Patrick Bond[1] Graduate School of Public and Development Management University of the Witwatersrand Johannesbug, South Africa http://pdm.mgmt.wits.ac.za/ pbond at wn.apc.org
JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH, VII, 1, SPRING 2001, 52-89 [SEE PDF FOR PAGINATION] http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr/ ISSN1076-156X © 2001 Patrick Bond
I. Introduction: African Nationalism in Decline
Startling arguments have been made by radical scholars that the nation-state is no longer an appropriate site for contestation of formal power, on behalf of social progress, by the 'multitudes.'[2] Perhaps most extreme is the stance of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000: 305), in Empire:
"As the concept of national sovereignty is losing its effectiveness, so too is the so-called autonomy of the political. Today a notion of politics as an independent sphere of the determination of consensus and a sphere of mediation among conflicting social forces has very little room to exist. Consensus is determined more significantly by economic factors, such as the equilibria of the trade balances and speculation on the value of currencies. Control over these movements is not in the hands of the political forces that are traditionally conceived as holding sovereignty, and consensus is determined not through the traditional political mechanisms but by other means. Government and politics come to be completely integrated into the system of transnational command. Controls are articulated through a series of international bodies and functions. This is equally true for the mechanisms of political mediation, which really function through the categories of bureaucratic mediation and managerial sociology rather than through the traditional political categories of the mediation of conflicts and the reconciliation of class conflict. Politics does not disappear; what disappears is any notion of the autonomy of the political.
The decline of any autonomous political sphere signals the decline, too, of any independent space where revolution could emerge in the national political regime, or where social space could be transformed using the instruments of the state."
This deduction will be controversial, at least in the African semi-periphery and periphery. The approach taken in this essay is an investigation into political prospects within a single case, Zimbabwe, which embodies various discursive currents associated with African nationalism and class politics. (Elsewhere-Mhone and Bond, forthcoming; Bond, forthcoming-a-I discuss the material conditions required for Zimbabwe's 'national' economic revival, drawing upon a modified, partial 'delinking' scenario advocated by even the United Nations Development Programme).
Contrary to Hardt and Negri, I will conclude that the appropriate normative formula is not the dismissal of state-sovereignty as a short-medium term objective of Third World progressive social forces, but instead, aligned simultaneously with international popular struggles against the forces of Empire (both in Washington and transnational corporate headquarters), the rekindling of nation-state sovereignty but under fundamentally different assumptions about power relations and development objectives than during the nationalist epoch. Such power relations can probably only be changed sufficiently if the multitudes contest those comprador forces who run virtually all their nation-states. To do so, I submit, will require the articulation of a multifaceted post-nationalist political programme, grounded in post-neoliberal economic formulations....
[The full article is available at <http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr/archive/vol7/number1/bond/index.shtml>.]