Eternal Famine?
The Dialectical Repetition of Famine in Ethiopia
It would be very easy to watch and read the Western coverage of the famine in the Horn of Africa, as the infinite redressing of an unhealable wound. On the one hand, you can imagine the voices of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) tutting in their offices- “oh, not again. When will they learn?” Indeed the World Bank’s enlightening response to the famine was that the famine was due to agricultural mismanagement. A pithy piece of Newspeak right on cue, thank you World Bank. World Bank bureaucrat Wolfgang Fengler, attributes the famine to high prices of crops due to locally controlled markets. He thus prescribes that the Horn of Africa opens itself completely to Free Trade and the pit that is the global market. The experience of other African states that followed Fengler’s logic are testament to this being the worst possible choice for the region- i.e. being forced to rigorously devalue its currency, shift to a heavy emphasis on exporting its own products and decrease wages to keep down the need to import goods.
Then on the other hand in mainstream circles, newspaper editorials struggle to paint a clearer picture than the IFIs and fall into the age-old Imperial logic of environmental determinism- i.e. rejecting the power of human agency and understanding African history as one of mere reaction to environmental onslaught. This has led to many columnists ring-fencing the famine as a case for Global Warming, but the facts don’t quite stack up in this direction, in fact the weather front which created famine conditions is a relatively frequent weather condition. Upon condemning both these responses we must prescribe an alternative, one that does not avoid the material circumstances or the history of the region.
A quote from Marx works as a useful starting point in the unpicking of the famine in Ethiopia in 1984 and the famine there today, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Slavoj Zizek uses this to start his book ‘First as Tragedy, Then As Farce’, which outlines the dialectical repetition that highlights the contradiction of, and the need to reinvent, existing social relations. This year’s repetition of the famine in Ethiopia underlines the fundamental contradiction of the world of Capital- i.e. the needs of Capital are put before the needs of humanity. It is from this realisation that we can build a deeper understanding of the Famine and consequently build a solution. We are thus faced with the dialectic of the Old and the New- it is those who seek to infinitely create new terms who miss the very things that are New, and we should instead analyse the famine through what is ‘eternal’ in the Old.
The ‘Old’ famine, which peaked in 1984, saw low rainfall in all five Ethiopian provinces- Gojjam, Eritrea, Hararghe, Tigay and Wollo, and meant that agricultural production had stalled by the early 1980s. The Ethiopian Civil War, that had been running from the mid-1970s, with the Communist Derg Government attempting to squash the US-backed insurgence, meant that government military spending was around 46% and spending on health halved from 6% to 3%, castrating the government’s ability to deal with the famine. The Derg agricultural policies that are attributed to intensifying the famine, or even creating the conditions for famine to spread, were in the name of “counter-insurgency” The process of ‘villagisation’ was meant to conserve limited resources and improve access to health care and education, but instead it displaced communities in times of harvest and thus halted production. The Civil War, which emerged out of this time of vast geographical displacement, and ate incessantly at the government budget, was a Proxy War- part of the Capitalism vs. Communism Cold War. The Derg government backed by the Soviet Union were fighting the US-funded rebels, in the struggle for Ethiopia, a scenario common in Africa during the Cold War- see Mozambique, Angola etc. Both the superpowers of the 20th Century saw Africa as an important battleground, one that needed to be conquered for its natural resources and its workers to be exploited, or at least provided with a government that supported the Capital interests of the superpowers. The weakness of the Third World movement meant that Ethiopia was left isolated in a hostile world.
If we perceive the famine on these realpolitik terms, then we have no trouble tarring the 2011 famine with the same brush as in 1984- the brush of incapable African governance. We may be able to stretch this logic to some form of truth- the horrific Red Terror in 1977 and the legacy of incessant conflict and Afro-Stalinism in the region have indeed depleted opportunity for positive political and social change, but to dig a little further reveals the Real dialectic kernel in these events and discovers what has been eternal.
The story of the 2011 famine is a similar one to 1984, rainfall less than 30% of the 1995-2010 average. The lack of rainfall meant that some areas lost up to 60% of their livestock, devastating communities’ abilities to feed themselves. Due to the commodification of aid, the response was slow from aid doors, leading Oxfam to claim that the famine had received “willful neglect” from European governments. As aid companies rely on funding from either governments or philanthropy, the provision of aid is a long bureaucratic process. The developmentalist programme of aid companies has always been to remain external to communities in the particular country. But what this has meant is that local communities have not been given complete autonomous control of development programmes, and have more often than not been left completely out of the drawing-up of policy, alienating communities from the programs which are designed to help them. So to dig deeper than the front pages reveals the inner kernel of the problem- the interests of Capital have consistently been valued higher than the interests of humanity.
So what has been eternal in the famines? The ceaseless domination of Capital and moreover the global commitment to upholding Capital’s needs at humanities expense, has been the dominating stream that has run from the Old to the New. It is easy to become nihilistic in surveying the opportunities for positive social change in the Horn of Africa, but it is the Universalist species-being (to take the Young Marx term) logic that carries hope. Marx described this species-being being as the “geographically expanding, deterritorialising scope of social activity” and we saw this in the Third World Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War and specifically Pan-Africanism. And where this movement failed due to the alliances it made with the emerging bourgeoisie in Africa, this essence is living and breathing in many of the social movements that are emerging globally- be it the Zapatista movement in Mexico or Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa. Whilst it is still to be seen how successful this network of activists will be (be it striking workers in Wisconsin, landless peasants in Brazil or free speech activists in Swaziland), it is evident that the logic of species-being, that was so important to the Third World Movement, is still alive today, meaning that the principles of mutual aid and global solidarity are important as they ever have been.
