To be clear: I like the manifesto below; I agree with it! But that agreement is not because it’s also published as a journal article. Instead, I believe it because, as a manifesto, it demands change now in terms I understand and appreciate historically.
Since my argument depends on the definition of “manifesto” I use, here’s mine:
Always layered and paradoxical, [a manifesto] comes disguised as nakedness, directness, aggression. An artwork aspiring to be a speech act—like a threat, a promise, a joke, a spell, a dare. You can’t help but thrill to language that imagines it can get something done. You also can’t help noticing the similar demands and condemnations that ring out across the decades and the centuries— something will be swept away or conjured into being, and it must happen right this moment. . .This is a form that asks readers to suspend their disbelief, and so like any piece of theater, it trades on its own vulnerability, invites our complicity, as if only the quality of our attention protects it from reality’s brutal puncture. A manifesto is a public declaration of intent, a laying out of the writer’s views (shared, it’s implied, by at least some vanguard “we”) on how things are and how they should be altered. Once the province of institutional authority, decrees from church or state, the manifesto later flowered as a mode of presumption and dissent. You assume the writer stands outside the halls of power (or else, occasionally, chooses to pose and speak from there). Today the US government, for example, does not issue manifestos, lest it sound both hectoring and weak. The manifesto is inherently quixotic—spoiling for a fight it’s unlikely to win, insisting on an outcome it lacks the authority to ensure.
L. Haas (2021). “Manifesto Destiny: Writing that demands change now.” Bookforum accessed online at https://www.bookforum.com/print/2802/writing-that-demands-change-now-2449
In 2023, Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton published, “How capitalism is destroying the Horn of Africa: sheep and the crises in Somalia and Sudan,” in the peer-reviewed Review of African Political Economy (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03056244.2023.2264679). To its credit, the Review publishes “radical analyses of trends, issues and social processes in Africa, adopting a broadly materialist interpretation of change.” And what a breadth of fresh air this article is.
First, its tone is direct, its language unequivocally materialist in the great manner of yesterday, its focus is on the marginalized, and, equally important, how could we not want change after reading this?
We present in outline an historically and empirically grounded explanation for the post-colonial destruction of the nation states of Somalia and Sudan. This is combined with a forecast that the political de-development of the Horn, and of the Sahel more generally, is spreading south into East and Central Africa as capitalism’s food frontier, in the form of a moving lawless zone of resource extraction. It is destroying livelihoods and exhausting nature. Our starting point is Marx’s argument that the historical growth and the continuing development of capitalism is facilitated through what he called ‘primitive accumulation’. With regard to the current situation in the Horn, there is a sorry historical resonance with the violent proto-capitalist land clearances that took place from the sixteenth century onward in England, Ireland and Scotland and then in North America. While today, as in Darfur, this may be classified as genocide, the principal purpose of land clearances is to convert socially tilled soils and water resources used for autonomous subsistence into pastures for intensive commercial livestock production, which now in Somalia and Sudan amounts to nothing short of ‘ecological strip mining’.
To repeat, how could you (we) not want radical change when reading further:
. . .we argue that the trade is intimately connected with the deepening social, economic and ecological crisis of agro-pastoralism in the region and the way that livestock value is now realised. Underlying the empirical data is the intensification of an environmentally destructive mode of militarised livestock production that, primarily involving sheep, is necessarily expansive, land-hungry, livelihood destroying and population displacing. Sustained by raw violence and strengthened by United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi investment in Red Sea port infrastructure, the Horn and the Gulf are locked into a deadly destruction–consumption embrace.
More, there is a singular cause and it is clear: “This internationally facilitated mode of appropriation, with its associated acts of land clearance, dispossession and displacement, is the root cause of the current crisis.” Nor is there anything really complex about this:
The depth and cruel nature of the changes in Sudan and Somalia’s agro-pastoral economies cannot reasonably be attributed only to environmental change, scarcity-based inter-ethnic conflict, or avaricious generals per se. To lend these arguments weight, some hold that they combine to produce a ‘complex’ emergency. The only complexity, however, is the contortions necessary to fashion a parallel universe that usefully conceals the rapacity of capitalism. Particularly cynical is the claim, for example, that Somalia’s long-history of de-development is the result of climate-change-induced drought. It is no accident that the same international powers and agencies fronting this claim have, for decades, been active players in the Horn’s de-development.
You cannot imagine how much I want to believe these words! And I take that to be a good measure of just how effective a manifesto this manifesto is, at least for someone like myself.
Manifestos are their own public genre, whatever the publication venue. This is not a policy memo whose second sentence after the problem statement is the answer to: What’s to be done and how? But then we would never look to manifestos for the devil in the details, would we?
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 