Prediction 4 – Africa Outperforms
The basis of this prediction was set out at the start of 2021, and reinforced in the review. Africa has been less badly affected by COVID than many other continents, though it has been more badly affected by the lockdowns and lockouts that have impeded the growth in the global economy, supposedly in response to it.
As global growth resumes in the next few weeks, as the potential for further restrictions disappears, as Omicron is seen as simply marking the end of the pandemic, the first consequences will again be seen in the need to deal with the resulting shortages, be it of labour, or primary products, or intermediate production. In developed economies, the first is resulting in much higher wages for workers, though, in many cases, not yet enough to cover rising costs of living as the effects of past and present liquidity injections causes consumer price inflation to soar to levels not seen in 30 and more years. Ironically, Britain which marginally voted in favour of Brexit, largely on the back of the votes of bigots seeking to limit immigration and “control borders”, has had to mostly abandon any such hope of control, both by letting in goods unchecked, and by going begging across the globe for immigrant workers to come and save its from its self-inflicted predicament.
But, developed economies across the globe, face problems of declining birth rates, to the extent that they are not even capable of replacing those that die, without immigration. Even China, as I reported several years ago, has seen its once seemingly endless supply of labour start to get used up – one reason for it seeking to create its own welfare state, and now seeking to encourage more births – leading it to begin to move more quickly up the value chain, and to locate production of lower value goods in other parts of the globe, in Asia and Africa.
The Malthusians have always had a thing about population growth causing impending catastrophe, and wanting to impose birth control, and other forms of population control, particularly on developing economies. This kind of reactionary nonsense is seen amongst many in the environmentalist movement, which is the 21st century equivalent of Malthus and his followers. At COP26, one group, Population Matters, had a massive inflatable baby wearing a slogan T-shirt saying “smaller families, cooler planet”. On its website, it claims that, by mid-century, global population will have risen by around 30% from 7.7 to 10 billion. Its the kind of projection that catastrophists like to make, and has been seen in relation to COVID too. They are always wrong, and basically for the same reason that they fail to account for anything actually changing in the intervening period – other than if everyone adheres to their own reactionary solutions that basically amount to produce less, go back to more primitive times.
In fact, according to the UN, the global population is growing at a slower pace than at any time since 1950. That is despite the fact that as, across the globe, poverty is in decline, and healthcare is improving, populations are ageing, because more people live longer. The cause of a slowdown in population growth is falling levels of fertility, i.e. declining birth rates, and again, that is not surprising, because the truth is that, contrary to the Malthusians, poverty is not a result of people having large families, but people having large families is a consequence of poverty, in economies based upon peasant production. A 2020 study in The Lancet, forecast that, in fact, global population will peak at 9.7 million in the 2060's.
A look at the series on Lenin's writings on Economic Romanticism shows why this is. In economies based on peasant production, or small scale commodity production, families depend upon large numbers of children for production, and so as to obtain the benefits of division of labour. As Lenin showed, it was those small producers that had large numbers of family workers who also had the largest number of wage workers. The former enables greater competitiveness due to division of labour and economies of scale, and this, in turn enables them to grab market share, to become buyers-up, to take over the production of their neighbours, and turn them into wage workers. But, also, in poor economies, dominated by such production, where infant mortality rates are high, it is necessary to have larger families so as to have enough children surviving into adulthood so as to become producers. Its very economically inefficient, but necessary, given the material conditions of production. But, once such production is replaced by larger scale capitalist production, these conditions disappear, and along with it the need to have large families.
Africa is still heavily influenced by such inefficient peasant production, and small scale commodity production. But, as with Asia before it, which led to the development of the Asian Tigers in the 1980's onwards, it has all of the conditions for rapid growth, in specific regions, as imperialist capital comes in to take advantage of its resources, and the most important resource, these large supplies, of cheap labour that can be drawn in from the existing peasant production. That development, will also hasten the development of large domestic capitals, as it did in Asia.
The creation of the African Continental Free Trade Area, and extension of free movement of labour across the continent will enhance those developments, and ensure that the more rapid growth of African economies compared to the rest of the globe, seen over the last 20 years, continues and accelerates. Of course, wars like those taking place in Ethiopia, place obstacles in the way of such progress, but such conflicts, were also a feature of the development of nation states, and multinational states in Europe and North America too. They did not prevent the continued development of capital and of economies there, but were, an unavoidable aspect of it. Again, it was one of the reasons that the peaceful creation of the EU, was one of the greatest achievements of humanity, and the fact that, at this early stage Africa has produced the ACFTA, is itself an immense and significant achievement.
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