Democratizing or Reconfiguring Predatory Autocracy? Myths and Realities in Africa Today: Myths and Realities in Africa Today

Chapter One - Introduction

Chapter One Introduction The debate about the scope and the promise of capitalist democracy (liberal democracy) has been reignited by the African experience of democratization in the 1990s. This could hardly be more welcome in a continent where the authoritarian imprint of capitalism has very deep roots and where bourgeois revolutions are an exception. The authoritarian features of African societies can be traced back to both their colonial heritage and to their dependent and reactionary mode of capitalist development, by and large based upon agrarianism and the servitude and not, as in the United States , on the impulses stemming from a myriad of free farmers ( Boron, 1989). Little wonder that if in her almost five decades of independent political life Africa did not have a single capitalist revolution culminating in the implantation of a democratic regime – neither Nigeria in 1960, nor Senegal in 1960, nor Cote D’Ivoire in 1960, nor Guinea in 1958, let alone Ghana in 1957 – concluded their “unresolved question” by establishing a democratic regime. These independence “revolutions” had as their overriding concern making room for the development of capitalism, not the construction of a democratic order. Yet, despite the legacy of its traumatic history, in the early 1990s Africa seemed ready to try democracy again. This trend was reinforced by the world-wide democratic thrust that started to gain momentum in an unprecedented manner. Impressed by these events, Samuel P. Huntington argued that the world was surfing on a “third democratic wave” (Huntington, 1991). Others, like Francis Fukuyama, saw in these developments the clear signs of a victorious capitalism that, hand in hand with a no less triumphant liberal democracy, was heralding the “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992). In the face of this supposedly definitive victory and the unchallenged hegemony of neoliberalism, including the resounding failure of really existing socialisms and the inability of social democracy to transcend capitalism- a significant section of the left has accepted a mistaken conception of democracy that rests on 2 Democratizing or Reconfiguring Predatory Autocracy? Myths and Realities in Africa Today two premises. On the one hand, the supposedly linear and irreversible nature of democratic progress; on the other hand, the belief, both historically false and theoretically wrong, that democracy is a project that is coterminous with the mere establishment of adequate representative and governmental institutions. The heroic enterprise of creating a democratic state is reduced to the establishment of a system of rules and procedures unrelated to the ethical and social context proper to democracy and indifferent to the implications that deep seated social contradictions and class inequalities have for the political process. Thus (mis) understood, democracy was completely “depoliticized”, becoming a set of abstract rules and procedures that only pose technical problems. It is rather puzzling that democracy, being such a simple and reasonable political program, has been able to arouse throughout history fierce passions and dogged resistance, bringing about revolutions and counter-revolutions, bloody civil wars, protracted popular struggles and brutal repressions of all sorts in Africa in the 1990s and in the twenty-first century. Was all this drama – the drama of the West since the time of Pericles – just the results of a simple drama malentendu? Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to think instead that the implantation of democracy reflects a peculiar outcome of class conflicts, something that goes beyond an innocent procedural instance, how could we possibly account for the fact that it was much easier to abolish slavery – and the empire that rested on slave labour – than to democratize underdeveloped African capitalism? A substantive caveat is in order here before we continue our discussion. Throughout this note I shall use the expression democratic capitalism instead of the more common capitalist (liberal) democracy. The reason briefly speaking is quite straightforward: the latter expression conveys the wrong idea – but a rather apologetic one – that in this type of political regime the capitalist side of it is just an adjective that barely qualifies the workings of a full-blown democracy. On the contrary, democratic capitalism captures the real essence of these regimes by pointing out that the democratic features of it are, for all its importance, hardly anything more than political modifiers of the underlying undemocratic structure of a capitalist society (Boron, 1995b: 189220 ; Wood, 1995: 204-237). 3 Introduction The belated triumph of Schumpeterian ideas, which downsize the democratic promise to its formalistic and procedural arrangements, mirrors the narrow scope and limits...