China's Investment in Africa to Increase to $50 Billion by 2015, Bank Says

[Delenda Carthago]

China’s investment into Africa (http://topics.bloomberg.com/africa/) may rise by 70 percent to $50 billion by 2015 from 2009, as the Asian nation seeks to acquire resources, Standard Bank (http://topics.bloomberg.com/standard-bank/) Group Ltd. said.
Bilateral trade between China and Africa will reach $300 billion by 2015, double the 2010 level, Africa’s largest lender said today in a report.
Companies including Aluminum Corp. of China Ltd. and China National Petroleum Corp. are seeking acquisitions in Africa, buying iron ore (http://topics.bloomberg.com/iron-ore/), oil and copper assets to feed a growing economy. Africa’s gross domestic product will expand by about 6 percent annually through 2015, Standard Bank said.
“Trade and investment routes in Africa are being recalibrated as economic momentum shifts to the East,” George Fang, China head of mining and metals, said in the report. “This has been further intensified by the turmoil in advanced economies and has been exemplified by sovereign debt challenges across Europe (http://topics.bloomberg.com/europe/).”
China is adding infrastructure capacity to link resources in African countries, which “will make investment viable while leaving a future economic legacy” for African nations, Fang said.
--Xiao Yu. Editors: Alan Soughley, Indranil Ghosh

[Paul Cockshott]

It is easy to see that the amount of surplus China can export will be enough to rapidly industrialise Africa.

[islandmilitia]

It is easy to see that the amount of surplus China can export will be enough to rapidly industrialise Africa.

It's not easy to see this at all, because the article itself makes clear that Chinese investment is concerned with resource acquisition - and on that basis it would be much more reasonable and sensible to expect that the impact of Chinese investment will be to accentuate highly unequal and distorted forms of development, by supporting the resource sector at the expense of other parts of the economy, which will make African economies even more dependent on external demand (specifically Chinese demand) and reduce the possibility of any form of self-reliance. The enhancement of dependence is even more likely when you acknowledge that another dimension of Chinese economic interaction with African countries (other than resource-directed investment and the export of African resources to China) is China exporting manufactured goods to African countries, at both ends of the value scale, which is having implications for the basic manufacturing industries of African countries - as discussed in articles like this (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/world/africa/21zambia.html?pagewanted=all) one and this (http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/sa-exports-crowded-out-by-chinese-products-2012-08-30) one. The overall impact is the consolidation of a new (or maybe not so new, given the parallels with Africa's broader experience of colonialism) form of dependence under a new imperialist power, China.

[Paul Cockshott]

It is a matter of the relative sizes of the Chinese labour force and the African ones as compared to the relative sizes of the European and African labour forces in an earlier era. The shear scale of the Chinese surplus value product in terms of hundreds of million person years means that if it is to find an avenue for investment it will rapidly raise the size of the capitalist sector of the African economy. You are right about the areas that it will initially concentrate in, but the consequence will be the creation of a large industrial working class in Africa, at a much more rapid rate than has occured in the past half century.

[Teacher]

I watched a documentary a while back called "When China Met Africa" (I think that was the name) and the sense that I got from it was that the party bureaucrats in China seem to actually believe their "win-win" rhetoric about investing in Africa and helping Africa's development. However, on the ground-level much of this stuff is playing out like old fashioned colonialism. I am interested in learning more about the China-Africa relationship.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I watched a documentary a while back called "When China Met Africa" (I think that was the name) and the sense that I got from it was that the party bureaucrats in China seem to actually believe their "win-win" rhetoric about investing in Africa and helping Africa's development. However, on the ground-level much of this stuff is playing out like old fashioned colonialism. I am interested in learning more about the China-Africa relationship.

Old-fashioned colonialism came in two parts: resource extraction and re-sale.

Does China re-sell the goods, now manufactured, back to the African countries it deals with? If so, then a case could be made for old-fashioned colonialism. If not, and China sells the finished goods to the West, then there's no old-fashioned colonialism.

[maskerade]

I watched a documentary a while back called "When China Met Africa" (I think that was the name) and the sense that I got from it was that the party bureaucrats in China seem to actually believe their "win-win" rhetoric about investing in Africa and helping Africa's development. However, on the ground-level much of this stuff is playing out like old fashioned colonialism. I am interested in learning more about the China-Africa relationship.

this is nothing like old fashioned colonialism. where is the brutal slaughter of natives that accompanies colonialism? Where is the complete restructuring of African society to favour Chinese rule? I don't think that this is a comparison that should be thrown around lightly.

The current China-Africa relationship is in many ways 'win-win', though for African elites not their subjects. That being said, they construct a lot of necessary infrastructure, and because of the convergence of Chinese business and political interests, the deals that China can offer African states are much more favourable as they don't come with the ridiculous demands that Western donors usually impose. China also does not take side in the internal conflicts of African states - they usually support whoever is in power until someone else takes their place.

Another thing I would like to point out is that China brings in prison labour to do construction projects. I've seen this with my own eyes - the workers on Chinese projects are transported on large trucks accompanied by guards, and i've had the misfortune of seeing their living conditions with my own eyes. This contrasts to the influx of petty-bourgeoisie Chinese traders who live relatively comfortable lifestyles.

I don't see this investment as particularly negative and either way China is not to blame - China is a capitalist state taking advantage of the conditions created by European colonialism and the neoliberal westernism that has largely shaped the structure of African economies in the post-colonial period.

[Robocommie]

This would be an example not of classic colonialism, but of neo-colonialism, utilizing neo-liberal trade policies to gain control of third world resources for first world industrial economies. Armies in this case, are less important than trade agreements and foreign investment.

The military gets involved only when local "instabilities" become a threat to the social order which allows such liberal trade practices to continue smoothly.

[Magón]

I actually know a guy who came from the DRC, but was originally from Angola, and our first conversation was actually about China's rise in African nation's industrial buildup. He also suggested a doc. to me, that explained some of it too (I'll have to remember the name), but basically all China is doing is like has been said, neocolonialist takeovers.

Especially in Angola and the DRC, where there's plenty of raw materials for making metals, China has taken big steps in building up their major cities, as well as roads leading to and from their necessary points. The irony of it all is, China imports the workers (with the necessary tools and stuff to build buildings, roads, etc.) rather than hiring native Angolans or Congolese, for most of the work. Apparently the Chinese government also makes working in Africa, seem like more of a vacation, than what it actually is. They're put on contracts, and can't do anything but work until the contract is expired (which is several years according to what my friend told me.)

All the while, things between native and chinese workers, isn't the best because the Chinese worker's aren't taught Portuguese or French, which a lot of people in Angola and the DRC still speak, so progress on a building can take many more months to finish and get done, than it would otherwise. Plus the Angolan/DRC workers apparently aren't paid as much by these Chinese companies, as the Chinese workers are, so it's just another problem between them in these countries.

China isn't any better a outcome for African nations, as any Western country, but the reason so many African nations take China over the US/West, is because the US/West also comes with a lot more demands and rules of how the ruling class handles things. China on the other hand, just wants to work, and leaves Angolans, Congolese, etc. to their own doings, rather than get involved.

As my friend put it, Africans have been forced into a corner, and have had to choose the lesser of two evils, just to survive and grow.

[Teacher]

When I said old fashioned colonialism I didn't mean colonialism of the 19th century, sorry for being confusing. I agree with Robocommie that China's activities in Africa are like 20th century style neocolonialism.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

@Teacher You see, when it is the "Commies" going to the third world for their resources, or rather the slightly more state-controlled economy countries, it is automatically reported with the highest fervor and coverage by the western capitalist press to show how the Red Dragon is exploiting the third world. In reality, however, China is indeeed bringing back surplus, is indeed engaging in imperialist policies, is indeed seeking to bring back the surplus to its bourgeoisie. But the Chinese bourgeoisie is nothing yet in comparison to the western ones if you see the population size ratio. China has rather favorable deals towards the African and underdeveloped countries, because the bourgeois greed is not as strong in china as in the west. The scale of the investments of China is allowing Africa (and especially the income poorest but resource richest parts of central Africa) to, like Paul Cockshott mentioned, industrialise.
As far as the historically dark continent Africa goes, this is relatively good news.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

... But not good news for the development of Chinese Socialism of course! This imperialist development most likely also spells more bourgeois political power in the not-so-distant future China. But Chinese Capitalism will fail as well within the next years when Western Capitalism does.

[islandmilitia]

It is a matter of the relative sizes of the Chinese labour force and the African ones as compared to the relative sizes of the European and African labour forces in an earlier era. The shear scale of the Chinese surplus value product in terms of hundreds of million person years means that if it is to find an avenue for investment it will rapidly raise the size of the capitalist sector of the African economy. You are right about the areas that it will initially concentrate in, but the consequence will be the creation of a large industrial working class in Africa, at a much more rapid rate than has occured in the past half century.

This is a very confused set of statements. Firstly, you seem to infer (without making it explicit) that the size of the surplus available for investment in Africa and the rest of the periphery is determined primarily or solely by the size of the working class in the metropole, the implication being that a larger working class will, given an equal rate of exploitation across societies, provide a larger pool of surplus, part of which can be made available for investment in the periphery, in addition to other potential uses like the personal consumption of the bourgeoisie and capital investment in the metropole - but this is obviously far too simple a picture of how exploitation, surplus value, and investment operate, because the amount of surplus available for any purpose is dependent on a complex set of variables and background conditions, such as the organic composition of capital and the rate of exploitation, and how surplus is deployed is also similarly complex, in that it depends on factors such as whether alternative outlets for surplus inside the metropole have been exhausted, and the state of class struggle in both metropole and periphery. This is especially the case when it comes to China, because recent economic history indicates that a primary destination for much of China's surplus, especially China's international trade surplus, has taken the form of investment in other metropolitan countries, through purchases of US treasury bonds, rather than it all being investment in Africa. It may well be the case that the net level of Chinese investment in Africa is greater than British investment during the classical colonial period, but if this is true it is by no means the straightforward result of the Chinese working class being much bigger than the British working class, it needs to be seen and analyzed as a specific process.

Secondly, and more importantly, you really have not engaged with my last post, and on top of that, you rely on a false conception of African economies. There is no "capitalist sector" in African societies, they are capitalist in their entirety, because they are societies in which production is fundamentally regulated by the law of value, which imposes itself via the integration of Africa societies into the world economy. For that reason, the impact of Chinese investment is not to expand a capitalist sector, as if there also exists a feudal sector, it is, as I said in my last post, to accentuate a particular sector of the economy - resource extraction - at the same time as reducing the viability of manufacturing at all levels of the value scale, which suggests a shift in power within a capitalist totality. It is probably true that the expansion of resource extraction will increase the size of the working class within that sector just because of the increased scale of the production, but the more important point is that those increases will take place alongside the weakening of manufacturing and that the experience of Chinese investment up to the present indicates that even within the resource sector the growth of the working class will be limited, because the tendency of Chinese companies is to import professional and skilled workers from China itself, and to draw on the local working class only in order to fill the most low-paying positions, as the user Magon also pointed out. This is well-documented, and provides a basis for resistance, as discussed here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-19135435). When you have an increase in the workforce of one economic sector whilst the rest of the economy suffers, that is not industrialization, that is a dramatic step away from any possibility of autonomous economic development.

It is worth pointing out in this context that, by assuming that the size of the Chinese working class will straightforwardly result in vast investment in Africa, and by assuming that the scale of this investment will bring about industrialization, you are implicitly saying that the problem of British colonialism from the standpoint of development was that it was not large enough in scale, because a really thorough penetration of Africa through investment would have brought about industrialization, as China is apparently currently doing. The political end-point of this line of argument is to assume that really thorough imperialism can support development, which is basically a recapitulation of the narratives that imperialism produces about itself, and ignores that the actual consequence of imperialism is to produce incredibly distorted and dependent forms of development which can only be overcome through social revolution.


The current China-Africa relationship is in many ways 'win-win', though for African elites not their subjects

The Chinese role in Africa is not dissimilar from classical colonialism in that regard, because the nineteenth century colonial powers also relied on the authority of pre-colonial elites like landowners in order to support their own colonial power.

[Paul Cockshott]

What do you mean by the law of value?

It is quite wrong to describe the African economy as wholly capitalist. It does contain capitalist sectors but the majority of labour hours performed are not capitalist wage labour on the premises of employers for the production of goods and services for a profit for that employer.
It is this form of labour that creates the characteristic class relations of capitalism.

In principle a country like China with an order of magnitude greater labour force than the combined labour forces of France and Britain a century ago, could run without exporting any surplus. And this may happen at some time in the future. But for that to occur the surplus has to be accumulated internally, but that hits limits due to the effect of the rising organic composition of capital. That creates incentives to export capital to gain access of external reserves of labour in areas where the organic composition is low.
Initially a capitalist economy can expand internationally by exporting labour as well as capital, and that indeed is what Britain did in North America or Australia. We can expect a similiar export of both labour and capital from China. But as the internal labour reserves are used up, ( effect of one child family policy) what is likely to happen is an export of more capital than labour.
This will not lead to a 'self sufficient' economy in Africa, but an economy integrated into the new capitalist world economy centered in Asia.

A problem with the British Empire was its parasitic rentier character in the 20th century which meant that it actually tended to consume rather than export capital. China may undergo a similar transition to a parasitic rentier economy, but before that, it will go through a progressive phase of capital export just as Japan did in the last quarter of the 20th century.

[robbo203]

What do you mean by the law of value?

It is quite wrong to describe the African economy as wholly capitalist. It does contain capitalist sectors but the majority of labour hours performed are not capitalist wage labour on the premises of employers for the production of goods and services for a profit for that employer.
It is this form of labour that creates the characteristic class relations of capitalism..

This applies also to the West and the world as a whole as well as born out by the annual UN surveys . A little over half of total work hours performed falls within what is called the "grey economy" - the unpaid non-market sector - which is by no means just confined to just the domestic household . Proof , if proof was needed, that a communist economy is feasible :)


Some years ago I came across figures which suggested that as far as Africa was concerned there has been a relative increase recently in the size of the subsistence sector compared with agricultural production for the market and this had been brought about in part by the relative decline in world food commodity prices. From that point of view it makes sense to rellocate more household labour to subsistence production within a peasant context

Does anyone here have data pointing to the extent of, and the state of , subsistence agriculture in Africa today? Links would be appreciated.

[islandmilitia]

What do you mean by the law of value?

The tendency of commodities to exchange in ratios determined by their relative quantities of embodied labour.


It is quite wrong to describe the African economy as wholly capitalist. It does contain capitalist sectors but the majority of labour hours performed are not capitalist wage labour on the premises of employers for the production of goods and services for a profit for that employer.

This is also very confused. You seem to suggest that the reason Africa is not capitalist is because not everyone in Africa produces as a wage laborer for the profit of a capitalist. You do not actually specify what you understand by wage labour (is this the same as workers who are not impeded by formal legal controls over the use of their labour? how then does the concept of wage labour relate to phenomena like indentured labour, and how does it relate to the Chinese context, where migrant workers retain formal rights to land in their original rural locales?) or profit (profit is a historically variable category, with different meanings across different modes of production, so that it existed as a legal category even in Maoist China, in that the profits of the state-owned sector were engineered through the pricing system, but obviously did not have the same meaning in that historical context as it does in globalized capitalist economies). It is not clear within your definition whether it is wage labour or profit that is decisive, in that, if it is profit which is characteristic of capitalism, you are open to the obvious point that profit is realizable through forms of labour organization other than wage labour. I would be more inclined to argue that we should not confuse relations of production with relations of exploitation by linking capitalism to a particular form of labour organization (so I think that capitalism is fully consistent with slavery, as Marx did when writing on the history of the American South) but I also would not cite something as vague as "profit" as the decisive factor, because profit is by no means exclusive to capitalism as such. Rather, following Banaji, the characteristic law of motion of capitalism is that it is a mode of production based around the self-expansion of value, whereby there exists for capitalists (or state-capitalist regimes) an imperative to invest, specifically in labour-saving innovations which reduce the labour embodied in their products, in order to maintain parity with their competitors. That definition is consistent with Marx's enterprise and shows that capitalism can embody multiple forms of labour organization, just as previous modes of production could embody wage labour and commodity production without therefore being capitalism or having capitalist sectors. It also shows that African economies are capitalist without reservation because they are part of a world economy in which relentless accumulation, under the impetus of the law of value, is the decisive factor.


But for that to occur the surplus has to be accumulated internally, but that hits limits due to the effect of the rising organic composition of capital.

In other words, it is precisely as I said, that the generation and deployment of surplus is complex and dependent on multiple variables, rather than just the relative sizes of different working classes. What does seem clear is that the current phenomenon of Chinese investment in Africa is not the result of there being no alternative outlets for surplus, because Africa accounts for less than twenty percent of current Chinese investment flows, and the investment that does occur in Africa, we should be clear, is of a more strategic kind, and one carried out to a large extent by China's industrial SOEs, in that it is aimed at securing for China the natural resources required to maintain the growth trajectory of the Chinese economy, which in the most recent period (since 2008) has meant supporting the development of infrastructure as part of the government bailout package.


But as the internal labour reserves are used up, ( effect of one child family policy) what is likely to happen is an export of more capital than labour.

China already exports far more capital than it does labour, that much is obvious, because there is no process of Chinese settler colonialism in the current period, and the workers who are moving to Africa are those in managerial and professional positions, far fewer than the workers who area actually employed in the resource extraction sector that has expanded through Chinese investment. You seem to be rather confused about labour reserves within China as well - there are frequent reports on labour shortages in the export sector, but that is only partly due to the One Child Policy, it is arguably more to do with the fact that the government has introduced social concessions in the countryside as a way of reducing the scope of social unrest, and that the impact of those concessions has been to reduce the incentives for rural inhabitants to become migrant workers in the export zones.


but before that, it will go through a progressive phase of capital export just as Japan did in the last quarter of the 20th century.

Funnily enough, a major destination for Japanese investment in the 1980s and 90s was China itself, in that Japan, along with other Asian economies, provided the basis for the growth of export industry in China. What exactly was progressive about this, given that it accentuated all the tendencies towards the victory of capitalism within China during that period, and given that the Chinese growth model, based around export production, has required the violent suppression of working-class living standards in order to function?

What you are still failing to grapple with, beneath your confusion about expanding a capitalist sector or about there being "progressive phases" of capital export, is the actual, concrete impact of Chinese investment. You asserted that the impact will be to bring about industrialization and you have provided no evidence or analysis to support that assertion, and you also have not dealt with my arguments about what is already taking place through China's increasing economic role - which is the growth of resource extraction combined with the weakening of manufacturing, the former due to investment, the latter due to the import of Chinese manufactured goods. Your argument continues to suggest a positive appraisal of British imperialism (though only in the nineteenth century, apparently) on the basis that the export of capital brings about economic development, whereas all the analysis, in fact all the analysis that has ever been put forward by radical scholars of colonialism and globalization, shows that imperialism in its different forms produces highly distorted economies which are dependent on the metropole. I suggest you engage with those really key, concrete issues.

[robbo203]

. That definition is consistent with Marx's enterprise and shows that capitalism can embody multiple forms of labour organization, just as previous modes of production could embody wage labour and commodity production without therefore being capitalism or having capitalist sectors.


I think this is a little confusing. Capitalism is compatible with slavery, for instance, in a historically contingent sense but the essence of labour organisation under the capitalist mode of production is wage labour. In precisely the same way that the essence of labour organisation under a system of chattel slavery was slave labour despite the existence of wage labour alongside this.

"Capitalism" does not embody multiple forms of labour organisation but only, strictly speaking, wage labour. Actually existing capitalist societies may involve, or make use of, forms of labour organisation other than wage labour but in saying that you are saying something slightly different - that we dont actually live in a purely capitalist system in the pristine sense of the word and this is true of any other kind of system as well...

[Paul Cockshott]

This applies also to the West and the world as a whole as well as born out by the annual UN surveys . A little over half of total work hours performed falls within what is called the "grey economy" - the unpaid non-market sector - which is by no means just confined to just the domestic household .
I agree with this, in Africa the percentage will be bigger.

[Paul Cockshott]

"Capitalism" does not embody multiple forms of labour organisation but only, strictly speaking, wage labour. Actually existing capitalist societies may involve, or make use of, forms of labour organisation other than wage labour but in saying that you are saying something slightly different - that we dont actually live in a purely capitalist system in the pristine sense of the word and this is true of any other kind of system as well...

Yes!

[Paul Cockshott]

You say there is no Chinese settlement in Africa, I have been reading press reports that there is for example here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/chinas-new-export-farmers-1215001.html

[Jimmie Higgins]

In reality, however, China is indeeed bringing back surplus, is indeed engaging in imperialist policies, is indeed seeking to bring back the surplus to its bourgeoisie. But the Chinese bourgeoisie is nothing yet in comparison to the western ones if you see the population size ratio. China has rather favorable deals towards the African and underdeveloped countries, because the bourgeois greed is not as strong in china as in the west. The scale of the investments of China is allowing Africa (and especially the income poorest but resource richest parts of central Africa) to, like Paul Cockshott mentioned, industrialise.
As far as the historically dark continent Africa goes, this is relatively good news.

On this specific point, I don't think the relative size of the ruling class or their personal greed are really factors in this. If China is offering better deals, it is because of the dynamics of imperialism and China's position as "new kid on the block". To get into markets, they have to be willing to pose as the better alternative to their competitors (the US who've set up AfriCom and are also zeroing in on Africa). They also don't have the military capabilities of the US at this point so that also creates conditions where their leverage is based on offering a gentler kind of relationship.

Neocolonialsim of the US sort, was the "gentler" relationship compared to old-style and more direct colonial rule and this is how the US began to expand it's influence - initially in the decay of older empires. War, of course, quickly became a part of this and it will be for China at some point as well.

[maskerade]

There are indeed Chinese settlements in Africa - to say the contrary just isn't true. In Angola, Chinese are the largest expat group, larger than the Portuguese even.

As for the post above, I think there is a reason to be worried about eventual Chinese involvement in African conflicts. What the US is doing with things like AFRICOM (tip of the iceberg, btw) is very clever from the perspective of their ruling class. The US military trains pretty much all the African armies and makes them dependent on the use of American technology. This technology isn't given or sold to the African states, but just used to make their training exercises function. The day these armies are called on to engage in peacekeeping, the Americans will have to be there as the African armies can't do shit without American equipment.

China naturally sees this as a threat to its interest, and I'm fairly certain that America is doing all this imperialist posturing to counter Chinese influence. There is already the beginning of a proxy war occurring - America sells guns to Nigeria, China sells to Equatorial Guinea; both states claim an off-shore oil field as their own.

[islandmilitia]

I think this is a little confusing. Capitalism is compatible with slavery, for instance, in a historically contingent sense but the essence of labour organisation under the capitalist mode of production is wage labour. In precisely the same way that the essence of labour organisation under a system of chattel slavery was slave labour despite the existence of wage labour alongside this.

"Capitalism" does not embody multiple forms of labour organisation but only, strictly speaking, wage labour. Actually existing capitalist societies may involve, or make use of, forms of labour organisation other than wage labour but in saying that you are saying something slightly different - that we dont actually live in a purely capitalist system in the pristine sense of the word and this is true of any other kind of system as well...

I simply disagree. When I said capitalist societies are compatible with slavery I didn't simply mean that societies where capitalism is dominant can embody slavery as a separate economic sector existing outside of capitalism, I meant that production on the basis of slavery is in no way non- or pre-capitalist, and that there is nothing exclusively capitalist about wage-labour. What is at hand here is our basic understanding of what distinguishes modes of production from each other - and by saying that wage-labour is the defining characteristic of capitalism and that societies are not solely capitalist to the extent that they incorporate forms of labour organization other than wage-labour, you are essentially defining capitalism in terms of relations of exploitation (to use Banaji's term) in the most formal sense, whereas the task of historical materialism, as understood by Marx, was to understand the laws of motion which regulate different societies and distinguish modes of production, those laws of motion being in no way reducible to the organization of labour. That Marx sought to understand capitalism's laws of motion and did not simply identify capitalism with wage labour is most evident from his comments on the nature of the American South, which obviously embodied slavery on a vast scale, because Marx asserts with great confidence, in the Grundrisse, that the American slave plantations were capitalist enterprises, and that the plantation owners were capitalists, even whilst these existence of slavery made these enterprises in some sense unusual within the context of world capitalism. Marx's insight in these comments is that capitalism is not reducible to wage labour, and that capitalist production can rest on other forms of labour organization, but that wage labour should still be seen as the norm of capitalist production, because it enables the rapid relocation of labour. Banaji delves into these issues in greater detail in his book, Theory as History, which I would suggest you read. I find this whole idea of the "grey economy" existing in opposition to capitalism similarly problematic, because a basic insight of any Marxist feminist analysis is that the contemporary household (presumably part of this grey economy) is fully structured by capitalist logics, in terms of its function as a unit of consumption, its role in the reproduction of labour power, and its differences from the more production-based household in pre-capitalist societies.

You are of course free to define capitalism in any way you wish, because we are ultimately talking about different categories and frameworks, and capitalism does not itself have any ontological definition - but you should be aware that Marx's approach to modes of production (and capitalism in particular) is distinctive, and that it is not one which simply equates capitalism with wage labour. It is worth pointing out that this more simplistic way of understanding capitalism, and the broader analytical practice of saying that contemporary societies are comprised of multiple modes of production, which is its logical consequence, has historically been an important part of the theoretical justification of Stalinism - so that, in China, for example, the Comintern invoked China's supposedly semi-feudal condition as a way of justifying the subordination of the CPC to the KMT. I would expect someone with robbo203's politics to be more sensitive to those historical issues, based on what I know about World in Common.


You say there is no Chinese settlement in Africa, I have been reading press reports that there is for example here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...s-1215001.html

No, I didn't say there was no settlement, I said there was no settler colonialism, which is quite different. Obviously I don't believe there is no settlement because I explicitly referred to it in one of my earlier posts when I pointed to the Chinese practice of importing managerial and professional workers.

You have yet to take up the really concrete issues in this thread, especially your claim that Chinese investment will lead to the industrialization of Africa.

[Paul Cockshott]

Marx had changed his mind on this by the time he drafted the third volume of Caoital, I find his later view more persuasive.

[Paul Cockshott]

You say I have not replied to the substantive point that the mere size of China's economy does not mean that it will export enough capital to accelerate the industrialisation of Africa. In the end, like all predictions of what is likely to occur in the future this is a matter of judgement. My judgement is based on looking at the statistics for investment, change in the organic composition of capital and rate of growth of the working class in China. This led me back in 2006 to say that I thought that China would go into a capital export phase shortly with significant capital exports to Africa. (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/clartearticle.pdf or
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/bigpic.pdf). I said at the time that because of the relative magnitudes of capital involved that the effect would be much greater than the previous British export of capital to Africa. So far things have been developing as I expected.

[islandmilitia]

You say I have not replied to the substantive point that the mere size of China's economy does not mean that it will export enough capital to accelerate the industrialisation of Africa. In the end, like all predictions of what is likely to occur in the future this is a matter of judgement. My judgement is based on looking at the statistics for investment, change in the organic composition of capital and rate of growth of the working class in China. This led me back in 2006 to say that I thought that China would go into a capital export phase shortly with significant capital exports to Africa. (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/clartearticle.pdf or
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/bigpic.pdf). I said at the time that because of the relative magnitudes of capital involved that the effect would be much greater than the previous British export of capital to Africa. So far things have been developing as I expected.

You should be aware that there has been a sharp upwards trajectory in China's outwards investment since 2004, so please, don't pretend that saying this would continue beyond 2006 or that China would enter into a capital export phase is some kind of brilliant analytical insight, it's not even a prediction. I did read the piece and it didn't add anything whatsoever to your assertions in this thread, insofar as it didn't offer any real evidence or analysis for China bringing about the industrialization of Africa. So, try again, I guess. I would also argue that your piece has a number of basic analytical failures. It looks at outwards investment from the viewpoint of falling profit rates within China, but the major feature of investment in Africa especially (in both its state and private forms) is that it is carried out in order to secure the resources for China's continued industrial growth, so it is not, in other words, a case of manufacturing firms locating in Africa because rising wage rates have threatened profit rates in China, instead it is a case of China's growth creating a demand for raw materials that can only be met by taking advantage of the resources of African countries. In the most recent period this demand has arisen from the government bailout program because that program involved the construction of infrastructure on a mass scale. There have emerged responses by firms when faced with rising wages within China, but the main response there, especially in the case of foreign firms, has not been relocation to Africa, it has been relocation to China's interior provinces or to surrounding Asian countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, because the geographical situations of those countries easily allow for them to take over the current function of China in regional trade networks and production circuits.

At a really simple level, you are wrong to think that the simple quantitative scale of Chinese investment will bring about industrialization in Africa, instead we have to look at the actual qualitative nature of the investment, in terms of the sectors where it is being deposited, as well as other kinds of economic relationship such as the import of Chinese goods. You have to consider what investment in the resource sector will mean for the dependence of African economies on the world market and you have to look at the political implications that the Chinese presence is already producing in African states, such as the unrest in Chinese-owned mines. You can't conduct that kind of analysis, instead you just point to Chinese investment being larger than British investment and draw a series of false conclusions from that rather banal empirical fact.

[Costello74]

See tbh China can fuck away off! They are doing to rob the continent of its resources as Europe did before.
The Scumbags are hated in Africa as much as the old colonial rulers and the yanks are!

[Teacher]

In the documentary I mentioned one of the main characters is a Chinese landlord living in some country in Southern Africa. The relationship between him and his African temp laborers was about what you'd expect from an expat capitalist and a desperately poor group of indigenous people. They call him "boss." He berates them for not working hard enough and not accepting pay cuts. He just generally treats them like shit. In private moments, all the African laborers talk about how the Chinese contractors don't really respect them as human beings.

[Paul Cockshott]

IM it is partly a matter of level of abstraction. I am mainly concerned with evolution of c/v globally. Africa and muslim world the last big reserve of labour to be drawn into cappitalist production, assuming India now self industrialising. Yes in short term Chinese capital will go to other labour reserves nearer than africa, but demographics make in long term not so favourable there.