Description
In this book John Saul examines the grim reality of post-liberation southern Africa and also the forms of resistance that the re-subordination of the continent now calls for. In the process he exposes and contests the rhetoric that serves as apologia for the “Empire of Capital,” and shows the linkages between inequalities and injustices reinforced by the ‘free’ market on the one hand and, on the other, by the assertive religiosity and ethnic messianism that the “Empire” helps to emerge and then uses as “justification” for renewed imperialist intervention. His book makes a significant contribution to the discussion on Imperialism and resistance to it in the present day.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION
The basic premise of this book is a straightforward one… The world is a horribly unequal and exploitative place. Capitalism, serving as the chief engine of empire, has been…the key force in making it so.
At the turn of the century…capitalism’s principal beneficiaries sought to transfigure this system, under the title of globalization, into a commonsensical fact of life and, in its name, to reinforce an unassailable form of quasi-colonialism upon a global South much of which has only just, within the preceding forty years, cast off the shackles of the most overt and direct kind of colonialism.
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Empire of Capital
A. Colonization-Recolonization: the Southern Africa Case
Chapter 1: Decolonizing the Residues of Empire
Chapter 2: Recolonization and the New Empire of Capital
B. Revalidating vs. Resisting Empire: the Global Struggle
Chapter 3: Revalidating Empire: Rhetoric of Ferguson and Ignatieff
Chapter 4: Regrounding Resistance to the Empire of Capital
C. Recolonization: Revisiting the Case
Chapter 5: The Strange Death of Liberated Southern Africa
Conclusion: Resistance
Appendices:
1. Eduardo Mondlane and the rise and fall of Mozambican socialism
2. Rememembering Samora Machel
Cover: Woodcut (1982) by M. Mtundu Mzaanhoka, Mozambique.
John Saul
A professor emeritus of political science at York University, Toronto, John Saul has had a long and distinguished career as writer, teacher and activist in both Canada and southern Africa. As part of his involvement and concern with national liberation movements in Africa, he has participated in many committees with leaders of these movements, and interacted with them on issues of strategies and policies.
In recent years he has been very preoccupied with the fortunes of the aftermath of liberation in many of these countries. In particular he has written recently on what he thinks has been going wrong in South Africa, of how the aspirations of those who fought for freedom have been betrayed, and the need to incorporate the rights and needs of women, the minorities and the poor in the agendas of development. he remains committed to a politics of genuine liberation, one that is both anti-capitalist and profoundly democratic.
His authored and co-authored some 20 books on Africa and more general development issues, and is considered an authority on the region. Among his most famous books are essays on the Political Economy of Africa (with Giovanni Arrighi), Recolonization and Resistance: southern Africa in the 1990s, The Next Liberation Struggle: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy in Southern Africa.
