ABSTRACT
Projections about the future political economy of Africa based on established trends point to a troubled future for the continent. Given the problems of political leadership, class formation, social instability, and external dependence, both aspects of underdevelopment have to be attacked simultaneously—external and internal, superstructural and substructural. The African ruling class is the political power while the ruling class of the bourgeois countries is the economic power. Psychological liberation and self-reliance are intrinsically related, then, to liberation and self-reliance in political economy. The superstructural and the substructural are inseparable. The conception, generation, distribution, and utilization of futures studies are concentrated in the metropoles of the advanced industrialized states, a further reflection of global inequalities. Liberation comes not only from the barrel of a gun; the output of a computer and the scenarios of a planner can contribute to the achievement of national and collective self-reliance.
