Contingent identity and socialist democracy in the port of Maputo

Failures of socialist revolutions in Africa are sometimes dismissed as alien tothe history of socialism - attempts to gloss developmentalist nationalist projects in thediscourse of socialism. This paper argues that the problematic relationship betweenparty, state and broad-based political activism in African revolutions are not part of an incommensurate ethnicised history; they are like those that have repeatedly recurred andbeen debated in the history of socialism. It looks at one particular moment in the historyof Frelimo's Mozambican revolution - the confrontation between the party and Mozambican port workers over the restructuring of work and pay in 1980. It argues that theways that Frelimo envisioned its options at this moment illustrated two recurring tensions in Marxist-Leninist political practice - reluctance to confront the contingency ofstructure and the materiality of ideology

Contingent identity and socialist democracy in the port of Maputo

Failures of socialist revolutions in Africa are sometimes dismissed as alien to the history of socialism - attempts to gloss developmentalist nationalist projects in the discourse of socialism. This paper argues that the problematic relationship between party, state and broad-based political activism in African revolutions are not part of an incommensurate ethnicised history; they are like those that have repeatedly recurred and been debated in the history of socialism. It looks at one particular moment in the history of Frelimo's Mozambican revolution - the confrontation between the party and Mozambican port workers over the restructuring of work and pay in 1980. It argues that the ways that Frelimo envisioned its options at this moment illustrated two recurring tensions in Marxist-Leninist political practice - reluctance to confront the contingency of structure and the materiality of ideology

Proletarianisation, agency and changing rural livelihoods : forced labour and resistance in colonial Mozambique

In current analytical approaches to rural poverty in southern Africa, the concept of changing livelihoods stands in an inverse relation to the concept of proletarianisation. The more we see the term livelihoods, the less we see proletarianisation. This shift reflects criticism of Marxist work on proletarianisation for its teleology - confusing irreversibility with inevitability - and for its functionalism - not recognising the agency of the poor, including the struggles of people not to be proletarianised. It also reflects, however, the current ascendancy of methodological individualism in development studies. This paper argues that much is lost when the description of livelihoods becomes an alternative to class analysis rather than its complement, and when agency is reduced to individual strategising. It argues that the multiplicity and variation of rural lives in Mozambique today are the outcome of a historical process of proletarianisation grounded in recourse to forced labour by capitalist enterprises and the colonial state. It shows how both forced labour and resistance to it shaped the ways labour and agricultural commodity markets worked and developed. The concept of changing livelihoods helps us to us to document the processes of commoditisation that underlie both the contingency of proletarianisation and its irreversibility. It thus also helps us to understand why the struggles of rural people against forced labour and forced cropping often brought them more tightly into a world where wagelabour was done or hired. If we become so enmeshed in documenting the complexity of multiple livelihoods and individual creativity that we can no longer see broad patterns of class struggle in historical change, then the concept of livelihoods becomes an ideological mask rather than a useful working tool

Proletarianisation, agency and changing rural livelihoods: forced labour and resistance in colonial Mozambique

In current analytical approaches to rural poverty in southern Africa, the concept of changing livelihoods stands in an inverse relation to the concept of proletarianisation. The more we see the term livelihoods, the less we see proletarianisation. This shift reflects criticism of Marxist work on proletarianisation for its teleology - confusing irreversibility with inevitability - and for its functionalism - not recognising the agency of the poor, including the struggles of people not to be proletarianised. It also reflects, however, the current ascendancy of methodological individualism in development studies. This paper argues that much is lost when the description of livelihoods becomes an alternative to class analysis rather than its complement, and when agency is reduced to individual strategising. It argues that the multiplicity and variation of rural lives in Mozambique today are the outcome of a historical process of proletarianisation grounded in recourse to forced labour by capitalist enterprises and the colonial state. It shows how both forced labour and resistance to it shaped the ways labour and agricultural commodity markets worked and developed. The concept of changing livelihoods helps us to us to document the processes of commoditisation that underlie both the contingency of proletarianisation and its irreversibility. It thus also helps us to understand why the struggles of rural people against forced labour and forced cropping often brought them more tightly into a world where wagelabour was done or hired. If we become so enmeshed in documenting the complexity of multiple livelihoods and individual creativity that we can no longer see broad patterns of class struggle in historical change, then the concept of livelihoods becomes an ideological mask rather than a useful working tool

Contingent identity and socialist democracy in the port of Maputo

Failures of socialist revolutions in Africa are sometimes dismissed as alien to the history of socialism - attempts to gloss developmentalist nationalist projects in the discourse of socialism. This paper argues that the problematic relationship between party, state and broad-based political activism in African revolutions are not part of an incommensurate ethnicised history; they are like those that have repeatedly recurred and been debated in the history of socialism. It looks at one particular moment in the history of Frelimo's Mozambican revolution - the confrontation between the party and Mozambican port workers over the restructuring of work and pay in 1980. It argues that the ways that Frelimo envisioned its options at this moment illustrated two recurring tensions in Marxist-Leninist political practice - reluctance to confront the contingency of structure and the materiality of ideology

No separate spheres:the contingent reproduction of living labor in Southern Africa

Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) rejects the classical political economy distinction between productive and unproductive labor, the latter defined as all labor that does not produce surplus-value. Rather, much non-commodified labor, particularly that done in the domestic sphere, is not unproductive but necessary since it produces labor-power. Hence, SRT has proposed an alternative distinction: productive versus reproductive spheres of labor. This article argues that this opposition too is analytically and politically misleading. Capital is concerned with profit, not with the reproduction of the living labor within which labor-power is always embedded. It is the everyday struggles of living labor that determines its reproduction. These take place not just in the kin-based sphere of the family but in overlapping, shifting places and processes, including struggles for better wages and working conditions in capitalist firms. This paper uses two different contexts in southern Africa to make this argument: an influential debate over how to understand changes in apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s; and a sugar-cane plantation in Mozambique where interdependent contradictions of class, gender and race defined a social division of labor that systematically compromised the reproduction of living labor.</p