Journal of Law and Political Economy

The second edition of the Conference on Economic and Monetary Sovereignty of Africa was held in Dakar, Senegal, on October 25–28, 2022. Participants from around the world debated the theme “Facing the Socio-Ecological Crisis: Delinking and the Question of Global Reparations.” The event was designed as a follow-up on discussions begun during the first edition (held in Tunis in 2019; see Ben Gadha et al. 2021), as well as an opportunity to reflect on recent developments. 

The Dakar Declaration is one of the main byproducts of four days of intense, fruitful, and comradely debates on the triptych of delinking, socio-ecological resilience, and reparations. It is an internationalist manifesto and a global action plan.

It is widely contended that Africans were complicit in enslaving other African people, that slavery was legal at the time it was in force and, hence, that demanding reparations from states can have no legal basis. Drawing on the work of Nora Wittmann, this essay questions these presumptions, advances the argument that there is a legal basis for reparations, and puts the case for grounding the legal approach within a wider political economy of reparations.

The picture of holding the same money in our hands across borders has time and again served as a symbol of unity, while its divisive potential often disappears behind a veil of hope. Real monetary solidarity—the necessary flip side of Pan-African trade and development—requires more than a simplistic plaster of neoliberal currency unions. The time is now to counter the US dollar dominance, and discussions of South-South monetary solidarity are many—from the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), the West African eco, the East African Monetary Union (EAMU), to a potential sur in Latin America and a move away from the petrodollar system. This contribution outlines a continuum of monetary unification systems and stresses the fundamental nature of political commitment to solidarity across monetary, productive, social, and political frontiers in order to achieve monetary unification as a stepping-stone to Pan-African unity.

Jack Balkin’s scholarship exhibits an indecisive faith, symptomatic of legal liberalism, committed to belief in the future moralization of politics and disavowal of that belief. This yields indecisive theories of constitutionalism, politics, jurisprudence, and history; repeatedly, focus on progress, open-endedness, and discussion neglects how previous decisions and entrenched institutions foreclose alternatives. Above all, Balkin disregards how capitalism precludes democratic redemption of liberal ideals. The Constitution entrenched capitalist social property relations and insulated them from the democratic process. Capitalism’s social compulsions foreclose democratic redemption of the liberal ideal of equally respecting the freedom of all. Constitutional legitimacy in capitalist democracy is entangled in contradictory imperatives to sustain both civic solidarity and accumulation. By undermining regimes of constitutional legitimation, accumulation has yielded cyclical patterns of constitutional development. Responsible struggle to achieve liberal ideals must acknowledge that capitalism forecloses their redemption but that no liberal overcoming of capitalism is currently possible.

This article reflects on the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and Law (APPEAL), formed in 2012 as the first contemporary scholarly group named for the emerging field of Law and Political Economy (LPE). APPEAL organizes academics and allies to address urgent social problems by exploring possibilities for reorienting the economy toward justice, equality, and democracy. To mobilize ideas for change, APPEAL emphasizes collaborative intellectual communities. I situate APPEAL in the context of a neoliberal political movement to capture law’s power by investing in the Law and Economics message that economic power inevitably limits democracy and social justice. Though vastly outmatched in funding, APPEAL brings together experts in economics, law, and other disciplines to clarify and change influential neoliberal ideas about both law and economics. I highlight APPEAL participants’ scholarship showing the interconnected social, political, and legal nature of economic power as the basis for transforming economic politics and policy.

This essay describes three new versions of socialist feminism, briefly traces their genealogies, and shows how they address the economic and social crises we face today. Antiwork theory proposes basing individual and societal value on support for life rather than on production and suggests certain nonreformist reforms—a universal basic income and thirty-hour workweek—to advance the struggle to reach such a world. Care theorists share the central value of supporting life and its reproduction and propose ways toward these goals, including abolition of the family. The third approach puts forth new concepts of labor and class and deepens our understanding of the crises faced by global finance capitalism by injecting perspectives from struggles in the global South. All are concerned with how to produce changes in subjectivity adequate to support these struggles and to build a new society based on socialist principles.