America Beyond Capitalism

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Robin Cohen and Harry Goulbourne

After independence many African countries abjured conventional patterns of political representation and democratic participation in the interest of creating a unified state and promoting economic development. Today, however, the dominant models of one-party democracy and African socialism are in terminal collapse as a result of internal pressures and the influence of political changes taking place in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Throughout Africa, especially in South Africa, the old Left has been slowly forced to abandon its belief in democratic centralism in favor of a more pluralistic vision of the future. In this volume of provocative essays, leading scholars from Africa, Europe, and the United States examine the extent to which popular demands for democracy are both subverting and enriching the postcolonial order in Africa. The contributors explore a wide range of topics, including economic democracy, the state and civil society, the impact of the economic crisis on women, and agrarian reform. Theoretical chapters are followed by case studies of the prospects for democracy in South Africa, Uganda, Ghana, the Sudan, Botswana, and the southern African region. This book will be indispensable for those seeking to understand Africa's future in the world order.

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from the Macroeconomic Research Group

MERG has become convinced that a sea change in economic policy is essential to generate growth in the next few years. It can demonstrate that its proposed policy framework is both coherent and affordable. The MERG proposals offer a radically different vision of the future of South Africa. They have been designed to address the current imbalances, through direct intervention, in a way which would benefit all sections of the South African population within a short period of time. MERG took the objectives of the democratic movement as its starting point. The aim of the MERG framework is, therefore, to secure a rapid improvement in the quality of the daily lives of South Africa's poorest, most oppressed and disadvantaged people. The strategy stresses programmes to: initiate job creation and training programmes for the unemployed; improve the status of the poorest women in the rural areas; improve the availability and quality of education, health, housing and electrification; raise the level of wages of low-income workers, and; dramatically improve the skills of employed workers.

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Lewis H. Lapham

For the better part of twenty years Lewis H. Lapham has sketched the American social and political landscape with a fine sense of history and a sharp and caustic wit. In The Wish for Kings, his most provocative book to date, Lapham obliges us to take a long hard look at what has become of our hallowed democratic tradition. Although we like to believe that we live by Lincoln's famous words - "government of the people, by the people, for the people"--We have become accustomed to a government by and for the friends of privilege. The promise of democracy is synonymous with the idea of the citizen, but to people who have grown tired of self-government the belief in kings and queens and fairy tales replaces the will to engage in the rude and often uncomfortable arts of politics. Lapham notes the effects of our distaste for objection and dissent - an apathetic public debate, 90 percent of the wealth in the hands of 5 percent of the population, the media and the universities united in their defense of oligarchy - and discusses at length the ways in which a courtier spirit (the obverse of the democratic spirit) subverts and weakens the hopes of a free republic. It is a discussion that has particular relevance to the present moment. If the wish for kings is as old as Babylon and as modern as the worship of Hollywood celebrity, our 1992 presidential election translated the wish into nineteen million votes for H. Ross Perot. Frightened by the weakness in the economy and dissatisfied with the wisdom in office in Washington, a sizable percentage of the electorate embraced in the figure of a Texas millionaire what it imagined to be the comforts of autocracy. The question remains as to whether the enthusiasm for Perot was merely an angry protest against a government that had arrogantly distanced itself from the American people, or whether it expressed a more general longing for a magical figure capable of quieting all our fears and answering all our prayers. The question is an urgent one, and it defines the task of the Clinton administration. Unless President Clinton can sustain the public faith in the practice as well as the theory of Democracy, it is possible that the idea of democratic self-government will come to be seen as a once noble experiment no longer adequate to the specifications of the twenty-first century. The several facets of this question come into brilliant focus in this important book by one of our most incisive social critics. No one who cares about the future of our nation should miss reading The Wish for Kings.

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Michael Newman

"The Maastricht Treaty reactivated a long-term debate about the future of the European Union. Does it still make sense to talk of the 'sovereign state', or is power now moving upwards in the direction of a political union and downwards to a regional level? What are the implications of such trends for democracy? Controversy over what is happening and what should happen has engulfed the whole European Union. Yet the arguments are often conducted polemically, and both information and concepts are distorted."--BOOK JACKET. "This book counters misrepresentation by both 'Eurosceptics' and 'Euro-enthusiasts' by examining the issues involved in the sovereignty debates. Written in an accessible style, it examines key questions in democracy, drawing on both traditional concepts of political thought and empirical evidence to elucidate the current situation. It offers critical insights into the EU, and some of the arguments frequently used in its defence. But it rejects the nationalist opposition, and presents a case for a democratic EU which would be worthy of support."--BOOK JACKET. "Specialists, students and all those interested in the future of the European Union will find this a challenging critique of conventional analysis, which provides sufficient information for readers to form their own conclusions."--BOOK JACKET.