Welcome to the Radical Cape Reading Room
You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
Greetings from the Cape Vert Peninsula, and welcome to the Radical Cape Reading Room! Here’s a quick introduction to this substack and how it came to be.
Surplus labor, civil society, and other ideas that are what thinkers make of them.
At the beginning of 2025, I was reading Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James’ history of the Haitian revolution. In an afterword penned in 1963, James, a committed and active Trotskyist, approvingly cited an analysis by Arthur Lewis, who would later, in a short memoir penned upon his receipt of the Nobel Prize in economics, call himself a social democrat and discuss the key, ongoing support he had received earlier in his career from Friedrich Hayek. Lewis’ most famous theory, the dual-sector model of national economies, took what had been a key term from Karl Marx, “surplus labor,” and, completely redefining it, made it the center of a quantitative model for economic development that was equally attractive to both Marxists and neoliberals.
Around the same time as I was reading James, I came across a couple of news releases from Human Rights Watch: one on an escalating crackdown on political opposition and civil society in Tunisia, and another on increasing curtailments of civil society by the Ethiopian government. While the roots of the term “civil society” are yet older, most contemporary usage draws on readings of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian who during the First World War quit university and joined the Italian communist party. The notebooks he kept while imprisoned during the Second World War adapted and updated Marxist theory for the twentieth century; his ideas regarding an active and politically integral civil society were a key part of that. His analysis of civil society was not much more optimistic than that of his French contemporary Louis Althusser, who also spent the war in prison for his political beliefs, and whose approach is signalled by the name he would later give to Gramsci’s civil society organizations: Ideological State Apparatuses.
Yet if Gramsci was more pessimistic about “civil society” than Human Rights Watch is today, he was not entirely so, and his terminology was like an ancient Greek colonnade: brightly painted by its builder, but underneath it all and for years on end, monumentally blank and inspiring to all sorts of people of whom the builder may or may not have dreamed. But I am getting ahead of myself.
While Human Rights Watch was publicizing particularly zealous regulatory and carceral approaches to civil society in Tunisia and Ethiopia, the United States was shuttering its foreign aid program. Ken Opalo, professor of political economy at Georgetown University in Washington DC, wrote cuttingly about aid-recipient countries that “outsourced their ambitions,” concluding, “it would be irresponsible for African policymakers to continue exposing their citizens to the whims of politicians in donor countries. It would also be irresponsible to not cultivate full ownership of service delivery in sectors that have come to be dominated by donors.”
I’ll look to get deeper and more discerningly into civil society, ideological state apparatuses, and the question of what various writers say about who “owns” their activities in a future post. Likewise, I hope to devote at least one post to how it came to be that African governments have for some time adhered to certain limits on their own expenditure while either coordinating with or leaving relatively free reign to donors in certain key sectors. But this page that you are reading now is not those posts. I will only note here that what Opalo recommended in early 2025 is what in the 1950s and ’60s impressed James about Lewis, his fellow member of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. It is what Lewis would make the centerpiece of his Nobel lecture in 1979: the possibility and even importance of countries in the Global South delinking the fates of their economies from forces in the Global North which are beyond their control.
Miles Davis asked: So What?
Quite frankly, I find this all fascinating: what ideas have been radical but are no longer, or vice versa? What commonalities exist between thinkers and interest groups with otherwise divergent agendas? Now, since I happily fail quite often to make any distinction between what is everyday and what is profound, I won’t promise that my posts will have any preordained balance between one and the other.
My focus will largely be on West and Central Africa and its diaspora, though I may venture further afield if a topic seems to be relevant, or if talking about a beam in one eye seems preferable to pointing out a mote in another. You can figure that interests here will range across the social sciences and humanities and generally have a historicist bent. Sometimes I may simply be noting the implications of readings in various books; I may just as well be commenting on current events. Of course, while all of those events take place outside of my reading room, even such as I experience firsthand, I also have the opportunity to read about them sooner or later.
A Room of One’s Own
A little over a decade ago, I found myself looking at a friend’s bookshelf here in Dakar. He had done a masters at the London School of Economics, the university where Lewis had encountered Hayek all those years ago, and his bookshelf featured titles like Seeing Like a State and States and Power in Africa. He was a little older than me, and when I tried to draw him out around James Scott and Jeffrey Herbst, he demurred. Work took up all his time and mental energy, he said: since graduating, there was very little left for reading outside of the strictures of his professional life. I felt a certain sadness on hearing this, and, despite an admiration for him that never stopped growing, I resolved that having time and space to read would be more important to me than any job or graduate qualification.
Mind you, looking back, I won’t claim for that to have been a wise resolution, taking the world as it is. Yet that decision of mine, without my having realized it, set the cornerstone of the Radical Cape Reading Room. May you feel welcome here, may you feel free to subscribe, and may we take life in its untold volumes, turning over the leaves, sometimes together, and sometimes each alone.