Multinational corporations and capitalist development: a critical discourse in microeconomics

1. Introduction
The first multinational corporations were the East Indian Company established by the British in 1600 and the Dutch East Indian Company established in 1602 (Cf: Bowen et al, 2002; Glenn, 2007). These started as private corporations chartered by the states of their respective countries. These early multinational corporations were not only fully supported by their states and administered other lands under their countries’ flags, when the Dutch company ran into bankruptcy and would be liquidated, its debts were socialized, i.e. borne by the Dutch state, while its profits had always been private (Cf: Ricklefs, 1991).
Since their not so humble beginnings four hundred years ago, multinational corporations have been a key feature of capitalist development as it spreads its fangs across the world. The globalization discourse in the past few decades has however given added fillip to the need for a deepened understanding of what multinational corporations are, what they do and how they fit into the framework of capitalism as a whole.
This is not surprising and is not just about the “discourse” of globalization. The “global reach” of multinational corporations represents the arm with which capital breaks down all walls, moulding the entirety of the world in its image as Marx and Engels asserted in the Communist Manifesto. It is pertinent thus, to examine if despite the century and a half separating today’s globalization from the Communist Manifesto, multinational corporations represent a qualitatively different organization from the most minute of firms.
In this essay, I intend to contribute to the critical discourse on multinational corporations and capitalist development, within dimensions of the discipline of microeconomics. The thesis of the paper is hinged on an assertion that multinational corporations epitomize the essence of capitalist development. Despite the complexities of their forms, processes, operations and relations, they are and remain the firm theatre for the production and reproduction of the socioeconomic relations for the exploitation of labour
I do thus present the following propositions:
• Capitalism is of necessity a multi/transnational phenomenon, the relations of production and exploitation inherent in it operate essentially within the same locus at both its unit level and within the transnational reality of its materiality
• Multinational corporations are not just a peculiar feature of capitalism and capitalist development at a particular point in time. They might evolve and differ in some aspects from other types of firms, but remain essentially typical in their origins, determinant dynamics and goals
• The “free market” is a myth; capitalist development rests implicitly on power relations situated within administrative structures which rather become explicit in the market, as against originating from within it.
The implications of our point of departure impinge on the perspective of multinational corporations expansion in the age of capitalism’s neoliberal globalization which situates this in structural changes such as the falling transaction costs associated with transportation and communication, dominance of new technologies in the production process and the development of new financial instruments and a concomitant retreat of the state (see Strange 1996).
Multinational corporations continued expansion, dominance and role as the captains of the capitalist economy rests squarely within the logic of capitalist production’s trend towards monopoly and corporate-organized production and trade.
In the light of the above, the approach taken by this study is that of a microeconomic analysis situated within the post-sceptic paradigm on globalization (see Martell 2007) which takes note of the factual reality of globalization, without losing sight of the fact that with capitalist development, as an old axiom goes: “the more things change the more they remain the same”.
2. Operational definition of MNCs
It might be necessary to make a clarification on the term “multinational corporations”, which is used throughout this essay before proceeding with its analysis. The term “multinational corporations” was coined by the Harvard Multinational Enterprises Project mid-last century and soon became largely accepted in describing what authors like Penrose, and Vernon had described earlier as “international corporations” (see O’Brien and Williams, 2007). In the 1970s and subsequently with both the preference of the United Nations and the spread of neo-Gramscian perspectives on International Political Economy, the term transnational corporation, became popular in describing firms which operated in more than one country (see for example, Sklair, 2002). In the cause of this essay, for the avoidance of doubts we shall use the term multinational corporations, to refer to this category of firms which to borrow from Dickens (1994) have “the power to coordinate and control operations in more than one country, even if it does not own them”. In doing this we take note of but choose to avoid the “unsettled disputes” on possible differences that “distinguish between MNCs, global enterprises, international business organizations, transnational corporations and so on” identified by Persaud (1980,15), due to this analysis’ limitations of space and time.
3. MNCs as firms
Multinational corporations are first and foremost firms. They are administrative organizations of persons with the primary purpose of valorizing in-puts, towards appropriating profits accruing from the sales of the commodities or services that they produce in the market.
Penrose in her seminal work on the growth of the firm considers the possibility that large firms might need to be considered as separate species even if of the same genus as the traditional smaller business firm dominant in advanced capitalist economies before the middle of the 20th century (1959, 19). Her position however does not vitiate the fact that firms they still are, even with such species-complexities.
Chandler would further the horizons of this perspective stressing the importance of scale and scope as determinant features of industrial capitalism. Not surprisingly it could be argued, he thus identifies “organizational capabilities” as the “core dynamic” of the firm in this form of the capitalist firm (1994, 593 – 595).
The firms with the largest scope and scale, of course, are the multinational firms. Their organizational capabilities within and across the frontiers of states can not be disputed. Indeed, it is not our intention to do this. Rather, it does buttress our position that capitalism and capitalist development can not be understood strictly within the paradigm of the free market which multinational corporations and the neo-conservative ideologues of neoliberalism hold forth as a mantra.
The Schumpeterian argument of “creative destruction” where competition over innovation and not a market-driven, competition over prices prevails gives an inkling to our position (Schumpeter, 1942). Quite instructive though in buttressing the fact that a world dominated by multinational corporations is not genuinely one of a “free market” and indeed that with the capitalist firm as the site of production of commodities, the market is constructed can be averred from Richardson’s perspective in “Organization of Industry” (1972).
As Richardson points out, the perspective of firms as “islands of planned co-ordination in a sea of market relations” is quite misleading . He further rightly argues that “firms are not islands but are linked together in patterns of co-operation and affiliation” (p. 895). Planned coordination as he points out “does not stop at the frontiers of the individual firm but can be effected through co-operation between firms” (Ibid).
Considering the wealth MNCs control across the whole world, a picture thus arises, whence the perspectives above are taken into consideration. This is a picture of the co-operation of the personifications of capital across borders with the market as being subordinate to the aims of this co-operation. The aim of this co-operation is quite clearly that of enhanced and enhancing of profits. The market is thus not the invisible divine god it is claimed to be. It amounts to nought but the hand-maiden for a mystified administration of an ever-concentrating regime of capital.
The transnationalizing firm
We have looked at multinational corporations from the general perspective of being a firm-organization. This might not adequately address the questions of why and how, some firms transnationalize, while others do not.
Peter Dickens (ibid) carries out an incisive study on “transnational corporations” identifying them as “the primary ‘movers’ and ‘shapers’ of the global economy” (p. 106). Pointing out the significance of transnational corporations not only in shaping the contemporary global economy, but precisely because of that in undermining the autonomy of nation-states; he presents possible macro and micro level explanations for why firms “transnationalize”. We shall be concerned here with the possible micro-level propositions made, in line with the thrust of our analysis.
The micro level approaches which he engages with, focus on the firm. The seminal works of Hymer (1976) and Dunning (2003) served as the substrate for his analysis.
Hymer reveals the fact that market imperfections which firms with the requisite resources to exploit can find is actually at the heart of their transnationalizing quest. This for us is indeed very instructive as it runs counter to the oft held litany of governments in the global south that seek foreign direct investment, supposedly on the altar of the market, while what they actually tend to do is to bend the supposed freedom of the market in the interest of multinational corporations.
The “eclectic” paradigm of Dunning, who sees the possible challenges to global capitalism as moral and is concerned with making it a good phenomenon, is nonetheless insightful as well. It presents three conditions as being conditional for a firm to transnationalize. These are: ownership-specific advantage; inherent internalization of such advantage such that it is best wielded directly by the firm as against leasing it for example; location-specific-factors. A cursory look at each of these shows that they boil down not to a submission to the market, but rather to their providing interstices within the market framework within which extra-market powers and capacities of such concerned firms are best utilized towards the valorization of capital.
The multinational corporation’s oligopolistic characteristic also fuses with an increasing dominance of finance market in maintaining capitalist imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism (see Lenin, 1916). This macro might of the multinational corporations economically which is translated into political might would amount to nought if MNCs do not wield much more than only power at the micro level. The continued exploitation of the labour of the immense majority of the population by an infinitesimal minority cannot be wrought without the forging of hegemony at the workplace.
Burawoy (1982) gives a succinct analysis of how with the age of monopoly capitalism, this phenomenon that inheres in the firm, becomes the more strengthened. A closer look at this might be beyond the purview of this analysis. The crux of his position which we concur with, however, is in highlighting the fact that the production process not only results in the production of use value and valorization but as well manufactures the consent of the working class who see their fates as being tied in with the continued existence of the firm and thus capitalism as a going concern.
MNCs comprising a distinct set of transnational processes, activities and structures in the labour process subordinated to capital accumulation and the profit motive of the bourgeoisie, but being basically an epitome of the fundamental category of the production relations within the micro-unit wherein such relations abide, i.e. the firm, thus become an engine room for transnationalizing consent. This however also makes them sites for contestation in a global world by counter-hegemonic forces who seek, a brave new world
Conclusion
In this essay, I have argued basically that while multinational corporations might in size and complexity be considered as variants of sorts, of non-MNC capitalist enterprise, the same logic and interests binds it. This line of argumentation never the less does not lose sight of the variants of types within the fold of MNCs as a category, but rather abstracts from this towards its micro-analytical pursuit.
The aim of the analysis has been to underscore the continuity within the not merely seeming, but indeed changing realities, of our present age of globalization which MNCs are “primary movers and shakers” in and of. This qualitative continuity in scope and scale, geographically and organizationally is one of the continued and indeed enhanced exploitation of labour by capital and the organization of the labour process within and across borders to engender this.
The analysis’ contribution to micro-theory has been largely economic but notes the sociological dimensions that make such economic materiality possible within an equally micro-level operationalizing of the theory of hegemony. With this we summarily captured both the most pervasive danger of the multinational firm to humanity and the hope that spurts from its transnationalizing additive feature on its essential sameness to capital’s primary unit of domicile and expansion, the firm.
Multinational corporations as firms, in summing up we must say, present the most visible personification of capital for organized labour and indeed all forces that believe another world is possible to confront in making such world come to birth, building from our communities, the shop-floor of the firm and to the transnationalized global world.

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Financialization, Corporate Governance and Labour: A Critical Introduction

1. Introduction
On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers, which had held over $600 million worth of assets, collapsed, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States . This marked a turning point in world history, similar to the Wall Street Crash of October 29, 1929, that had signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. Once again the material crisis of the world capitalist economy has brought human kind to a point of transition where ideas and forces behind these engage in an attempt to forge or re-forge a new order, re-formulate policies and construct new (or re-hashed) paradigms for the disciplines and practice of economics, politics, finance and international relations.
Concepts and processes of ‘financialization’, ‘corporate governance’ and ‘globalization’ which have come to assume front burner positions in the last thirty years of neo-liberal globalization of capitalism, now take on even more critical importance. The different views on what they entail and the consequences of these have not only been at play in the pre-September 15, 2008 world (particularly in the two years preceding it, when the financial cycle’s downturn threw up its cash crunch beginnings), they will shape what steps will or could be taken in attempts to salvage the world from the consuming aspects of capitalism’s “animal spirits”, to use Keynes words.
In this essay, we intend to conduct a critical introductory analysis of financialization, corporate governance, and labour. Our standpoint is Marxist and thus a critique of the very logic of the dynamics of these three variables as elements of an eternal order, as capitalism as not always been and will not always be society’s mode of production.
While taking note of the merits of Keynesian and Post-Keynesian formulations and the acceptance by these traditions of the inherent instability of capitalism , we do not share their optimism on the possibility of a lasting regulation of financial markets, resolution of the structural or cyclical crises of capitalism or the taming of the beast of capital for the overall good of society. Every regulation, de-regulation, or re-regulation of the capitalist economy at conjunctures of transitions in history has been merely re-arrangements in some form or the other of the relations between state, capital, and society; ultimately to the benefit of capital as a social going concern. This is to say in other words that; capitalists and their representatives to defend the capitalist order have always executed these.
We are of the view that despite its seeming intent, on the face of it, to make possible a more just, if not an entirely just society possible, as a major bye-product of its effective demand quest, Keynesianism suffers from deeper theoretical flaws that mark bourgeois economics as a whole. Onimode (1985, 5 – 13) captures these succinctly as “the problem of paradigm” and “the methodological defects” .
At the heart of our thesis is the argument that capital and indeed the capital accumulation process are not merely, things in themselves. They are social relations driven by competition within and between the capitalist class in the same countries and globally. The institutions of governance at the corporate and broader societal levels are mechanisms fashioned within the crucible of this reality. The only value-adding factor in the process of capital accumulation, however, is labour. Thus social wealth creation is dependent on labour employed or more properly put labour power exploited to appropriate surplus value (Cf: Marx, 1976, 283 – 306). This is the source of profit.
Profit is thus a function of value added only by labour. This has no meaning for the capitalist who considers labour as just another ‘factor of production’, in his quest for an ever-expansive accumulation of capital. Investment rests primarily on the profit-motive over and above the real value creating necessity for sustained capitalist production. The replacement of regulation with de-regulation and liberalist re-regulation that stir the jinni of financial markets once again is always just around the corner for capitalism once it feels strong enough.
We thus sum up our theses as follows: the capitalist economy tends towards financialization and this in itself is fraught with instability and; re-configurations of the manifestation of capital’s dominance of society through regulatory frameworks in the wake of crises can only but be temporary due to the profit-motive logic of capitalism, which eventually smashes through these.
We shall present our argument in the next section by situating financialization within the capital accumulation process. Here we shall scrutinize the dynamics between liquidity, investment, income, production, and consumption. In section three we shall look at corporate governance in relation to views on labour and the class struggle and relate this to financialization. Finally we shall draw our conclusions.
We must point out the limitation of space and time for this essay, which is one of the reasons why we present it as an introductory analysis. It should at best, be considered as broad brush strokes initiating the beginning of our own commitment to better understanding the discipline of macroeconomics, coming from a Marxist political-economy background.



2.0 Financialization and capital accumulation
The term “financialization” is today a well used one. Financialization entails the growing predominance of the financial system in a capitalist economy. According to Epstein in Financialization and the World Economy: “financialization means the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international markets” (Epstein, 2005, 3).
Stockhammer asserts that ‘financialization is a recent term to capture transformations within the financial sector as well as in the relation between the financial sector and the economic sectors’ (2002, 720), while Dumenil and Levy present it as ‘a prominent feature of neoliberalism’ (2005, 8).
From the views above, which we largely agree with, financialization, is in a sense, a relatively new phenomenon. It is however new in the sense of old wine in new skin, as it is an inherent tendency of the capitalist accumulation process to tend towards the predominance of interest-bearing capital as capital strives to attain its most liquid form and indeed its sole being of commodity itself, i.e. money generating money . Foster (2007) reiterates this in what he describes as the “financialization of capital” .
We shall attempt to look at why and how this is not just characteristic of capitalism but indeed manifests itself within the aggregates of investments, savings, consumption, and income, being the constituents of macroeconomics.

2.1 Liquidity, investment and production
At the crux of financialization are two key interrelated dynamics. The first is the continued quest of capital to valorize. The accumulation process ordinarily produces both use value and value. Being subject to the dictates of the market though, the amount of use-values produced is limited; not by people’s needs, which are still yawning, but by ineffective demand borne out of the relative poverty of the immense majority of the population. The second is the need for confidence in the uncertain future, “in the form of claims to capital” . It is not possible for even a seer to see all what could happen in the future. Nevertheless, despite this hazard, without some form of certainty that the an economic activity would result in expanded value, no capitalist would invest in any endeavour no matter to what extent human beings would benefit from this.
Capital accumulation starts for the entrepreneur as investment. It is the initiation of a flow and a flow itself of resources employed to generate returns, an income, or what he sees simply as profit later. Sullivan and Sheffrin thus consider investment as the use of resources considered as assets to generate profit (2003, 271). A ‘universal equivalent’ (Marx, 1976, 159 -161), which is money is the life-blood with which this employment of resources, otherwise stated as investment does itself assume life as it is used as a measurement, standard and ‘store of value’ to pay for each of these. These flow and (constant) setting into motion of the circulation of capital is for the purpose of profit and the building up of a stock of wealth, which is capital.
The ‘universal equivalent’, or money as it were, is a capital-commodity itself, but one set aside as the mediator for all commodities intercourse in the matrix of the market. It is thus the most liquid of assets. The extent of ‘liquidity’ of all other assets, or forms of capital, then becomes determined by how easily convertible they are to money. With the growth of capitalism money, being a store and standard of value as much as its medium of exchange becomes more than mere ‘money’ and covers all forms of financial instruments , as an economy’s money supply.
In summary on one hand, investment to the capitalist as a whole is the utilization of assets for generating as their income, profit (and thus, one could assume; capital as a stock). As Keynes puts it:

When a man buys an investment or capital-asset, he purchases the right to the series of prospective returns, which he expects to obtain from selling its output, after deducting the running expenses of obtaining that output, during the life of the asset .

For that individual man though, he most likely would need more than what he could raise as his equity-assets for his investment, thus requiring liabilities more often than not in the form of credit, which tends to be more convertible to money or which is obtained as money itself . The liability incurred by the entrepreneur-capitalist is a financial asset of the ‘rentier-capitalist’ or “functionless investor” as Keynes puts it and the entrepreneurial-capitalist pays the later an interest for the use of this credit. Thus on the other hand investment tends to involve financial leverage reflected in the money liabilities entered into in and as a consequence of investment.
Since production is a social reality, the aggregate of these as the economic activities of a myriad of entrepreneurs manifests itself, at the macroeconomic level, as the Debt-to-GDP ratio of a country. Financialization as spurred by the ideology and new economics of neoliberalism in the past three decades leads to the expansion of this ratio and consequently credit bubbles, initially, and with its continued logic outside an interventionist containment leads to a depression as (Keen, 1995), brilliantly analysis.
This position of Keen rests on Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis which we will now give a closer attention to.
Minsky’s thesis is a development of Keynesian views and interest in making capitalism work, despite its inherent instability. It is a leading current of post-Keynesianism. While traditional Keynesian analyses presents the capitalist economy as a tri-markets pyramid with the labour market at the bottom, the product market at the middle and the financial market at its peak, it took Minsky to integrate “financial institutions and usages…into the analysis” and in doing so, present a clearer “theory of the cyclical behaviour of a capitalist economy” (Minsky, 1980, 95).
The Minskian thesis can be summed up in our view, thus: “investments generate profits” and profit expectations make debt financing a possibility; at every point in a capitalist economy, there is a “…mix of hedge, speculative, and Ponzi finance in existence” which is both historically established and dependent on expected future profits; a financial cycle can be distinguished , at its bottom or initiating phase, there is much confidence in the future and the economy’s finance is largely hedged while as it reaches its peak it tends towards the speculative (and the Ponzi); this situation emerges from policy thrusts that encourage “growth through investment”; to keep “it from happening again there is a need for the capitalist economy to shift emphasis rather “to the achievement of full employment through consumption production”.
Could an acceptance of the Minskian thesis as a basis for policy-formulation have led to avoiding a crisis like the current one? We would say yes, theoretically speaking. Its logic is almost flawless, especially as Minsky himself accepted the temporality of not just his own thesis, but indeed of all economic theory .
The reality of capital’s expansion though, is that it is a double movement of production and valorization. The capitalist is however less interested in the commodity-in-itself or the use-value which is the end-product of production. His interest as the personification of capital is in valorization, the expansion of the value of what he represents. Thus where and when social wealth is to an extent as abundant as is the case in advanced or later capitalism (even though this remains concentrated more and more in a few hands), the financial market, or its bulk, which is “fictitious capital” can not but continue to play an ever more important role. While for its self-preservation at crisis points such as this, the views of a Minsky or a Stiglitz could find ready ears amongst policy-makers, it is very unlikely that capital will allow for any lasting reining in of itself, before it shoots itself in the foot, again and again.



2.2 Investment, consumption and income
Keynesianism economics is concerned with maintaining relations of stabilization between investment, income, employment and effective demand . We have looked at investment above in relation to production and liquidity and shall start here by engaging with income and consumption to now relate these to investment in a capitalist economy, from a Marxist stand point.
Case and Fair (2007, 54) define income as “the sum of all the wages, salaries, profits, interests payments, rents and other forms of earnings received... in a given period of time", in an economy . It is the sum total of the ability or substratum available for possible consumption encompassing both monetary and non-monetary resource, even though it is expressed as a total in monetary terms (Barr, 2004, 121 – 124). Income thus in a social sense is manifested inflows reflecting enhanced assets or decline in liabilities, without these being borne out of more in-put of resources by the country or firm concerned. It is generated from economic activities, which entail the employment of the so-called ‘”factors of production”.
We see here a relationship emerging between income and investment. Since, income represents the ability to consume; it also presents the possibility for this ability to be rather used (or at least a part of it) as investment in the hope of expanding subsequent income. In the ceteris paribus language of bourgeois economics thus, an increase in income tends to lead to an increase in investment .
It is noteworthy though that economists’ thinking generally allows for and actually considers some level of income inequality within a given society as necessary. It is merely “excessive inequality” that is considered a problem and this largely from the perspective of efficiency and social injustice (Cf: Barr, Ibid). Thus flowing from this, even though Keynesian economics is a redistributive theory, it does not aim at eradicating social inequality. It is aimed at emboldening capital’s offensive through reformist tokenism for the working class rather than being emancipatory in providing alternative economic thinking for social progress. This is why Keynes posits the problem as one of under consumption.
Effective demand which is the touchstone of Keynesianism comprises aggregate consumption and investment. This fluctuates and Keynes analysis the dimensions of this fluctuation through the interactions of the propensity to consume, the marginal efficiency of capital and the rate of interest. A “pragmatic-utilitarian justification of ad hoc state intervention” serves as the outlet for introduction of government spending, to ensure the going concern of capital. The enhanced consumption of working people in this sense is not one based on a perceived need for maintaining a just or humane living for humans, but rather one with the ulterior motive of jump-starting the workings of the profit-making, self-expanding machinery of capital. Simply put; it is about re-awakening the production process and its output towards ensuring continued valorization of capital.


3.0 Corporate governance, labour, and class struggle
Oman of the OECD Development Centre avers that: “Corporate governance” comprises the public and private institutions – both formal and informal – which together govern the relationship between those who manage corporations (“corporate insiders”) and those who invest resources in them
He further goes on to point out that:
These institutions typically include a country’s corporate laws, securities regulations, stock-market listing requirements, accepted business practices and prevailing business ethics.
The foregoing gives a fairly concise conceptualization of corporate governance. Corporate governance exists at the micro or firm, national and global levels of economic activities. The increasing importance of economic governance at the global level is for example reflected by Tabb’s conceptualization of multilateral economic institutions as being actually what he calls: Global State Economic Governance Institutions (Tabb, 2004). At the micro/firm level, Orghanzi (2004), studies the relationship between corporate governance and financialization in the United States, in an in depth survey which rests heavily on Stockhammer’s earlier work. The differences in “corporate governance” at national levels are at the heart of the literature on varieties of capitalism . This designates two major “varieties” or “models” of capitalist accumulation the Liberal Market Economy (LME) and the Coordinated Market Economy or according to Abe (2006, 2); the A-B (American-British) and G-J (German-Japanese) models, respectively.
Critical engagements with the phenomenon of corporate governance see the increasing influence of the financial sector on Non-Financial Corporations within the paradigm of the subsisting architecture of neo-liberalism as having a tendency to slowdown the accumulation process of real production (Cf: Stockhammer, 2002). The reason for this is not far-fetched. The drive to increase “share-holders’ value” and the incorporation of the managerial strata through share options have driven firms investments more towards short-termism and greater investments in the financial market as against in the production of goods.
Dumenil and Levy (2005) locate the origin of corporate governance in the distilling out of a managerial class as an impersonal category from the capitalist owners, noting however the binding of both as the “upper classes”. In an opposite class location they place the “popular classes” comprising the clerical and production workers. They see the Keynesian compromise with its corporate governance architecture as entailing “containment”, indeed “repression” of the highest echelons of capital which is represented by the finance-owning capitalist and the institutions of the financial system. Neoliberalism represents a restoration of this stratum and indeed the domination of finance over not just production but society as a whole. They further in their investigation show that while the A-B model we referred to above from Abe might characterise this the more, the process of increasingly financialization-driven; class patterns in the economy, power within state and hegemony over society is palpable as well in the G-J model, for example . The main thesis in their methodology was summed up as “that the transformation of capitalism and the perspective for the future must be assessed in relation to class relations and power configurations” .
The determinacy of the various elements of corporate governance emerge precisely from these; “class relations and power configurations”, between and within the popular classes (or labour) and the upper classes (personifications of capital) in which with financialization and driving financialization, the representative fractions of finance capital hold sway. Stockhammer (Ibid, 722 - 723), problematizes this phenomenon also through a class analysis in a similar manner. On one hand he argues that the managerial representatives of capital receive both wages , even while they also receive “rentier income” in the form of stock options. On the other hand, we also find pension funds as one of the two main “institutional representations of previously decentralized savings”, playing the role of de-personalized rentier-capitalist. He however leads then to the fact that the situation is not as simple as it would seem, with this scenario. Why is this so?
With financialization or the “shareholder revolution” as the corporate governance architecture it structured in its own image amounts to, “a market for corporate control” was won and the trade off between growth and profit supplanted by emphasis on short-term profit and consequently lower investment activity in production (Ibid, 739). Capital accumulation slowdown is the consequence of this.
The direct consequence of this could be gleaned from Kalecki (1970, 6). He shows that the power of trade unions impacts on the mark up of the capitalist-entrepreneur in his drive for profit, where and when there is the “the existence of excess capacities”, such that there could be increases in output and employment/increase in wages as well. The slowdown in capital accumulation depresses the excess of capacities and with consequent depression as we seem to be in now, where output is further curtailed due to grave downslides of effective demand, the trade unions tend to get weaker thus allowing for wage cuts. This however, as he argues “contributes to the deepening of unemployment rather than reliving it” and consequently the spiral of ineffective demand worsens.
These analyses we consider as very insightful. We however consider some inadequacies in it. This, one could say, is captured by Roemer (1986, 88) thus: “the elimination of capitalist exploitation might require significant incursions against the institution of private property, not simply its redistribution”. While the issue of corporate governance as a concept might have come to acquire greater significance in the past thirty years of neoliberal globalization , corporate governance is a feature of capitalism which with the expansion of capitalism beyond its earlier beginnings into incorporation and managerial de-personalization has always existed.
Within the Keynesian compromise, this is geared towards some effective demand resuscitation-targeted redistribution of income which nevertheless still upholds inequality. Indeed “effective demand” and tinkering for it had at its heart, getting the capitalist machine moving again and not necessarily full employment in itself. Labour thus, remains even to Keynesians as just another resource or more properly put, so to speak, “factor of production” (with wages as “factor costs”), and not the creator of wealth .
The reformist tilt to income redistribution to stimulate effective demand which the capitalist system might want to take again in the present crisis, very much as was the case between Roosevelt’s New Deal and Keynes under consumptionist theory, serve to try blunt the possible thorough going manifestation of the class struggle. It aims to steal the possibility of revolutionary winds from labour’s sails, containing it ideologically and psychologically as much as economically from demanding more than merely making the system of capitalism and it’s for profit motive, work.





4.0 Conclusion
In this introductory essay, we have tried to come to grasp with the dynamics of financialization, corporate governance and labour. Our point of critical departure has been one of Marxian analysis, which places the exploitation of labour at the heart of its discourse of the economic process.
In engaging with more mainstream, or rather bourgeois economic thinking in our analysis, the Keynesian traditions have been our focus. This is not accidental; we consider Keynes reformist conclusions from his realization of the instability of capitalism as being inadequate for an emancipatory approach to economics as theory and practice. We have in a sense beyond the Marxist been influenced, even if not explicitly by the perspective of Polanyi (1957, 29 – 50) on the divide between the substantive and formal meaning of the economic and think that bourgeois economics masks this presenting its deductive formal economics as given even for the substantive economic with the consequence of ideas of economists reflecting specific interests being taken as given.
The significance of the above to the analysis we have attempted above is that financialization could not have enthroned itself and played the role it has for the last three decades outside ideological as much as theoretical ascendancy.
In summing up, we posit the financial instability thesis of Minsky as an apt reflection of the tendency of capitalism. Corporate governance is seen as the format at different point sin time that the re-arrangement of relations between capital, society and the state is manifested and has as its primary goal, the furtherance of capitalism as a social going concern, under circumstances of boom (in which it sooner or later gets geared towards liberalization) and in times of depressions (when as with the policy thrust of most capitalist economies being debated now, it is ready for some Keynesian compromise or the other.
We consider the redistributive element in Keynesianism as being of benefit to labour, but merely as a bye-product in its quest at jump-starting an ailing capitalist economy. We hold that if another world is possible as the alternative globalization movement asserts and which we believe, another economics beyond the Keynesian as much as beyond the new classical school is as well both desirable and possible.
Such economics would place at its heart the overcoming of the exploitation of the vast majority of the human race and the despoliation of our continent now in peril. We are not doctrinaire about such new economics being Marxist in a sense bearing on dogma. But we strongly believe that Marxist political economy would be of utmost importance in forging such economics in general and here and this instance in understanding the dynamics between financialization, corporate governance and labour in a capitalist economy as we have tried our best to do.
















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Reading the Maps: 'I did a lot of work when I was able': remembering John Saville, 1916-2009

Reading the Maps: 'I did a lot of work when I was able': remembering John Saville, 1916-2009

Excellent biographical post on John Saville....one of the richest minds and committed socialist fighters in the 20th Century.

Remembering Soweto: thinking of Nigeria

It's thirty three years today since Hastings Ndlovu, Hector Pieterson and twenty one other children were mowed down by the hat-filled bullets of the apartheid state machine, in the South Western Township (Soweto) of Orlando, which had produced the Mandelas, and Sisulus then in prison. Their crime was refusing to be taught with what Desmond Tutu described as "the oppressors language" in line with the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974. Over 500 persons were to be shot dead or never to be seen again from the violence that rocked the apartheid enclave for days after this. It was actually the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime as within and outside the country the visible "fire in Soweto, burning all my people" (as Okosun rightly sang) became a clarion for action

Sam Nzima's picture of 12-year old Hector carried in the arms of his cousin, with his sister running along distraught by trauma, became a prick on the conscience of humanity (although of course what has no conscience could not be pricked, thus Anglo-Saxon capital, for example, continued its intercourse with the racist devil).

What are some of the general lessons in brief, we could draw from Soweto as activists in today's Nigeria, and indeed as partisans in the struggle for social change, across the world as a whole?

First, I would say is the import of consistent organization and the multifarous nature of organization in building the momentum for change. It took ANC 82 years to move from formation to democratic seizure of power. Power which it won it recently retained in a situation which Bond recently described as a further left-shifting South Africa. ANC was barely on ground in the country then in 1976. Haven been dealt a severe blow in the aftermath of Sharpeville and the Rivonia trials, its leadership and activists were mainly, either in jail or exile. But the traditions of organization remained and Biko's Black Consciousness Movement/Black People's Convention was the heart of this. It inspired and gave support to the Soweto Students’ Representative Council’s (SSRC) Action Committee which organized what was intended to be and started as a peaceful protest march.

Second, one could say was the importance of theory rooted in struggle. ANC eventually was to be the main beneficiary of the struggle inspired by the BPC based largely on its relation of reality to theory on the way forward for a post-apartheid South Africa as being a non-racialist one. Groups like the BPC, Sobukwe's PAC, AZAPO and co which stood on the ideology of black nationalism were to remain largely fringe platforms then and now (of course this is not to attribute the dialectics of power solely to theory...).

Third and most importantly I believe is the correctness of the axiom "dare to struggle, dare to win". Many a time, when we dare to take the first definitive step, or repeat this, in the cause of struggle, we never can fathom what failures or success, what casualties and yet what victories could lie behind that door of change we dare to open...or at least seek to ensure is not closed.

In summing up, I would also want to use this opportunity to make a call with regards to the young lad (Hector's cousin, if I remember correctly) in the Nzima's picture...particularly for us Nigerians. I do think, his name needs to restored in the hagiography of that day which is now African Day of the Child. Searches, I have made do not even reflect his name (may be, if I had more time for more extensive searches...? I do it in my notes but back home in Nigeria), but his presence of mind (and in a sense Nzima's) and compassion not to leave a bllood and companheiro still on the battle field gave the world a visualization of that day's horrendous depth.

For us Nigerians his case assumes a double importance. For his last location (he became wanted by the apartheid state after that picture became 'globalized' and had to go on exile), was in Calabar, Nigeria. As some of my South African friends asked when I went to the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum shortly after it was opened "Aye it is not enough for you to fall on your kneels and kiss this spot....where is our brother?" If he is dead, as they rightly said, at least knowing would soothe his family's uncertainty of his ends. Yoruba have a saying that one's child known to be dead is better than one's child being missing! If anyone knows anything about his ends living or dead it would be a major step, I think, towards filling some gaps in the story 33 years after.

June 12, "democracy day" and the myth of MKO

Myths are stories that acquire larger than life dimension and which many persons in a society could tend to believe as having something to do with reality. Indeed more often than not, myths could have that smoke if not the fire of historical facts, in them. Indeed, like the axiom of there being a fire wherever you find smoke; some myths tend to amount to falsities, moving with every motion forward even further from the half-truths they started as.

A particular myth in Nigeria’s recent history is that of June 12. Quite a few Nigerians stood, sat and even ate (as in ‘chopped’ money) on June 12 while both its struggle and its gravy train subsisted. Just as the Daniel Kanus of this world swore that they would neither eat nor drink without Abacha succeeding himself, so did a number of NGO careerists push Abiola, as some would say, to an early grave, insisting on the validation of June 12. I am actually less disturbed by this or the fact that business is now going on as usual with proposals-driven activism being the order of the day for human rights crusaders of today that had been the leftist champions of yesteryears. At least, it is no secret to anybody that man must wack! I also have no problem with an assertion that June 12, 1993 was definitely a very important date in Nigeria’s constant ‘on the march again’. It would be anything but fair and correct not to appreciate what it means for over 14 million Nigerians from all walks of life to come out and cast their votes in what till date remains the freest and fairest elections in the history of Nigeria.

It thus is not surprising, somewhat, for one to hear so many human rights activists of different shades, colours and forms coming out to sing into our ears every year, over the last decade, that June 12 and not May 29, should be Nigeria’s (and for them, this is equal to Nigerians’ democracy day). Maybe if they had left matters at one of; “well, since on that day we had the freest and fairest elections in the our national history…”, I would have just held my peace and continue with keeping myself amused at how otherwise they try to deify MKO Abiola. But then, heroes, gods and the surreal are all part of the ingredients of myths’ meals!

As another ‘June 12’ made its passage through the corridors of time, not surprisingly, several seminars, symposia, workshops and (actually, more of) talk shops took place, especially in Lagos. These of course were rituals at the feet of a graven image that mocks what as and what could be. In all of these, even while far away this time, one could imagine the same religious-like cant of empty chanting: IBB is a self-acclaimed ‘evil genius’; MKO was a Saul with ITT (they conveniently forget this really, except for those that still remember Fela’s International Thief Thief, amongst our NGO friends), who became the people’s Paul and then very much born-again died on the cross of Aso rock, at the Golgotha of the people’s cause. With that we have both the beatification and mystification of Abiola in one fell swoop, creating the myth of MKO the June 12 custodian. I actually wonder at why they never get bored with repeating this falsity year in, year out for a decade now. In a few decades from now, the story would have been so perfected that our children, particularly in the south-west of the country might even be taught in school that MKO descended from heaven with a chain to die for the profane salvation of the rest of us. But how true is all this hogwash? What deeper significance of June 12 could we grasp? Should June 12 and not May 29 be Nigeria’s ‘democracy day’? Is there even democracy in Nigeria, not to talk of which day should be democracy day? How could we look at Abiola’s role in history objectively? We will try to provide our own view of what answers to these questions could be.

On June 12, in my view, Nigerians came out first and foremost to vote the military out and not primarily to vote in Abiola. Of course Abiola had built bridges just as much as he had acquired much more enemies than wives. But if it had been any gorilla that had come out to contest against a goat, Nigerians would have most likely trooped out still to vote for one of them…presumably the gorilla, who is a primate like we humans. Nigerians were simply fed up with military rule, period. But let us look at the promise of hope that Abiola gave. Did he present anything fundamentally different from the package of the IBB administration? Not really. He never hid his commitment to the same neoliberal policies of the Washington consensus which SAP was and which has now been discredited even in western countries. Politically, and quite importantly, never before or during the June 12 saga did MKO commit himself to the Sovereign National Conference mantra of his loudest supporters. In his view, the malnourished National Assembly was good enough. All talk of fundamentally re-structuring Nigeria, economically or geo-politically just amounted to hot air as far as he was concerned.
The disdain in which MKO held the mass which as an upsurge stood on June 12, could be best understood by his position on July 5, 1993 and his role in Abacha’s ascent to power.

The popular struggle for the June 12 mandate was started outside Abiola’s desire on July 5, 1993. The ‘vanguard’ organization on this day and for the first half of the June 12 match and march, again and again was Campaign for Democracy, which today still exists as a lonely, forlorn, dishevelled and dis-embodied ghost of a paradise lost. On that day over one million Nigerians marched in a procession to Abiola’s house to demonstrate popular support for a fight back to reclaim the June 12 mandate. Abiola was very much in the know of this demonstration. But quite surprisingly, his guards informed this mammoth-sized mass that ‘Bashorun’ was sleeping and would not like to be disturbed. And actually he was! He had spent the night at Abuja discussing with IBB on what, in their collective interest, was to be done. Although he eventually had to come out to address us, it later struck me after we got to know why he was sleeping that after all the hue and cry, MKO did realize that he had much more in common with IBB as part of those that had taken Nigeria down the road of disgrace than he had with the masses who sought a people’s national redemption.

June 12 was a revolution. Like most revolutions it did not end as a success for the revolutionary forces that sought change. Like most revolutions, in the six years it lasted, structures, movements and persons for progress and retrogressive elements for the status quo, raged in battle. While Abiola by the circumstances of his interest had to have one leg each in these two sides, his heart remained firmly with the later, even in the dungeon. The anti-climax of post-Abacha/Abiola resolution of the crisis in the favour of the forces both represented is what May 29, 1999 amounts to. Abiola was the fore-runner and Obj the christ of Nigeria’s befuddled elites wobble and fumble of a rule.

May 29 is no better than June 12 as democracy day. The later was the beginning and the former, the end, of a charade. This charade is at the heart of the myth of June 12. At its crux is the belief that the snail could be the animal with horns that could kill a man or woman. The present set of elites in Nigeria can hardly save itself. It is of course less concerned with saving the country despite all its re-branded saying of the same thing, which is equal to sophisticated nonsense. Abiola’s significance lay in showing both the possibilities and the insurmountable limitations of an illusion that Nigeria can be changed without those who seek to change it being by the people, of the people and for the people. Very much like the myth of his being an Are ona Kakanfo (without the 201 incisions, this was less real than his being disgraced by “mad dogs”), we see how a real personage’s place in history becomes surrealistically mythological.

Could things have been different if Abiola had chosen to stay and fight instead of those months he ran away to the west? This is most likely the case. His support for Abacha’s coup however shows again, just how much he held the people in contempt believing that he could still be unctioned and donned with state power through a putsch. When most people condemn the Onagoruwas, Jakandes, Babatopes and co, who by the way deserve every single bit of such condemnation, they conveniently tend to forget that these persons plus Kingibe who went into Abacha’s government with the full blessings of Abiola. NADECO was formed some months later when it became clearer to the civilian wing of the country’s knock-kneed elites that Abacha the dark goggled one was smarter than them all. It was to claim the ‘national democratic revolution’ as its own and subsequently its epigones particularly Bola Ige were to mid-wife the three witches of PDP, A(N)PP & AD.

Abiola and Nigeria’s elite might have been of as much use for the revolutionary-democratic struggle which covered itself with a borrowed MKO toga, as water is for a raging fire, but that did not stop us from winning back a democratic republic. This is why one can not but be dazed when many human rights activists of today say there is no democracy in Nigeria (and wistfully, the bolder ones would add; “if only June 12 had not been annulled”). I beg to assert that we have democracy. We had a democracy in 1960, our first democracy as a (multi)nation state. This was truncated in 1966. We had that same type of democracy for four years from 1979, even if by then, it had degenerated in its appearance. That was the same kind of democracy which Obasanjo who had packaged the earlier lost one came to find twenty years later. What those who say we have no democracy with May 29 fail to realize is that there are different types of democracies and even these different types have ‘levels’. Jefferson and Lincoln’s Americas were democracies for rich white men. While they held the rights to be inalienable and self-evident, they kept black men, women and children as slaves. Similarly apartheid South Africa was democratic for the white South Africans at that time. The present democracy in Nigeria is real. It is however, just a form of elite’ democracy, by a degenerate set of national elites for their visionless self. It has always been and except there is a thorough-going revolutionary transformation through struggle that will enthrone participatory-democracy, which will permeate up from the communities through the local governments and states to the federal organs of rule; it will always be so.

The greatest significance of June 12 for any Nigerian who seeks much more change than that between akara or moi moi and beans is that it demonstrated how powerful the masses awakened for action can be. It however also shows just how dangerous faith in the likes of Abiola could be.

We can not change the past but some people doctor history in so many ways. The primary way is by creating myths of personages and events at critical junctures in a society’s history. When doctoring gives us pictures so transformed by plastic surgery that distorts where we are coming from, it becomes more difficult for us to appreciate and learn from that past as we march into a beckoning future.

MKO Abiola was a Saul that never became a Paul. Not even in the dungeons or at the hour of death. June 12 was the beginning and just like October 1, to the earlier deeper beginnings than June 12, May 29 was its climax. June 12 does have the import of those votes of over 14 million Nigerians and should be thus respected. Neither day represents our sought for democracy day. We might have a democracy, but it is not the sort of democracy we seek. It is also not a sort of democracy that the neoliberal policies which Abiola was not given the chance to practice and which Obasanjo put into motion, that we seek. A new democracy day different from October 1, still awaits our finding it and fanning its flames in the future.

We must look beyond the myth of a June 12 held so closely to the chest with nostalgia by project-pursuing NGO chieftains who try to bamboozle us each year with the mythology of June 12, Abiola and sundry tales by moonlight.

the 'international support' debate: with OM

"Four things come not back: the spoken word, the spent arrow, time passed and the lost opportunity" (Omar Halif, 14th century philosopher)
Dear Osita,
I will be very brief after your last mail, subsequent to my response to Rot Fash's. I do think it would however be "disingenuous" to circumscribe any response whatsoever from me after some of your assertions below, based on that. The most I could do is to assume a non-polemical and summary stance in response.

I am glad you assert I seek to subscribe views to critique. The views I actually pass through the most severe of critique, if you must know, are actually mine. I believe that it is in the process of critique that knowledge is expanded. It is also not my brand of dialectics. It is a materialist Hegelian-Marxist brand actually.

I do take exception at your considering my approach 'pompous' though. I am sure that if it were not yours that we are talking of and you were asked to consider which approach is pompous: one that consciously states, that opinions are 'in my opinion', 'from my point of view' etc and one that comes out telling all and sundry that 'whether we like it or not', you would most likely agree with my, if the least of objectivity is to be included in deciding that the former tends less to the pompous. Even the issue of what the crux of our disagreement is reflects this difference in our approach. I said 'might' be, you describe it as 'is'...

To say I am not forthcoming with concrete suggestions, my good friend, is decidedly unfair, to say the very least. A cursory look at my contributions since joining this serve would contradict this assertion. It was in presenting concrete suggestions that I, Carol and Oyebisi took up the challenge of what would have been our FOIC meeting last June. In the build up towards March 21 as well, when in-puts were called for, I do remember that I was the fist to submit 'concrete suggestions' as in-puts to the triumvirate' s proposal (as against some other view that this came in late!). And I say this without the slightest twinge of immodesty, but as a statement of fact in response to your false assertion, please.

I never intended to respond to the questioning of my past activities evidence, for several reasons, summed up by Soyinka's response to Chinweizu et al that a tiger need not assert its tigritude. People might disagree with my approach, but I daresay that there is none, not one that we have had cause to work together at any of my stages of development who would raise such a question. I have and I still do, give my heart, my head, my limbs, my soul, and my all to that which I have given my life....the struggle for a better human society. I would however have pointed out an abridged evidence list of what I am doing, simply to have the moral authority for asking you for the same evidence you demand of me. But then, in the final analysis, all that still does not matter. In our lives as activists -a pathway, which of course starts and throughout involves, our personal decisions- every man and woman is left at some level to his or her conscience on how far, s/he walks her/his talk. The thing with my going on and on though is that, where and when we collectively decide to walk a path, then a right emerges for any one that is part of that decision to question just how much we are collectively walking it or not. In this light, I also remember very much your pointing out within the enthusiasm that drove us towards March 21 that 'doing nothing is not an option'. How on earth my screaming my lungs out that your assertion should be upheld now becomes a problem for you, I still do not understand.. .

This is where the issue of Nigerians standing up to be counted or not arises. People hardly ever spontaneously stand up to be counted without the driving force of organization. And even where and when they seem to without any clear-cut organization (as with the May 1989, anti-SAP revolt despite its virulence), this peters out like steam without a steam engine to convert it into a movement for social progress.

I do and will support any and every organised effort towards struggling for a better society. It is in this light for example that I am impressed by Don Kenobi's efforts in his own way and will endeavour to give it all the support I can even if only morally as I do with Sowore's SR and Sankara's NLF (in the same UK with you). My interventions on FOIC amount to less than 20% of my online interventions, most of which go beyond list serves and actions limited by the shorelines of Nigeria, because I do appreciate the internationalist dimensions of all struggle for social change, as a student of revolutionary history. The time and efforts I put into practical tasks though, dwarfs that for online engagements, while maintaining a rhythm with my academics with which I daresay I have thus far done our country and Afrika, proud in this programme.

I am not unaware that we are all beset with challenges of our different lives. I do think though, that be it to organize primarily on the ground or for 'international support', we need to make sacrifices.. ..particularly of our time, our energies and our resources. When we let opportunities pass by as we seem to be doing with March 21, even when we start again, we lose some extent of momentum, all other things being equal.

On a final note, I at times, consider the possibility of my engagements here seeming pedantic as you once pointed out, and do imply by allusions to 'encyclopedic' whatever. It is not my intention and if such thoughts do in any way impede, thinking together or working our walk together, I do sincerely apologize. I try to act on feedback of such possibilities without submitting my banner and right to it as well. On this March 21, going on about something to be done for example. I must say that I had thought I would response to yours and Rot Fash by March 21 (when it became exactly 2 months after), and then take a break from the serve, because I -and this is sincerely speaking from my heart- still can not understand how we could have yam, knife and stool and then keep making the same complaint of hunger we were making before having these, no matter how blunt the knife is or how little the yam is. I however got a personal email from a leading member of this serve and one whom I had engaged with polemically titled 'hello and support', raising questions on how we could still get this going on.This gave me hope that all is still not lost. And I will thus in my own way, continue with my 'redemption song'...if you will.

I must also, clarify, the unspoken, but quite palpable in yours, related to the above. Not only do I not think I have all the answers, I have as well learnt from debates I have engaged in here. Two that I have come to so much appreciate have been, John Onyeauku's introduction to Peter Ekeh and the challenge of Agbonkpolor' s which I followed up and have subsequently been an active member of the Post-Keynesian Study Group since February (I was not unfamiliar with that strand of thinking which I also do not agree with, as evidenced for example in my 'Socio-economic dynamics of Nigeria and NEPAD' published as a chapter in NEPAD The Journey so far, a few years back, but realised that a lot of development in it post-Joan Robinson required analyzing).

Now, I think I am probably getting too lengthy again and leaving the issue of discourse? I do apologise. I think above all, the issue of 'international support' or any other, the most important thing is our establishing some basis for working (as against just talking, do note please), together, without surrendering our different and even at times contending ideological heritages. It is in this spirit, that I have written this response hoping that there will be less sad days for our land.

In this light, I think Omar Halif's quote which I started with above, is quite noteworthy.. ...we have had so many lost opportunities. Could we, despite our differences, start more concretely with seizing the opportunities, within Nigeria and internationally to lead to that re-birth of our dearly beloved land Nigeria?

With heart-felt regards,

Baba Aye


******************************************************************************
LOL, Osita....

anyway, I do not have time right now, sincerely. My peasantry comrades will be here in about ten minutes for us to begin our journey.

We'll see when I'm back. And on my intended response, it was neither or threat, nor would it be in any thing but in good faith....to us all and what we stand for.

Sincerely warm regards,

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Baba, I patiently read your brilliant but rather lengthy response to Rotimi and was very alarmed by your threat towards the end to respond to me, knowing you in equal measure, in due course! If I withdraw my contentious comments, will you save us, or me, from further encyclopedia on this issue? I would have thought you have made your point with characteristic eloquence and pomp. However, you seem to imply that Obama will invariably follow the foreign policy path of his predecessors. That will not be 'change' let alone change we can believe in.
Osita
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Baba, it is rather disingenuous for your to claim that the crux of our difference is 'which comes first'. No, it is not. You took issues with my assertion, and yes it is my opinion, that this junta cannot be dislodged without international support. I never suggested that we should fold our hands and wait for an international miracle. In fact I made it quite clear that 'Nigerians will stand up to be counted'. You keep going on about the need to do 'something' and are very quick to subject every views and suggestions to your pompous brand of dialectic, but you are hardly forthcoming with concrete actions to be taken or evidence of what you have done or are presently doing. On the issue at hand, by all means let there be a million man march in Abuja to force the govt to effect true electoral reform, but I can't see why such efforts cannot be complemented by a campaign for international pressure, particularly by those of us in the Diaspora. A simple a sanction as an international travel ban against this junta and their families will leave Yaradua with no avenue for the treatment of his 'cold' and 'malaria', and bring home the idiocy and utter wickedness in stealing public funds that should be used to build world class schools and hospitals for all and using the money to buy these basic services overseas for a privileged few. Osita

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From: Baba Aye
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 16:58

Dear Osita,
Here you have actually presented a position much more like that which I uphold. The only addition and which might be at the crux of our difference on the issue is which comes first? This is definitely not a chicken and egg issue...international support came only in the wake of a groundswell of action on the ground there. That is the exact reason why it is support. There is a Yoruba axiom which could be translated as :'it is the child who stretches out his/her arms, that is carried'.

The issue here is, which body is on ground working towards a situation that would make the so-called international community feel inclined to render its support? Its not because the situation in Georgia or Ukraine was worse (in terms of rigging, violence, etc) than in Nigeria, quite on the contrary. So, evidence shows that it is not how bad the elites of a country Nigeria or otherwise runs its business that makes international support emerge. What did was the contestation of the power of the ruling parties by emergent alternative powers that mobilized the masses within this land.

Nzeribe is an enigma I have had cause to study. A statement he made during the Abacha days when he was asked why once again he was supporting such elements was that except there were 'compelling circumstances' nothing could make a dictatorship vanish. Of course 'international support' could add up within the calculus of such 'compelling circumstances' ...but definitely not as its denominator!

The question is despite all our turenche, what are we doing to build the denominator for such 'compelling circumstances' which could lead to the change we need in today's Nigeria?
WHAT?

Baba Aye
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Baba

I wonder what further empirical evidence you require. The mere fact that you can send criticial emails from Brazil without fear of an SSS visit shows that you enjoy 'international support'. I can go on and on.

The PDP controls all institutions in Nigeria: the Police, INEC, the courts (that are supposed to be the last hope of the common man) etc. That places severe restraint on what the opposition can achieve internally. Do you think SaharaReporters would still be in operation if they worked in Nigeria?

If we're going to succeed in 2011, we have to be frank about what can be achieved in 2 years and what cannot.

Osita
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Dear Osita
On yours below, please:
The mere fact that you can send critical emails from Brazil without fear of an SSS visit shows that you enjoy 'international support'. I can go on and on.

The 'mere fact' you allude to has nothing whatsoever to do with international support, but rather technological advancement. And you might wish to know that I have sent some more critical emails while in Nigeria on one hand and that on the other,some 'critical emails' by persons in developed capitalist countries have as well incurred state repression as with the bundestrojan project in Grmany for example. You mix up issues and with this singular example do not even start to make any validation of empirical evidence, talk less of going 'on and on'!

The PDP controls all institutions in Nigeria: the Police, INEC, the courts (that are supposed to be the last hope of the common man) etc.

The degenerate ruling elites in Nigeria (of which yes, its PDP incarnation holds sway, but not in an absolute sense) arguably, control 'all (I believe here; state) institutions in Nigeria'. But this formulation fails to take cognizance of the reality of life that even these institutions are sites of contestation! . With the police for example, the police strikes some six years back show flaw lines and cracks that more serious progressive forces would have guilt on. INEC, SIEC and co, are broader than these structures par se. They use workers and other citizens that are part of us at the polls. And besides as the Nwosu and more recently Ayoka dramas show us, are there not contentions within them? And with the courts....if things were as simplicita as you a lawyer put it, Adams and Mimiko would not be Governors today nor would there have been an Ekiti re-run for the country's political elites to once more show their utter hopelessness.

I would think a more 'nuanced analysis' (apologies, Otive) of concrete realities would be of greater benefit for out formulation of strategies of engagement.

Do you think SaharaReporters would still be in operation if they worked in Nigeria?

You actually miss the point here! Sahara Reporters does work in Nigeria! Where and how does it get a whole lot of the pictures and stories it uses? I do agree that its base is in the US, but to then say it does not work in Nigeria is like saying Unilever does not exist in Nigeria since its base is in the UK!. The point here is about understanding the multilayered reality of life (particularly in this age of globalization) and consequently the networking of forces that goes into the efforts of the struggle for social transformation.

And quite akin to the above is the fact that that can't seem to even hear the music despite its loudness can hardly dance to its rhythm. Is Sowore, the only radical person from Nigeria in the diaspora where such projects could be executed devoid of 'our' own Yar'Adua's brand of 'rule of law'? Sowore is not even trained as a journalist! Yet do we not have trained radical journalist (of course I do not here assert that they are all necessarily not doing anything) that could have used such spaces outside? There are many 'Marxist' and 'revolutionary' Nigerian emigres; how many of them have done what 'Man Show' is doing with SR?

The ruth of the matter, if you must know, is that Sowore did even more dangerous things than he is doing now, in the cause of defending what he stands for, while in Nigeria. I am proud to say he is one of those that to use Agbonkpolor' s words were 'my students'. And right from Henry Carr, where he was Chair and I used to fondly call him the 'anarcho-democrat in our League', he has never looked back in throwing his hat into the ring! What is the lesson from this, you might ask? It is very unlikely that even if 'international solidarity' comes (particularly and of course it involves this too: in the form of lucre!), people who have and only continue to talk without acting would do anything useful with it! It is actually much more likely that such would initiate internal struggles of ki lo ba de aluta! (i.e. wetin e come with struggle, or gbemu, or so do be or to NGO GBALAMU!). Quite unlike, your futuristic assertion which you can not provide any convincing evidence for, our past shows the evidence of what happened to Women In Nigeria, Campaign for Democracy, etc....in the wake of 'international support'.

In conclusion for now at least, I agree with you in a sense that:
If we're going to succeed in 2011, we have to be frank about what can be achieved in 2 years and what cannot
But the problem in my opinion is that what we frankly determine as achievable or not in 2years are not written in concrete. Lenin, did for example frankly point out in August 1917 that while the structures and processes of revolution should be deepened, it was very unlikely that the Russian revolution would go beyond the stage it was then for several years...barely two months later, came the 'ten days that shook the world' and which despite any angle one could look at it from, established the 'short twentieth century' (apologies to Hobsbawn). What lesson can we draw from this? While being frank about what he perceived as objective limitations, because the Bolsheviks, kept building and mobilizing, their lamps had oil in them when the bride groom came.
If as of today, we start something or at least seemed to start something two days less than two months ago, and nothing so far, while time ticks away towards barely two years away, then despite whatever words our mouths utter, our actions themselves speak louder about our being merely frank by half and our being at least a cause, if not the cause of our accursedness and neither the elites acting true to type or the mythological djinni of 'international support' should be held responsible.
Chikena!
Baba Aye

On the 'international support' debate: with ATL

Dear ATL,
You could be right about the duality of possible uses of nationalism as an ideology. This is one reason why strictly nationalism or patriotism as ideologies can hardly ever lead to lasting social transformation. I have argued earlier on nationalism itself that without radical 'nationalists' coming to terms with the truism in Malcolm X's assertion that there really are two nations in each 'nation' (that of the masters and that of the enslaved; that of exploiter rich and that of the exploited poor; that of the minority elites and that of the immense majority of dispossessed) strategies they propose would always be deficient. It is in this light for example on a 'black nationalist' note for example that while I am pan-Africanist, I do not stand for an 'I am black and proud' unity of Africa and while I do stand for a new Nigeria, I have no illusion that it would be the same Nigeria an Abacha or Obasanjo had as their visions.

I must also say, with all due respect please, that in my view, your reducing things to what people think they were or are, as defining what they were or are, hardly helps in providing an analytical basis either for our past or in strategizing for the future.If you it were possible to ask Hitler, or Mussolini, or even the devil about what they think they are, their stories would surely be different from how the average right-thinking person would situate them historically.

Personally, I do not see any problem in how people address issues on this serve. I would even think that there is an excellent level of self-moderation in language, to a very good extent. I say this based on my experience in over a dozen other list serves on which I am active, most of these being serves of activists from diverse countries. The extent of self-moderation here would also be quite clear to members of this serve who are also on the talknigeria/ naijapolitics/ naijanet/ etc group of serves where words like 'ngbati bastard', 'oloshi ibo', and curses plus abuses of people's fathers and mothers are part of the daily menu. I got on to this serves in trying to broaden the base of participation at the March 21 meeting subsequent to Carol Ajie enjoining me to after the meeting's notice was circulated here.

In my view as well sir, persons being passionate about their views does not amount to the revealing of any despotism whatsoever. Nor is it peculiar to this serve or activists debates in our country. It is actually and has really been an ingredient of polemics and discourse from the time of Socrates and maybe even before. Nor do I see labeling someone a Trotskyite a curse or an abuse. Besides on that, contrary to the picture you present that: Once someone says something that we do not agree with, we begin to label the person a Troskite as far as I can recollect on this serve the bandying of such 'label' thus was once. This was when T.Agbonkpolor so described Chom Bagu, who clarified issues simply by stating that he is not one and such would have been clear to TA, if he better knew his antecedents. ..and this was quite a while back, in 2007!

When you argue that the dictatorship of the proletariat is still a dictatorship and the society I think we seek to build is a democratic one I would say you totally miss the Marxist theoretical framework of that formulation which relates not just to a workers' state. The argument of Marx in that formulation is actually that any and every state including the most democratic of states is a dictatorship of the dominant class in the society that state governs over. I do accept the gross deviation of what was in the USSR (from the regime of Stalin to Gorbachov) from workers' democracy which is as well what was meant by dictatorship of the proletariat. This was argued against even while it existed by a broad array of Marxists, including both Trotskyites and some non-Trotskyites, with the traditions I belong to for example asserting that the then 'actually existing socialism' was actually not socialist, right from the 1940s.
Talking of proletarian dictatorship and credentials and Prof Olukotun, I do not see where proletarian credentials come in with regards to his past as a student leader or his present as lecturer and columnist. Proletarian = working class, none of these is necessarily a component of the working class and thus, proletarian credentials' do not arise! This in itself does not negate his being sincerely radical or genuinely revolutionary, which it is not for me to judge. Some of the fiercest and most consistent revolutionary fighters have been from outside the working class and quite a number never even subscribed to the proletariat' s world view which Marxism is. Everybody in the final analysis is left to his or her own conscience to follow whatever path the conclusions s/he comes to leads her/him. All I call for, for example is that on the issues we agree on, let us fight together, to forge a greater counter-hegemonic strength and thus increase the chances we stand of vanquishing a system, state, or group of elites who have the vast benefit of the means of coercion, large means of mass communication and traditions, values, habits entrenched over time on their side.

That aside, I do wonder at the seeming presentation of my take on the Prof's submission as being one that does in anyway whatsoever impugn on his patriotic credentials or on the correctness (in my opinion) or otherwise of his position. On the contrary, I did argue that I was of the view that he was correct to a great extent stating thus: I also think that while the Prof is correct about if we were to act our age as a country and all that, the missing point being how or which kind of people will lead us in acting out our age? What I did thus was to try expand the gem in his position, being closer to mine than that of Osita, whom it was I was responding to. I also did make it clear that that was my view and not a gospel truth from divine revelation that could not be contradicted, as obvious from my emphasis above.

I am bothered by a trend in your posting which reflects a line of argument that had featured several times earlier on this serve. This is a very curious manner of trying to deny some persons of the right to air their views by claiming that opposition views are slammed down with sledgehammers and that all views are not tolerated. Is it by refusing to air one's own views that one respects others views or conversely by engaging with others' views, and then letting practice or the strength of the logic of all contending views determine what is at a point in time, right or wrong if such could thus and then be determined? Why do you seek to do exactly to me, what you claim I do, without any reference to my doing so...because I never did so?

You say: What I am trying to say is that, please, don't start vilifying people just because they see things differently from the way you see them but could you be kind enough sir, to point at just one example of my vilifying a person or people, as against engaging with their views by exercising my equal right to present my own views as well?

You wonder at if a new society would be built throuh a struggle of ideas instead of people merely patting the back of people they feel have presented banal or retrogressive views. Of course it is not a question of Is this the way we are going to build the new society, history shows precisely that every new order has emerged from such contestations of ideas and the forces they represent, more often than not with the utmost of fierceness and thorough-going stubbornness of every side at crucial turning points, in human progress. The truth thus, if you ask me is not that: We can't build a new society that way, but that it is through the struggle over ideas and the struggles of social forces that every new society has been formed. This does not contradict the fact that Tolerance... that's what we need mostly here in the sense that no one should ascribe an halo to his or her position. Viewpoints should be thus presented as opinions and not in 'whether we like it or not' manners on one hand, nor on the other should people sanctify their sects or groups of sects as the chosen more 'comraded' or 'progressived' vanguard. And this is why I have fought against both dimensions of sectarian currents on this serve and other platforms where I concurrently engage on and also always present my opinions as viewpoints!

On a final note, I was very much amused that There are those, Baba Aye, who would say that you are vociferous because you are far away, ensconced as it were from the stark realities of the system, of course, this was not totally unexpected with the stridency of my voice thus far, insisting that we do what I strongly believe we ought to do, and which we had all verbally pledged ourselves to, because, aye k' oto...I would have just let that slide because really there is no talk in this one, ko s' oro ni nu e. I however remembered that in an earlier debate, my brushing aside response to an obvious metamorphosis of a position to another while claiming to be the same thing (i.e corruption eventually became = subjugation! ), became taken and presented as my accepting such, in my view, an expression of the blandest of inanities.

You do not define what you mean by 'the stark realities of the system'. It could be assumed though I believe, that it would basically be the socio-economic malaise of Nigeria and probably as well, the dangers of state impunity. Anyway, I do not think that your argument holds water, with all due respect. The Nigerian state in its present Republican manifestation might rule with impunity, but it was worse under its military incarceration, that however did not stop people being vociferous. Similarly, people's socio-economic realities were worse then, but we were all more active in action, than we now seem to be.

As for me being ensconced, as you put it, well....First, you might wish to agree that there are several elements of stark realities. I have made sacrifices, here, with regards to juggling my priorities for interventions through this channel, and several others bearing on the present state of our country and a world order, challenged yet still strong, by the present crisis of capitalism. Secondly and more important sir, is that far from being ensconced from the social realities back home, the pursuit of this programme, due to happenstances immediately after I left the country have been at the cost of deprivation, and humiliation for me, here and my family back home. And some of the worst of the blows came while I was on some of the most crucial formulations I have presented here and elsewhere. I have found succour in the truism of Marx Horkheimer's words thus: “a revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.”

For those who are convinced that I am ensconced though, my prayer is that may they be as ensconced as I have been, amen, amin, ase. But whether people are ensconced or not, whether we choose to stand by March 21 or not, the key issue remains in my view: what are we doing beyond merely online talk?

My regards,
Baba Aye
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From: Asaju Tunde Lee
Date: Tuesday, May 19, 2009, 11:30 AM

Baba Aye,

Nationalism has a positive and negative coloration doesn't it. Because, if you ask Abacha or Obasanjo, they would both tell you that they are nationalistic in their approach. Abacha refused to leave Nigeria, stashed a lot of money abroad in foreign reserves albeit for himself first and then for the nation. Obasanjo did everything he did because he believed that he was the wisest and everybody else was wrong.

The way we usually carry on on this listserve betrays the despotism in us all. Once someone says something that we do not agree with, we begin to label the person a Troskite. But then, the dictatorship of the proletariat is still a dictatorship and the society I think we seek to build is a democratic one. Now, democracy presupposes that we should tolerate other people's viewpoints even when they are not as progressive as we think.

There are those, Baba Aye, who would say that you are vociferous because you are far away, esconced as it were from the stark realities of the system. I think Ayo Olukotun has shown himself as patriotic as anybody else I know either on this listserve or as a person. His proletarian credentials either as a student leader, a lecturer or a columnist is well known. He does not have to follow where the path leads. There is something good in paving a new path and hoping that it is the right road that others have refused to follow.

Is this the way we are going to build the new society - where opposition views are slammed down with sledgehammers or are we going to be tolerant of all views - the progressive, the retrogressive and the banal? Methinks there is sanity in what our elders say, that even a mad man has a viewpoint and in the period of momentary sanity could be more correct than the so-called sane man.

Our arguments are too divisive and too retrogressive to represent democratic ideals. The bottom line, to my mind is Nigeria. We all love this country to bits, even the idiots who are eating it out still love it (for different reasons). What I am trying to say is that, please, don't start villifying people just because they see things differently from the way you see them. We can't build a new society that way. Tolerance... that's what we need mostly here. Let's find it, and then we can amass the power of the masses for a clear revolution.

Tunde Asaju