41,776 research outputs found
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.
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