Capitalist Agriculture and the Colonial State in Portuguese Guinea, 1926-1974

Abstract

he relationship between capital, states and rural producers has been a major and recurring theme in contemporary development litera ture. A lively debate centered particularly on the postcolonial state in Africa.' This study looks backward at producers, investors and the state in Portuguese Guinea in order to trace the economic and, in part, the ideological baggage of the postcolonial regime. The terms of the debate generally pitted state officials and producers in locked battle over resources and entitlements; the state being portrayed on the side of capital while, depending upon the point of view of the author, African smallholders were put in the guise of backward subsistence farmers, petty capitalists, or autonomous noncapitalist cultivators. In one of the important theoretical contributions to this debate, Henry Bernstein argued that, in the process of commoditization, direct pressure was being applied on rural producers by states, companies and international aid agencies.2 However, Bernstein did not represent commoditization as a one-sided process resulting in the complete dispossession or marginalization of African smallholders. Rather, he stressed the nuanced and varied nature of the forms of production deriving from the mutual interaction of producers and representatives of capital. Nevertheless, Bernstein was not optimistic about the long-term viability of petty commodity production. In his study of state intervention in Nigerian agriculture, Gavin Williams, like Bernstein, showed that the state is not neutral in the struggle for resources.3 The Nigerian state has been an active participant on the side of capitalism. However, Williams' point is that the state and capital have not succeeded because African peasant farming is an independent, noncapitalist, essentially household form of production that resists all attempts to subsume it to the needs of capitalist farming. That capitalist relations are not the inevitable outcome of expanding commodity relations is also one of the themes of this study.While both commodity relations and capitalist relations aim at increasing exchange value through the expansion of production, the distinguishing characteristic of