Abstract:
For decades, African governments have cited debt servicing and international credit ratings as the reasons for continued policies of austerity. It is demonstrated here that though unjust and anti-developmental, as critics of so-called structural adjustment have argued, IMF prescriptions and other capitalist structural reforms have been a success from the perspective of world elites. It is shown how, from the 1970s, rich country elites, as well as African elites, have created the conditions for Africa to become a major locus for the maintenance of liberalized financial and trade flows. Comprador bourgeois capitalism, with a new twist—the amassing of public debt and offshore transactions—is argued to be the African expression of financial expansion in Giovanni Arrighi’s fourth (US) systemic cycle of accumulation. A systemic, class-based explanation is offered for what is commonly understood as the anti-democratic nature of international financial institutions, and corruption of African leaders. The analysis provides an explanation for why, not a single African state has defaulted on external debt, as Argentina did, in 2001.
