African economy

African economy

Imperial Politics and Local Economy in Colonial Central America 1670-1770 Author(s): Robert W. Patch Source: Past & Present, No. 143 (May, 1994), pp. 77-107 (Guatemala) An entire commercial system based on government officials came into existence. The Spanish corregidores (magistrates), alcaldes mayores (high magistrates) and governors who ruled in the kingdom of Guatemala in reality were entrepreneurs who organized a variety of business activities that effected the economic integration of the whole of Central America. They succeeded because their political power allowed them to use coercion, rather than market forces, to get the local population, especially the Indian peasantry, to comply with their demands. Colonialism was thus an essential feature of commercial exchange, for market forces alone would not have resulted in the transfer of profits away from the peasants on the scale desired by the merchant class. Political power allowed magistrates in Central America to isolate the producers from merchant competitors and acquire the lion's share of the surplus. At the same time, professional merchants, rather than competing with the government officials, became their partners in crime - for the activities were of course illegal - and funnelled capital to the magistrates who used their political power to make the investments yield a profit. This was accomplished by ensuring the enforcement of contracts and collection of debts - which economic power alone could not always accomplish. Moreover political power could be used to establish local monopolies, thereby eliminating troublesome competitors. In fact, in other contexts, the need to acquire political power to enforce commercial contracts and exclude foreign commercial interlopers was one of the major causes of European colonial expansion.Spanish magistrates tried to profit from their positions by carrying out a variety of enterprises.45 Of these, by far the most important was the acquisition of the products of the Indian eco- nomy. This was made possible by the indigenous people's chronic need for money to pay their tribute and religious taxes. Magistrates turned this need to their own advantage by paying the church and the exchequer what the Indians owed and then demanding repayment in kind. Working through the native village rulers, Spanish officials could force the villagers to repay their debts in specific goods. If the people tried to resist, they were flogged by their caciques; and if the caciques failed to deliver the goods, they were flogged by the Spanish officials. In all cases, then, the magistrates depended on the existing structure of production and political system to carry out business with the Indians. This particular type of commercial operation, in which magistrates advanced money or credit to the Indians, became known as a repartimiento, a word derived from the verb repartir (to allocate or distribute In Soconusco, Suchitepequez and Sonsonate repartimientos were carried out to acquire cacao. In highland areas like Chiapa, Quezaltenango and Huehuetenango, magistrates used this method not only to acquire maize, cochineal and wool but also to get wheat, which the Indians did not want to produce but could be coerced into growing by making debts payable only in that grain. In areas of lower altitudes like Nicaragua, Sutiaba, Realejo and northern Verapaz, the repartimiento method was used to make the native people produce cotton, some of which was then distrib- uted to local Indian villages to be woven into textiles and sailcloth. Most of the cotton from the lowlands, however, was transported to the highland provinces of Chiapa, Quezaltenango, Huehuetenango and Atitlan, where it was allocated through a second repartimiento to the Indian villages to be made into textiles. In practice, therefore, a large part of the business of the repartimiento system consisted of the allocation of money or credit and of raw materials for textile production. Consequently this was a kind of putting-out system. However, unlike similar struc- tures of production in Europe, this putting-out system was coer- cive, and was made possible by the colonial relationship between Spaniards and Indians. In all these repartimientos the native people had no choice in the matter: the magistrates routinely got the Indians into debt, and then required them to repay the debts in goods that could be resold at a great profit. As one Maya Indian explained it, cotton was "put out among the women of the village . . by force, and if they do not do it [i.e., weave], they are flogged".46 Coercion was the sine qua non of the system. When possible, magistrates also made money by allocating Indian labour to Spanish enterprises. This was done to a certain extent in Chiquimula, where the corregidor organized drafts of labourers for the silver-mines in Tegucigalpa and charged the mine-owners for every worker thus provided. It was even more important in San Salvador, where the alcalde mayor practically monopolized the labour supply and therefore profited by charging Spanish landowners for the workers provided for the indigo plantationImperialism and Dependency: Recent Debates and Old Dead-Ends Author(s): Ronaldo Munck Source: Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 8, No. 3/4, Dependency and Marxism (Late Summer- Autumn, 1981), pp. 162-179PublishedThe process of articulation between these is one of the major focuses. Why it is that precapitalist modes of production tend to be preserved still seems to be explained only in terms of their being "functional" for the continued reproduction of capitalism. This may be so, but one gets an uneasy feeling that these cannot really be independent modes of production if their conditions of existence are so inextricably linked up with the expansion of capitalism. That there are noncapitalist relations of production, even Frank would not dispute today, but to see the Third World in terms of "combina- tions" of modes of production is another question.

Migration and the Labour Market Author(s): Emanuel Marx Source: Anthropology Today, Vol. 2, No. 6 (Dec., 1986), pp. 17-19PublishedWhile they made isolated attempts to break away from the functionalist paradigm of society, they tended to return to the familiar fold. They continued to study geographically bounded units, such as community, tribe, town, and they studied them one at a time, without recognizing that they were intimately connected with each other. They could not adequately deal with labour migration, as long as it involved two 'separate' social systems, the tribe and the town. Their inability to treat both within one system was to be their undoing. Political economists, such as Burawoy (1975), Meillassoux (1972) and Wolpe (1972), took over from where the social anthropologists left off. Their frame of analysis embraced both tribe and town and their macro-analyses of labour migration could better account for the facts.

Applications of the Lineage Mode of Production in African Studies Author(s): Peter Geschiere Source: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des tudes Africaines, Vol.19, No. 1 (1985), pp. 80-90Published operationalization. An important issue seems to be how models of modes of production can serve as analytical tools for understanding the great variety of African societies and their differing transformations in articulation with capitalism. Coquery-Vidrovitch (1980, 104) very rightly noted that, until now, the relation between the reflection on modes of production and historical research has been somewhat one-sided: modes of production have been deduced from historical studies, but these models have hardly served, in turn, as "un outil prealable d'enquete" - as a starting- point for further empirical studies. There seems to be a strategic dilemma in the application of the concept. On the one hand there is a danger that modes of production might be defined and distinguished in such general terms that these large models would be of little consequence to specific, empirical studies. Lately, there has also been evidence of the opposite tendency, towards "un pullulement des modes de production" (Gallissot 1980b and c, 116) - each case-study resulting in the discovery of a new mode of production; in this way the concept might equally lose its analytical value.

Pg 80.The Concept of "Articulation" and the Political Economy of Colonialism Author(s): Bruce J. Berman Source: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des tudes Africaines, Vol.18, No. 2 (1984), pp. 407-414Published Reliance on an abstract formal concept of mode of production results in a tendency to identify the existence of a mode by the presence or absence of a particular form of labor process or exploitation of labor such as the patriarchal peasant farm or wage labor. However, these are, as Jairus Banaji points out, "simple categories" or simple abstractions in Marxist terms which can exist within different historical societies dominated by the "laws of motion" or developmental tendencies of different modes of production and which take their particular character from the manner of their involvement in those wider relations (1977, 9-10, 30-31). Thus, peasant production in itself cannot constitute a mode of production as such, but is rather a form of production that can exist and takes on its particular historical character within the dominant dynamic forces of different societies which determine the conditions of its reproduction or transformation. Failure to recognize the conceptual limits of a "mode of production" has led to "a desire to link immediately observable features of society... directly to the defining features of various modes of production without setting them in the context of a historical process" (Mouzelis 1980, 367). This has meant, for example, that in some instances each different labor process has been identified as a separate mode of production in a multiplication ad infinitum in which a single Latin American latifundia is said to contain several "modes of production." In so doing, the utility of the concepts of "mode of production" and "articulation" disappear in a reductio ad absurdum of micro-forms (Long 1974). There is also the reverse danger of making the capitalist mode of production contain such a diversity of forms and relations of production that any sense of where it begins or ends disappears, and it becomes "a vacant and homogeneous totality" synonymous with the global system as such. This is particularly apparent when capitalism is defined at the level of exchange rather than at the level of production, as in Immanuel Wallerstein's world system analysis (Laclau 1977, 43-46).Pg 408Africa and the World Economy Author(s): Frederick Cooper. Source: African Studies Review, Vol. 24, No. 2/3, Social Science and Humanistic Research on Africa: An Assessment (Jun. - Sep., 1981), pp. 1-86.

Precapitalist modes of production are very difficult to specify. If every way of catching an antelope or growing a banana defines a mode of production, the concept blends into the empiricism that Marxists scorn.53 The lineage mode of production is being applied to Africa just as non-Marxist anthropologists have cast doubt on the category of lineage. The subordination of women is explained as necessary to the reproduction of the lineage mode of production, but this does not explain how or why women acquiesced to their roles, while much evidence suggests that their actual roles in both production and reproduction were far more complex than the dichotomy between the two implies (Guyer, 1981; O'Laughlin, 1977; Edholm et al., 1977; Mackintosh, 1977). A slave mode of production is a more dubious proposition: the forced importation of detached outsiders can strengthen kinship groups against kings or kings against kinship groups, and the use of slaves as producers cannot be explained at all without reference to wider systems of exchange.54 On the other hand, attempts to define modes of production at a comprehensive level-such as a colonial mode of production or Coquery-Vidrovitch's African mode of production (Alavi, 1975; Coquery- Vidrovitch, 1969) -get so far away from the point of production that they merely shift the question of determination to another sphere: why should a political process, colonialism, determine production, or why should trade? pg

The thorniest problem of all is how to go from the systemic and self- reinforcing nature of a mode of production to an understanding of how they transform themselves, how they are transformed from outside, or how they are preserved in the face of outside pressure. The specific problem recent Marxist analysts have posed themselves is not the classic transition of feudalism to capitalism but its opposite: how does capitalism become dominant in regions such as Africa without replicating itself in each instance? The starting point for studies of "articulation" is Marx's famous statement that capital always takes labor as it finds it. The question is what it does with labor. To explain that, Althusserians note that the logic of each mode of production unfolds on an abstract level and that the articulation of these modes produces a social formation. In some arguments, one mode of production is necessarily dominant in any social formation, for its requirements of reproduction subordinate the others.

Pg 14This reasoning from "capital logic" poses especially serious problems in the version of articulation put forward by Claude Meillassoux and Harold Wolpe. They argue that capital conserves precapitalist modes of production at precisely the point where the food they produce covers part but not all of subsistence costs; this atrophied sector pays the costs of reproduction of the labor force-raising children, maintaining women, and caring for the elderly-allowing capitalists to pay males lower wages and to earn "superprofits." Such an argument defines away all possibility of incomplete domination, of resistance to capitalism, or of African societies being ordered in any way except to maximize the advantage of capital. But how is one to tell whether cultivators' continued access to the soil represents their resistance to the work rhythms and powerlessness of wage labor rather than a perfectly functional part of a superexploitative system? This is Marxism without a class struggle: wage rates and the structure of migration are reduced to derivatives of capital's requirements and the most difficult question of all-why workers acquiesced-is explained in an ad hoc, atheoretical fashion, while the struggles of workers to shape 'the timing and conditions of labor and cultivation are ignored. Once again, function becomes cause, and we are ill- equipped to understand how migratory labor was obtained, the complexity of the relationship between the spheres of production and reproduction, the problems of disciplining and socializing workers, or the instability and tension that beset migratory labor systems (Meillassoux, 1975b; Wolpe, 1972).57 These are questions to which we shall return

Pg 15Rey's argument depends on problematic factors-alliances with specific classes, struggles, violence-without assessing the importance of different outcomes. The colonization of Africa "freed" labor in a different sense from that which, in Marx's analysis, led to the development of capitalism -freeing labor both to enter a market in labor power and from any alternative means of survival. If market incentives increased incentives for local rulers to exploit their subjects, colonization often undermined their means to do so. The individual's need for protection became less of a restraint on mobility. So Africans could increasingly be "free" of the paternalism and tyranny of kings or slaveowners without being "free" of land; the accumulation of agricultural capital by a dominant class became more difficult rather than less; and workers came forth in larger number but-with continued ability to return to the land or to seek new land-they resisted being pushed into a committed, disciplined working class. We are back to the question of what dominance means. Much of the thrust behind the recent trends in Marxist scholarship-and in dependency theory as well-stems from attempts to come to grips with the evident domination of capitalism in a situation where the essence of capitalism, the alienation of means of production and wage labor, is only sometimes relevant.Pg 16

The Modes of Production Debate in African Studies Author(s): Bill FreundSource: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des tudes Africaines, Vol.19, No. 1 (1985), pp. 23-29.Finally the domestic (lineage, kinship) mode of production has also shown itself to be a somewhat leaky vessel. As has already been suggested, it remains unclear as to how it can remain a "mode of production" once pre-capitalist ruling classes, let alone capital in its various forms, become historically relevant. Meillassoux's own insistence on the necessity for anthropology to take on an historical cast notwithstanding it is difficult to dissociate entirely his mode from the Chayanovian and other models of peasant production with their equivalent strengths and weaknesses. At its strongest, it powerfully recapitulates in Marxist terms how and why African peasant farming is unlike capitalist entrepreneurial agriculture, an argument long anticipated by "substantivist" economic anthropologists. As with Amin's or Coquery-Vidrovitch's focus, it leads us back however to an almost timeless African productive base, on which a ruling class, if one exists, merely and not entirely explicably, battens. Just as it is impossible in the present state of historical knowledge to explain African state formation directly through particular sets of production relations, it is also impossible to explain the dominance of the elder in the household by purely material means.Pg 26

On the Moderate Usefulness of Modes of Production Author(s): Wyatt MacGaffey Source: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des tudes Africaines, Vol.19, No. 1 (1985), pp. 51-57Published The merit of Meillassoux's original paper (1960) is that it integrates political questions (social control) with both economic questions (production and distribution) and ideological ones (production and control of knowledge). From the point of view of what was then traditional social anthropology, it introduced conflict into the concept of social function by asking, function for whom? From the point of view of what was then traditional Marxism, it introduced the possibility of a materialist history of societies hitherto considered static, by suggesting that a dialectic of class could be identified in them. These possibilities were opened by focusing on social reproduction, the re- production of the forces and relation of production prevailing in any given generation. The new perspective differed from functionalist anthropology in treating genealogy. kinship, marriage rules and magic as components of the economic processes of the society; it differed from Marxism in treating superstructure as something more than a secondary or illusory by-product of the infrastructure, and meant a renewal of the holistic perspective against those that favored single-level determinisms, economic, political or ideological.Pg 52

Rey's "lineage mode of production" is very different, however. It is specifically an effort to comprehend in Marxist terms the BaKunyi whom he studied in the field, although he has also tried to develop a general concept within which to compare the lineage mode with capitalism and other modes (Rey 1975). In this model, production factors and processes take second place to political factors. The heads of descent groups build alliances among themselves enabling them to keep their respective subordinates under control; slavery is an essential feature of the system, but only as one of a number of mechanisms (marriage, pawn) for transferring rights over persons from one group to another. Similar social forms are widespread in Africa, particularly Central Africa (MacGaffey 1983), but by no means universal, even where lineages are present; Nilotic societies, for example, are obviously very different, whether or not one finds Rey's characterization of the lineage mode adequate. Its chief deficiency is its failure to specify the factors that implicitly distinguish the "lineage" mode from any other in which lineages may also operate.

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Modes of Production and Modes of Analysis: The South African Case Author(s): Patrick Harries Source: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des tudes Africaines, Vol.19, No. 1 (1985), pp. 30-37PublishedExpanding on a crucial article (Meillassoux 1960) influenced by a profound debate in France over the conceptualization of pre-capitalist modes of production in the Third World, Meillassoux published a number of extremely important works (Meillassoux 1972a, 1973b, 1975d, 1975a). Drawing on his fieldwork, Meillassoux argued that the explanation of inequalities in small-scale societies had to be sought not at the level of production but at the level of the extra-economic relations. This was because storage problems and an insufficient mastery over the environment required a redistribution, largely for insurance purposes, of any agricultural surplus. Thus the concept of an economic surplus was foreign to these undeveloped societies and exploitation could not be found in terms of the alienation of surplus labour and the accumulation of wealth. Relations of dominance and subordination should rather be traced to the level of the superstructure, particularly to the relations of kinship and marriage, for in a society with a low level of technological development and an abundance of land and lacking a labour market, manpower was at a premium. The only way that a man could acquire a permanent supply of labour was through the productive and reproductive functions of his wife. The more wives and children a man had, the greater was his right to land and the greater was his ability to cultivate that land. But as agricultural produce could not be accumulated, it was redistributed to secure the loyalty of followers. Much influenced by substantivist thinking, Meillassoux concluded that it was in this way that a surplus was realized in social terms, i.e. through the accumulation of followers whose numbers determined the social standing of an individual. Thus a man's future was dependent on his ability to marry and it was through the control of the circulation of wives and brideprice that the elders were able to extract prestations from the juniors. But juniors could hardly be referred to as an exploited class. The product of their labour was redistributed to them by the elders who made no attempt to accumulate an economic surplus. Juniors should be seen as clients because their labour investment matured in the natural course of time as virtually all of them became elders. Furthermore, Meillassoux stressed, it was impossible to conceptualize classes in terms of age or, he added in response to his feminist critics, in terms of sex. Although exploitation could be found to exist in terms of the tribute extracted by one lineage from another, within the homestead or lineage as production units it could only be distinguished in terms of slavery. Meillassoux was deeply aware of the need to examine process as well as structure, and he, together with his colleagues and critics, soon produced a body of work in which they applied to given historical situations, analytical concepts derived from studies of societies dominated by, or combining, slave and kin-based forms of production. Although both forms of production were intimately linked, it was particularly the work on slavery that proved most historically rich.

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