TURMOIL, TRANSFORMATIONS, AND TRANSITION Nigeria in a World in Crisis; Problems and Prospects*
INTRODUCTION
I wish to start by expressing my pleasure at the
continued commitment of Social Action to organising camps such as these for
young women and men, many of whom have become activists only in recent times. These
started in 2008 and have become interlaced with a network of study centres in Benin, Port Harcourt
and Calabar. And over the cause of these past few years, I have noticed
significant developments in the arguments and politics of many a youth
associated with this process. For this, I do commend Social Action.
We face two interrelated problems at the historic point
where we now stand. On one hand, after decades of economic, political and ideological attacks by the bosses on the
working people, has resulted in a “poverty of philosophy” indeed a drought of living revolutionary alternatives (in
terms of both ideas and organisation) for young activists coming into political
life. On the other hand, we are living through the most earth-shaking crisis of
the capitalist system in almost a century. It does not only end there, this
multi-layered crisis is not going away soon. Resistance and revolts have shaken
several countries in the advanced capitalist world, the so-called “developing”
countries and the so-called Newly Industrialised; in short, we are witnessing a
global uprising. And it is one that
is obviously going to be long drawn.
Mass anger in this era of crises and revolts has not
only been manifested on the streets. Demonstrations and riots have been
intertwined with waves of strikes almost everywhere. Elections have also seen
quite a sizeable number of traditionally dominant liberal parties (of both the right and the left) booted out at the
polls. Although the main beneficiaries of these, particularly in Europe, have
been left reformist parties, far
right (fascist and ultra-nationalist) forces have also made significant
inroads, reflecting the desperation and confusion that also go with periods of
turmoil.
The foregoing broad picture brings me to the thrust of
this paper. I was asked to speak on “Nigeria in the face of global economic and
political transition”. I think this is in essence a robust topic. I have chosen
to re-phrase it though, because I am of the opinion that we are living through
a tumultuous period, which would most
likely result in some social-political and economic transitions in what
seems to me a pre-transition period.
Defining periods or moments of history is very important, not only for us to understand the
past, but also and more importantly to
guide our strategy in the struggle for a better future. For example, the
unquestioned conviction of revolutionary socialists organised around the Fourth
International at the end of World War II that an epoch of transition (to
socialism) had commenced, led to futile attempts at bending reality to fit into
an ossified (element of their) theory. This of course had dire consequences for
their politics.
History is driven by the class struggle, between the haves and the have-nots, the bosses and
the bossed, the rich and the poor, the
capitalists and the working class. This struggle is waged in the realms of;
economics, politics and theory/ideology. The 1970s-90s witnessed sharp
ascendancy of the bosses globally. Neoliberal globalisation which was (and
still is) the dominant ideology of the capitalists became ingrained as the
“conventional wisdom”.
The “Battle of Seattle” in November 1999 marked a
turning point of sorts. The upheavals we have and continue to witness in the
wake of the “Great Recession” constitute an entreport
into a new phase of struggle for the soul of humankind. Further
“approximations” of what we, the people essentially
want, would be critical to such entre port becoming the gateway to a period
of transition.
This paper thus looks at the following: the characteristics
of the current tumultuous times; what transformations within the subsisting capitalist social formation have and could
amount to; the problems and prospects of social-economic and political
transition in general and; the
specificities of these general trends within the concrete realities of Nigeria.
The foregoing haven been said, I must stress that this
is basically a draft. When I got the topic last week, I was enamoured by it. I
cannot think of any revolutionary that would not consider the issues it seeks
to address as being the central questions for us in the current period. I am
humbled by the fact that the paper is meant to serve as template for the
four-day period of robust discussions which I have known the Social Action
camps for. But, I was already in a bind of deadlines for both practical and
theoretical tasks, and cannot write as extensively as I would have wanted to on
the matter at hand, immediately. I do
hope that in our discussions, a lot of what might have been left out would be filled
in and would equally enrich the final paper.
A
WORLD IN TURMOIL; NIGERIA IN CRISIS
When the global economic crisis started in 2007, few
persons thought it could become so deep and last so long. Indeed, in its early
stage it was first presented as a “credit crunch”, and not wholly even yet a
financial crisis, in the United States and some countries in Europe. By 2008,
it was obvious that it was more than just credit that was in trouble. We then
had the narrative of a financial crisis.
Before the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15,
2008 (and even after that time, for a while for some), it was seen as problem
distinct from the economy as a whole, and thus there was no economic crisis.
But at the end of it all, it was clear that a Great Recession had set in, and
it was global.
I do not intend to go into the “whys” and dynamics of
the current global economic crisis. I have made an effort in that direction
with my book last year[1].
Further, it is obvious to even the most dumb witted of politicians and the most
placid of activists that there is such a global crisis. There are basically
four things that I would want to stress here.
First, we have a multi-layered crisis. That is to say
we have a complex of several crises which
are not only interrelated, but are interwoven into one seething organic crisis. An organic crisis is a systemic or put in other words, structural crisis. It calls into
question, not just this or that aspect of a social formation, but the entirety
of such society as a system.
Some of the key facets of this structural crisis of the
capitalist system are: economic; political; ideological; environmental and;
inter-national.
Second, while we have a multi-layered and yet singular
crisis, we single out the economic crisis as primary. This does not mean that
there is a mechanistic relationship between the economy and other spheres of
social life.
On the contrary, the different spheres of society’s
super-structure acquire their own dynamics, in a sense. But economic existence
and relations are and remains the base of social life, for it is the sphere of
the production and reproduction of our material existence. And of course, it
goes without saying that “existence precedes consciousness”.
Third, the current crisis did not just come out of the
blues, or simply happen because a few bankers were greedy, or even just because
of the liberalised space for financial transactions. The capitalist system is
inherently crisis prone, with cycles of prosperity (which the bosses are the
main beneficiaries of) and bursts (which the working people are made to bear as
much of the brunt of, as the bosses can make them do).
The financial sector tends to play a trigger role for
such crises of capitalism. This is not something that is associated with only
the recent period of neoliberalism. Capitalists need credit to expand
production, and thus accumulate more capital. But quite importantly, the tail
of finance appears to wag the dog of capital, as greater turnover of interest
could be secured through financialisation and its related speculation.
But financialisation has been a trigger, and not the cause of the crises of
capitalism in its seeming eternal cycles of booms and slumps. The roots of
these crises lie in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. And a major
factor why the current crisis is turning out to be a “Great Stagnation”, is
precisely because of the ever more increasingly difficult room for manoeuvre by
the bosses to maintain profitability.
Fourth, the crisis is global, but it is multi-layered
not only in this sense. It is also multi-layered in its interface with the
uneven and combined nature of capitalist development as a whole. In simply
terms, the specific ways and manners
it has manifested in different regions and countries stem from the historically
established peculiarities of these regions and countries. In a broad sense,
once could here talk of the different “modalities
of the capitalist mode of production”, as Gilbert Achcar puts it.
This brings us to Nigeria in crisis, in relation to the
universal structural crisis. We can remember that when the global economic
crisis started, the then Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Charles
Soludo claimed that it would not affect the country. But within three months in
2009, one third of the shares of banks and financial institutions had become
mere toilet paper. And not surprisingly, we have seen the poverty rate increase
from 54% to 70% from the pre-crisis period of 2006 to 2010.
The economic crisis of Nigeria has interlocked with
other masks of class struggle, particularly the ethnic and religious. It is
hardly accidental that the rise of Boko
Haram insurgency for example coincides with the period of the “Great
Contraction” of global capitalism.
The situation in Nigeria now is so dire that even
members of the elite can clearly see a revolution in the horizon. Earlier in
March this year, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, a former Head of State noted that the
shocking rate of youth unemployment (which is about half of the entire
population of youths seeking employment according to official figures) is a
recipe for revolution. Similarly, Aminu Tambuwal, the Speaker of the House,
stated two weeks ago that the present state of disillusionment and mass
discontent could very well lead to a revolution in the unfolding period.
The experience of the January Uprising is a pointer to
the possibilities of revolt. It is however also a pointer to the weaknesses of
forces representing revolutionary-transformative alternative to the bosses and
their system. But this problem which is ideological, political and
organisational is itself immersed in the process of attacks on one hand and
incorporation on the other hand that have been characteristic of the neoliberal
period that we are yet to break out of.
We thus find looming turmoil and with it, a serious
dilemma. But implicit in this is the reality of how popular revolutions do unfold i.e. through a series of
approximation by the working masses in the theatre of struggle, as different
contending and collaborating groups and social movements take to the trenches,
with and within the disposed people.
BETWEEN
TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSITION
There is obviously a relationship between crises and
the re-ordering of society within and
beyond particular systems or social formations, particularly in the modern era. Economic and political transitions in the strict sense of the
word are long drawn historical periods of social
revolution spanning decades, and in some cases centuries. Indeed, the
earliest of such transitions i.e. to stable agrarian societies (the Neolithic
revolution) lasted a few millennia!
Put in other words, “transitions” are essentially the
supersession of an obsolete mode of
production by a more progressive one, which emerges in its womb. As higher
modes of productions are attained, they become more universalized and also tend
to have shorter periods of the social revolutions that vanquish them.
For example, while the Neolithic revolution took
millenniums, the “dark ages” in which the slave-owning Greco-Roman era was
superseded by feudalism took like half a millennia and within a few centuries,
capitalism vanquished feudalism.
This might make it tempting for us to consider what is
happening before us now as a (beginning of) transition to socialism. There is
however something peculiar about this particular transition. Earlier social
revolutions had mobilised the masses around a rising elite which proclaimed its
interests as their interests. In
short, they had and could not but have dripped from head to toe in lies.
But the act of the working class emancipation, which is
both the pathway and precondition for socialism cannot but be an act of self-emancipation. Socialism cannot be
established for the working masses. It
has to be aware of its historic
mission. Socialist consciousness is not something that happens after the socialist revolution; it is at
the heart of the workers’ class
consciousness.
Does this mean that every
single worker has to have such class consciousness for such transitional
revolution to be won? Absolutely not! But a critical
mass of the working people has to be won to the cause of struggle for
socialist revolution, through practice. It
is this that constitutes the vanguard and
not some party. The revolutionary party is a party of the vanguard movement of the working class. Such
party and such vanguard movement as at now does
not exist anywhere.
This is the challenge of the subjective factor in world
where the objective factors are overly ripe. We are faced with the task of
forging the pre-conditions for overcoming this challenge, in Nigeria and
internationally.
Economic and political transitions are (series of) transformation, which bridge different social formations. There are
however transformations within a
particular (and more specifically, the capitalist) social formation. These mark
fundamental restructuring of the system with the intent of avoiding its
collapse, in the face of severe organic
crisis.
Dumenil and Levy for example point out three phases of
capitalist development marked by such transformations as being: the belle époque after the “Long Depression”
of the 1890s; the so-called “Keynesian National Welfare
State”/”social-democratic compromise”/Fordist mode of regulation, after the
“Great Depression” of the 1930s and; the post-Fordist/neo-liberal globalization
paradigm, after the mid-1970s crisis.
We might be in such a moment where transformation in
some form or the other would be on the order of the day. It is however
important to note that such transformations are shaped by the inter-play of
both popular and passive revolutions, with the later being considered necessary to
use in forging a “class compromise” (as with Keynesianism) only where and when
the ruling class feels threatened enough to thus give in.
The dilemma of the present moment is that, on one hand
the working class which is most strategically placed to give the bosses much
more than scares is, no thanks to its unions, in the bind of “pluralist”
illusions despite its consistently demonstrated discontent. On the other hand
though, as we stated earlier, this is one crisis that is not going away very
soon. The process of “approximations” as Leon Trotsky put it is thus more
likely to spread...as we are seeing it happen in Egypt.
We have looked thus far at the issues of transformation
and transition in a broad, general sense. How does this relate to the situation
in Nigeria?
Capitalist development in Nigeria, as with other places
in Africa was still at its infancy stage during the “stark utopia” of “the
Great Transformation”, as Karl Polanyi put it. While capitalism had taken roots
at the time of the post-War transformation, colonial fetters held it down from
instituting a “developmentalist” class compromise, as opined by Toyin Falola.
The 1960s was the decade of African states’
Independence. Barely a decade from that, the neoliberal counter-revolution was
enthroned. These had very adverse consequences for the trajectory of our
development in several ways.
We now have a self-serving class of elites, who are
some of the most parasitic in the world. Neo-patrimony and “prebendalism” have
become strategies for both primitive accumulation-in-perpetuity and
incorporatism as well. But the masks of ethno-religious manipulation melt
somewhat in the heat of crisis as we now see.
But, while left
reformism sweeps across Europe, resting on decades of social-democratic
politics turned social-liberalist, the visible “alternatives” on the terrain of
political contestation are no better than six to half a dozen.
In this light, I must primarily point at the new
mega-party of the bosses i.e. the All Progressives Congress. Several activists
and citizens in general have developed illusions in it. Such activists have
even constituted themselves as the “progressive front” within this supposed
coming together of “all progressives”. Such illusion for some is an extension
of a two-stage approach to revolutionary struggle.
Another pathway seems to be in the minds of other
activists. This is the formation of socialist parties. Any effort at organising
should be welcomed. Practice of course, is the sole criterion for truth. But it
is my candid opinion that massifying alternative
politics does not equate to attaching the nomenclature of “party”. And based on
the 1999 constitution, it could even be counter-productive. The challenge
irrespective of nomenclature is being on the ground as the Revolutionary
Socialists in Egypt were before January 25, 2011.
It is mass movements and through these, ultimately in
these period; political revolutions, that
can bring about reformative transformation in the country. In the final
analysis, the triumph of more thorough going revolutionary change in Nigeria is
bound to the international victory of the working class over the bosses.
CONCLUSION
This paper has been a summary attempt to present a
broad picture of the current situation in Nigeria and globally, with the intent
of grasping a sense of the prospects and problems of revolutionary transformation.
It bears in its heart, the maxim from Gramsci that
revolutionaries must be armed with “optimism of the will and pessimism of the
intellect”. In this direction, it aims at identifying the revolutionary pathway
forward without promoting movementism or a false sense of movement.
In summing up, I will paraphrase Karl Marx that human
beings make history, not based on terms that they invoke from the minds, but
based on the concrete reality that is the context of their struggle and which they intend to change and in
changing bring an end to the exploitation and oppression of humans by humans.
Thank
you for listening.
* Being
a paper presented on Wednesday, July 24, 2013 at the Social Action
Anti-Imperialist Camp for young activists, held on July 23-27, 2013, at De-Wis College, 5 Asuquo
Inyang Str., Off Abitu Avenue, Anantigha, Calabar.
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