The agrarian question in Tanzania: the case of tobacco

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 32Since independence in 1961, Tanzania has pursued a policy of institutionalizing a middle peasantry, while stymieing the development of capitalism's principal classes. The policy has taken an extreme form following a 1973 decision to forcibly reorganize the majority of Tanzania's peasants on individual block farms within nucleated villages and to bring the sphere of production more directly under the control of the state and international finance capital. This attempt to subordinate peasant labor to capital by perpetuating middle peasant households increasingly confines capital to its most primitive state. The pursuit of this policy in an export-oriented agricultural economy has particular contradictions and limitations. As long as labor and capital are not separated, they cannot be combined in their technically most advanced form. Hence the contradiction of the state's attempts to extract greater surplus value while simultaneously acting to expand and preserve middle peasant households. This paper explores the implications of such a course of action within the framework of Marxist writings on the agrarian question. Using tobacco production as, an example, it discusses the ways in which middle peasant households are being squeezed and pauperized by this backward capitalist system. It argues that the system inhibits the formal and real subordination of labor to capital and tends to perpetuate the extraction of absolute as opposed to relative surplus value. Household production fetters the concentration of capital and prevents the socialization of labor, while perpetuating the hoe as the main instrument of production

Landing the middle peasantry: Narodism in Tanzania

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 2

Government and opposition in Kenya, 1966-1969

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 85INTRODUCTION: Little exists to document the widespread repression of opposition in Africa since independence. Current studies of the rise of capitalism and the post-colonial state largely ignore institutionalized authoritarianism, which characterizes the political side of this process. The paper below discusses the repression of opposition in Kenya up to 1972. Its salience continues with Kenya having become a de jure one party state under President Daniel arap Moi and the increasingly repressive atmosphere since the abortive coup of 1982. It now appears that authoritarianism must be regarded as part of the ongoing political process and not simply as episodic. [TRUNCATED

The historical origins of Tanzania's working class

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 35INTRODUCTION: This paper discusses the historical conditions which prevented the emergence of a strong capitalist ruling class along the Kenyan lines in Tanzania. In Kenya, a nascent big bourgeoisie controlled African political associations as early as the 1930s, while in Tanzania, teachers, traders, and clerks were the mainstay of the independence movement, with kulak farmers participating (Awiti, 1972; Bienen, 1969; Hyden, 1968; Maguire, 1969), but never predominating as a class "to the extent where they could become an important political force at the national level" (Shivji, 1976: 50). A productive class of capitalists thereby came to engineer the state in independent Kenya, while in Tanzania the dominant force rested with an unproductive "bureaucratic bourgeoisie," a class awkwardly termed and poorly understood. The result in the case of Kenya was a capitalism which matured along rather classic lines, that is by increasing the productivity of labor without resulting in absolute immiseration, whereas in Tanzania, capitalism was retarded along the lines suggested by the Narodniks with the predictable consequences of absolute pauperization described by Lenin. [TRUNCATED

The devolution paradigm: theoretical critiques and the case of Kenya

Devolution’s assumptions presume democracy, yet its proponents view it as an antidote to repressive centralized states, where its assumptions do not hold. This contradiction explains why devolution mostly reproduces the status quo rather than transforming it in transition political economies. Scholars have both supported and criticized devolution, while numerous donors, civil society activists, local politicians, and ordinary citizens still view it as a solution. Disaggregating the theoretical assumptions underpinning the devolution paradigm and juxtaposing them against a case study of Kenya demonstrates how old incentives undermine new formal legal changes and why institutional change may be a dependent rather than an independent variable. Thus, a range of institutional initiatives from organizational tinkering to devolution and constitutional engineering often fail in autocracies and nominal democracies

Rural Development, Environmental Sustainability, and Poverty Alleviation: A Critique of Current Paradigms

Donors have developed new micro-level and local paradigms to address rural development, environmental sustainability, and poverty alleviation to bypass, ignore, and substitute for badly functioning and corrupt states. Yet, states still set the macro-economic, legal, and policy parameters or “rules of the game” within which other entities operate, and many non-state actors are only nominally independent. Hence, technical initiatives stemming from these paradigms, aimed at growth and equity are often theoretically misconceived and tend to fail when implemented. The paper critically discusses the new paradigms, including decentralization, civil society, microentrepreneurship, and capacity building, among others, mainly using African examples.economic development, formal and informal and insitutional arrangements, development planning and policy, economic development, regional urban and rural analyses, formal and informal sectors, institutional arrangements, institutional linkages to development.

The Politics of Violence in Kenya

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 257INTRODUCTION "So this is how it begins" (a Kenyan political scientist, Nairobi, January 2008). To the outside world, Kenya in 2007 was a model of stability and future possibilities. The draconian repression experienced under President Moi in the 1980s and 1990s finally had ended. It was replaced with hard-fought-for freedoms of speech, the press, and association. They emerged towards the end of Moi's rule and were expanded after President Kibaki's election in 2002. The days of imprisonment, detention without trial, and torture of opposition party supporters were gone. Kenya's once vibrant economy had been decimated and brought to its knees by Moi. However, by 2007, just five years after installing a new government, Kenya had an annual growth rate of over 6% and was poised to do even better. The mood was optimistic and most thought Kenya was back on an economic roll. Some in government spoke of Kenya following East Asia's "tigers," and becoming another Newly Industrialized Country (NIC). This was just one side of the story. The other was captured by Kenya's low scores on the World Bank's Governance Indicators, placing it below the mean for Sub-Saharan Africa in three of the following four areas: government effectiveness (28%/28%), political stability (15%/35.6%), control of corruption (16%/30%), and the rule of law (15.7%/28.8%). 1 Kenya was still rocked by financial scandals at the top of government, its infrastructure continued to crumble, and foreign companies were still skittish about investing in the country. 2 Crime, including gunfights in the central business district of Nairobi, carjacking, holdups in houses, and gangland style murders, peppered the lives of ordinary Kenyans and others. This duality of both positive transformation and imminent decay aptly characterized Kenya in the post-Moi era.[TRUNCATED

Dying to win: elections, political violence, and institutional decay in Kenya

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 263Introduction This paper examines the lessons learned from Kenya's 2007 post election violence and what has happened since then. It notes that the root causes of the violence still persist, have not been addressed, and easily could be reignited. Faced with a situation where institutions and the rule of law have been weakened deliberately and where diffused violence is widespread, both Kenya's transition to democracy and the fate of the nation remain vulnerable. The argument here is that the problems faced in holding and managing elections in conflict situations often are not simply technical. Instead, in Kenya and elsewhere, many difficulties are symptomatic of larger political and institutional questions related to democratic change that are more difficult to analyze in causal terms or to address. Democratic theorists from Robert Dahl2 onward have long understood that democracy consists of much more than just multi-party elections. At the heart of the democratic experiment are two underlying caveats bordering on truisms. First, there must be a willingness to lose elections and not to win them by any means and at all costs, including killing one's opponents. In established democracies, both politicians and the public accept that tomorrow is another day to get their person elected. Second, and central to democracy and the democratic process, is a belief in the integrity of the rule of law and institutions that must be matched by the way in which laws and institutions operate in practice. Where this does not occur, democracy is vulnerable. However, there is little by way of agreement about the underlying causes or events that give rise to these two factors or trigger the incentives for elite consensus necessary for their emergence. [TRUNCATED

Marketing Wine on the Web

E-commerce is penetrating agriculture, particularly for selling products directly to consumers. The wine industry is a case in point. The industry has long-term experience in direct marketing. Many wineries welcome patrons at their premises for wine tasting and for selling wine to them. Moreover, where the practice is allowed, shipping wine directly to consumers without the assistance of trade intermediaries is a significant sales channel. E-commerce was adopted early in the wine industries of wired high-income countries and the wine industry provides an opportunity for studying the adoption, use, and impact of e-commerce. Moreover, because e-commerce has not spread evenly through all branches of agriculture, lessons learned from the wine industry may provide useful insights for entrepreneurs and policy makers concerned with sections of agriculture or the food industry where e-commerce adoption lags behind. The specific objectives of the dissertation research project which we report here therefore were: (1) to assess the extent of e-commerce diffusion in the wine industries of Australia, California, Germany; (2) to identify e-commerce practices used by wineries for marketing wine; (3) to explain differences in wineries' e-commerce practices, and (4) to derive insights and implications for sections of agriculture that lag behind in ecommerce adoption.Marketing,

The gray matter structural connectome and its relationship to alcohol relapse: Reconnecting for recovery.

Gray matter (GM) atrophy associated with alcohol use disorders (AUD) affects predominantly the frontal lobes. Less is known how frontal lobe GM loss affects GM loss in other regions and how it influences drinking behavior or relapse after treatment. The profile similarity index (PSI) combined with graph analysis allows to assess how GM loss in one region affects GM loss in regions connected to it, ie, GM connectivity. The PSI was used to describe the pattern of GM connectivity in 21 light drinkers (LDs) and in 54 individuals with AUD (ALC) early in abstinence. Effects of abstinence and relapse were determined in a subgroup of 36 participants after 3 months. Compared with LD, GM losses within the extended brain reward system (eBRS) at 1-month abstinence were similar between abstainers (ABST) and relapsers (REL), but REL had also GM losses outside the eBRS. Lower GM connectivities in ventro-striatal/hypothalamic and dorsolateral prefrontal regions and thalami were present in both ABST and REL. Between-networks connectivity loss of the eBRS in ABST was confined to prefrontal regions. About 3 months later, the GM volume and connectivity losses had resolved in ABST, and insula connectivity was increased compared with LD. GM losses and GM connectivity losses in REL were unchanged. Overall, prolonged abstinence was associated with a normalization of within-eBRS connectivity and a reconnection of eBRS structures with other networks. The re-formation of structural connectivities within and across networks appears critical for cognitive-behavioral functioning related to the capacity to maintain abstinence after outpatient treatment