ABSTRACT
African-European civil society relationships from below are often arrayed against a nexus of state and capital from above. The latter generally pursue neoliberal, extractivist modes of capital accumulation and seek geopolitical power advantages within a hostile multilateral system. In the specific case of South Africa, this results in a sub-imperial/anti-imperial dialectic full of extreme rhetoric and uneasy multilateral alliances. Yet from below, the situation resemblance the arguments made by Karl Polanyi in the market-versus-society-versus market ‘double movement’ but expanded to the inter-continental scale. So while most European forces that influence South Africa and the rest of Africa reinforce existing Western corporate hegemony, there is also periodic civil society resistance, dating back to anti-slavery activism two centuries ago. Recent examples include anti-apartheid solidarity, the battle against European firms’ water commercialization in Johannesburg, fights against European mining houses and consumers of minerals, and contestation of intellectual property applied to life-saving AIDS medicines, which with European NGO support led to a dramatic rise in life expectancy. The dialectic is not only, therefore, between European and South African elites, but between elites and increasingly angry citizens, some of whom have developed compelling activist initiatives that suggest a ‘globalization of people’ can truly contend with the globalization of capital. As shown by the 2020 Covid-19 coronavirus threat, there is a desperate need to reorient African economies to meet basic social (especially public health) needs. That requires amplifying the ‘localisation’ project, so that the subsequent period of ‘personal distancing’ and border restrictions does not prevent activists from engaging in virtual forms of social solidarity.
