Category: The African Revolution
South Africa recently celebrated twenty years of “democracy” since a Black majority government was formed by the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies in 1994. South Africa has been a central, not a peripheral player in world society for 150 years. Its inhabitants have long been engaged in the struggle for democracy and equality. […]
MP3 of the Audrey Richards lecture in African Studies at Cambridge University, 22nd May 2014 This was an improvised talk lasting 49 minutes. It contains several verbal mistakes: Kreisler for Kreutzer (violin sonata) George for Peter Peckard (echoes of George Peppard?) The city of Nantes was part of Brittany in the 1790s and La Vendee […]
Africans wait for emancipation in an unequal world We live in a racist world. Despite the collapse of European empire and the formal adoption of a façade of international bureaucracy, the vast majority of black Africans are still waiting for meaningful emancipation from their perceived social inferiority. The idea that humanity consists of a racial […]
Introduction I first explain what I mean by saying that the informal economy, a concept I was associated with coining in the early 1970s, has taken over the world, largely as a result of neoliberal deregulation over the last three decades. After a brief account of my own early exposure to West Africa, I turn […]
Edited transcription of an improvised talk for a seminar, “Social movements and the solidarity economy”, organized by Jean-Louis Laville and Geoffrey Pleyers, EHESS, Paris, 2 February 2012. I was asked to report on the project I am involved in which has the same name as The Human Economy book; but, given this course’s focus on […]
The first Goody lecture given at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany on 1st June 2011. The lecture is available from the Institute in a handsome print version. I am grateful to Chris Hann for the chance to reflect here on the debt I owe to my teacher. Part One Jack Goody’s […]
The governments of the Soviet Union and its East European dependencies fell in 1989-90 with almost no loss of life. How could the most powerful and coercive bureaucracies the planet has ever seen collapse so quickly and utterly? They ruled in the name of equality through surveillance and fear, but their structures had been hollowed […]
John Young wrote to the nettime-l list in response to a version of the previous post that I sent there. Here is my reply: John wrote: “A commendably hopeful essay. So far the Egyptian initiative has lofted a Mubarak stooge in his place and the elevated overt military control. These are not hopeful yet, and […]
Saul Wainwright commented on the previous post in this series, CLR James and the idea of an African revolution: “I have been wondering about how to tie the Egyptian revolution into the larger world system. I was not aware that CLR thought there would be two more revolutions, one being Russian and other being American. […]
Tahrir Square, Cairo after Mubarak left Delacroix or what? (the date is a palindrome!) These scenes remind us that we need not be defined by our differences, we can be defined by the common humanity that we share.
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
