Landing the middle peasantry: Narodism in Tanzania

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 2

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

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 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

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

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.