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 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

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.

Learning to Understand by Evolving Theories

In this paper, we describe an approach that enables an autonomous system to infer the semantics of a command (i.e. a symbol sequence representing an action) in terms of the relations between changes in the observations and the action instances. We present a method of how to induce a theory (i.e. a semantic description) of the meaning of a command in terms of a minimal set of background knowledge. The only thing we have is a sequence of observations from which we extract what kinds of effects were caused by performing the command. This way, we yield a description of the semantics of the action and, hence, a definition.Comment: KRR Workshop at ICLP 201

Landing the middle peasantry: Narodism in Tanzania

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 2

An observation of cosmic ray positrons from 10-20 GeV

A balloon flight of the University of Chicago electron telescope was performed. Making use of the east-west asymmetry in the geomagnetic cut off rigidity, the cosmic ray positrons and negatrons were separated over the range 10 GeV to 20 GeV. The positron to electron ratio, e+/(e++e-), was measured to be 17% + or - 5%, significantly higher than the ratio measured in the 1 GeV to 10 GeV range by other experiments. This increase appears to suggest that either a primary component of positrons become significant above 10 GeV, or that the spectrum of primary negatrons decreases above 10 GeV more sharply than that of secondary positrons

Vortex Ring Dynamics in Trapped Bose-Einstein Condensates

We use the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation to study the motion of a vortex ring produced by phase imprinting on an elongated cloud of cold atoms. Our approach models the experiments of Yefsah et. al. [Nature \textbf{499}, 426] on $^6$Li in the BEC regime where the fermions are tightly bound into bosonic dimers. We find ring oscillation periods which are much larger than the period of the axial harmonic trap. Our results lend further strength to Bulgac et. al.'s arguments [arXiv: 1306.4266] that the "heavy solitons" seen in those experiments are actually vortex rings. We numerically calculate the periods of oscillation for the vortex rings as a function of interaction strength, trap aspect ratio, and minimum vortex ring radius. In the presence of axial anisotropies the rings undergo complicated internal dynamics where they break into sets of vortex lines, then later combine into rings. These structures oscillate with a similar frequency to simple axially symmetric rings.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, revtex4; new subsection and figure addressing axial asymmetry, added references to sections 2 and 3, minor changes to section 5, main conclusions unchange