance of minerals as well as agricultural land
2. in most cases this will amplify differences in land endowment, but in a few — for example New Zealand which is very farmland-rich but very mineral-poor — there is opposition and this is extremely tough to quantify
3. it ignores that for most of history no regions have been abundant in both capital and land.
• this was the case throughout the period from before the decline of the Roman Empire until the late nineteenth century
  
• instead of Rogowski’s square-shaped Figure 1.2 (page 8), I would prefer a diamond-shaped spectrum that permits a reduction to the three-way division found in the long sixteenth century and declining Roman Empire of
1. capital-rich
2. land-rich
3. neither capital- nor land-rich
   
• the book also fails to discuss why capital- and land-rich, labour-poor regions were absent for so long
  

In addition to the several questions explained clearly in chapter six, one could add several more questions made easier to answer:

1. why negligible religion in humid Eurasia since World War II, and
   why has secularism triumphed over every religion except Islam (as per Be Careful with Muhammad by the late Shabbir Akhtar, almost perfectly contemporary with Commerce and Coalitions)?
1. religious institutions — a component of “land” as defined by Rogowski — lose from expanding trade in land-poor societies to workers who minimally resent religion’s power, and at worst see its mythology as primitive superstition holding workers back from political empowerment
   
2. Islam — unlike any other major religion —is based in extremely land-rich Saudi Arabia, and most Muslim nations in Central Asia and North Africa are also very land-rich. Thus rising trade has enriched and strengthened Islamic institutions even as it mortally weakens other religions
   
• the reactionary character of Christian churches whose power base in Europe was dependent on local agriculture’s isolation from world markets may have prevented Christianity gaining comparable influence in land-rich Australia and the Western Hemisphere
3. Rogowski’s thesis implies that religion cannot maintain significant influence in labor-rich societies except under falling trade, as occurred with Christianity in medieval Europe, Buddhism in pre-industrial Asia, and Judaism in Israel today
2. following from 1), why extreme isolationism in Tokugawa Japan and Korea during same era:
1. these nations were and remain the most land-poor and labor-rich in the world, thus any opening of trade will radicalise owners of labor much more than even in the European cases discussed by Alexander Gerschenkron in Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective
2. the ruling class(es)’ dependence on isolation from world markets was so great that strong states were needed to maintain the desired isolation
   
3. thus, in East Asia, a tradition of strong states was built up before forcible opening to the outside world
3. why did the black civil rights movement in the US emerge when it did?
1. as James Löwen showed in Sundown Towns, black Americans were de facto excluded from ownership of the abundant factors of capital and land by local laws effective everywhere in the United States
2. expanding trade, by decreasing the value of the only commodity blacks could own — labour — thus weakened black protest capacity and increased the ability of white Americans to discriminate against blacks
3. contracting trade thus strengthened black protest capacity by increasing the value of the products of their labour, which under free trade would be imported
   
4. the black civil rights movement can thus be viewed as a delayed by-product of the collapse of world trade following World War I.
• one can argue that the strength of any black civil rights movement is proportional to how rapidly trade declines
  
5. the gains of black Americans were for the great majority largely reversed once trade expanded rapidly — leading to mass incarceration and growing police brutality — further confirming the dependence of even a partly successful black civil rights movement upon isolation from the competition of international trade

Despite its flaws and lack of updates, Commerce and Coalitions is a very worthwhile read that makes somewhat mysterious facets of history easily understandable.

I intend to write two more articles, one interpreting the somewhat peculiar case of Cold War-era Southern Africa and one looking at the problems of capital- and land-rich, labour-poor economies.