Capitalist crisis and uneven development applied in Southern Africa

Abstract

Some of the most decisive moments in the neoliberal era were implanted first as major changes to the United States and world financial system during the early 1980s. As an inside observer at the Federal Reserve briefly during the time, learning a bourgeois mode of economic theory and description—especially applied to the global recession, financial failures, and worsening inequality of that era—was unsatisfying. The ideological and applied power configuration was shifting from Keynesianism to Monetarism and with it came irresponsible banking deregulation. Seeing this from the Fed, and beginning to grasp the formidable implications for low-income people of the Global South—from redlined West Philadelphia to debt-riddled Southern Africa—meant that instead of social-democratic nostalgia, I sought an antidote in Marxist theory and anti-apartheid solidarity activism. With the help of Johns Hopkins University geographers, the financial frothiness that was washing over sites I was learning about in detail, suddenly became explicable in terms of underlying capitalist crisis tendencies. As I saw how they applied to uneven development, race, gender, ecological, and other super-exploitative relations in Zimbabwe and South Africa, especially using Rosa Luxemburg’s capitalist/non-capitalist framing in her theory of imperialism, not only analysis but praxis became all the more urgent. Those overaccumulation tendencies, their spatial and temporal displacement, and accumulation by dispossession have been central categories for analysis and strategy ever since.