‘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.