What does it mean for Africa to live under a One Party Planet?

In a recent pamphlet written by /The Rules collective, the bold declaration was made that we are living under the global rule of a One Party Planet – the neoliberal party. It doesn’t matter whether you live in socialist Ecuador or fascist Ethiopia, the set of assumptions and policies that are expressed by those in power are corporatist, extractive, debt creating, exploitive and life-denying for the majority of citizens. How did we get here? And what does this mean for the African continent?

We must start with modern paradoxes of power. We have reached runaway levels of inequality and entrenched poverty, or unfreedom for the majority if you will, while the functionaries of global capital espouse the rhetoric of freedom and progress. We seem to have access to more material and consumer goods, but are completely impoverished of the necessities like healthcare, a functioning education system or even natural resources like water and land. We have a rigged system where a few amass so much wealth and power they can subvert our ‘democracies’ yet the global elites are out-of-touch, callous and highly anxious. How does this seeming ambiguity add up to the claim of a One Party Planet?

One way to explain our global conundrum is to say that we have what moral philosophers call a ‘collective action problem’. Not only the notorious 1%ers, but indeed all of us, pursue our own profits or growth to the detriment of everything around us under the fundamental capitalist tenet of self-interest. When we do this, especially in a system that doesn’t account for ‘externalities’ (e.g. carbon emissions, polluted water ways, destruction of biodiversity, human misery), we become intricate cogs in system of distributed fascism that we impose on our communities, our ecosphere and ourselves.

However, this would only constitute a collective action problem if we cared about the moral outcomes. For the majority of humanity, that may be true, but for the profit-maximizing rationalist, this is a bitter race to the bottom in a zero-sum war of accumulation. They’ll outsmart each other on who takes the Rembrandt off the wall or the gold facets from the sinking Titanic. Indeed, they’ll count it as GDP and give themselves humanitarian awards on their way out. Fortunately, the few left who still believe in elite saviorship are quickly seeing the anarchist truth that freedom will only come from self-organization and self-rule.

It is clear that the paradoxes of elite power are not perplexing complexities, but rather, symptoms of a deep psychosis: rabid greed in the face of certain collective destruction; an increase in speed and efficiency rather than pause or reflection; medicating the symptoms of anxiety rather than addressing the cause; and the inability to think constellationally during civilizational collapse at economic, spiritual and environmental levels simultaneously. The prognosis is fatal.

We are told that the only solution is to emulate this behavior everywhere, to export it globally, to recruit more members to the One Party. And our elites are only too willing to do so. On the African continent, it is clear that the corrupt and inept leadership of both the traditional despots such as Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea or Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, or the more Western friendly faces of Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya, or his partner in crime, Hailemariam Desalegn of Ethopia, or even Jacob Zuma in South Africa, are not just a result of the historical context and the current political climate that favors expediency and the need to shore up control of a wily opposition. It is the direct application of neoliberal logic, which demands socialization of loss, and the privatization of profit. We can see the smoking gun wherever claims of economic victory abound.

At a global level, we see this through the blatant propaganda of the World Bank, the IMF, the Gates Foundation, the UN Millennium Campaign and other pushers of the status quo that claim that modern capitalism is lifting all boats in stark contrast to the reality that 85 billionaires now have the same wealth as 3.5 billion people. We see this in South Africa with the Treasury Department, hand held and spoon fed by their elder statesman, the World Bank, touting that inequality is being reduced significantly. As Patrick Bond has shown, this requires the blatant massaging of numbers on such a scale that it renders the numbers meaningless. But this of course makes for great sound bites. Zweli Mkhize, the ANC Treasurer, was quick to claim victory by stating: "in the midst of the gloom and pessimism that abounds, we must never lose sight of our strength as a people and our achievements as a country. Last week World Bank economist Catriona Purfield told reporters in Pretoria stated that in South Africa, large reductions have been made in poverty and inequality - in fact they are the largest reductions due to fiscal policies in our sample of 12 countries."

Besides going against direct economic evidence, these claims betray the lived experience of 99% of the country. The technocrats and functionaries of neoliberalism are out of touch with reality. Their self-serving bubbles of rationalist thought and circular economic logic are imploding around them. These are the ideal conditions for those of us concerned with emancipatory social change. It is our time to organize. To prove their fallacies as comedic parodies and creative accounting tricks. As with the great independence movements of the 1960s, this will require a revitalization of the Pan Africanist movement (which is, of course, already happening).

This will also require a new solidarity, not only continent wide, but globally, with others who are resisting the propaganda, connecting the dots among the corrupt officials of the One Party, exposing the contradictions in the rhetoric of the psychopathic 0.01%, opting out of the debt-based system and returning to the community as the focal point for real ‘development’. Rather than the false gods of foreign direct investment and undifferentiated economic growth at all costs, many are finding stability through new and old means such as the gift economy, barter, local currencies, food sovereignty and co-operative structures that undermine the capitalist system by their very existence. For those who are still seduced by the cloaked imperialism and formalism of the One Party, we urge you to study their crumbling order and play a part in taking our planet back.

* Alnoor Ladha is a founding member of The Rules and a board member of Greenpeace International USA. You can find him on Twitter at @alnoorladha

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