Experiments with a Public Sector Peasantry: Agricultural Schemes and Class Formation in Africa

Abstract

The African landscape is littered with the remnants of failed agricultural schemes. Yet, international agencies and national governments, both purportedly interested in development, continue to experiment with schemes that are little better planned than some of their more spectacularly misbegotten predecessors. This government persistence in the face of repeated failures is not interpreted as a defect of planning but as proof of government commitment to modernity in the face of cruel odds. Failures are explained by the intransigence or primitiveness of peasants. Such explanations begin to break down upon closer examination of actual experiences. Agricultural schemes are commonly over-capitalized, under-planned, and poorly managed (Palmer, 1974). It is worth considering the hypothesis that governments persist in these costly and unremunerative experiments neither because of a commitment either to modernity or productivity or because of simple ineptitude but because of their quest for control. Control over the peasantry is crucial since peasants are the majority of the population in all tropical African countries and earn the bulk of the governments' foreign exchange in all but Nigeria, Zambia, Angola, Botswana and Liberia. Because of this political and economic dependence on peasants, governments want a productive peasantry, but one that remains under secure control. Governments do not want peasants using their productivity to wrest either political or economic concessions. Tensions arising from government attempts to control peasants on whose productivity they depend provide useful insights into contemporary processes of African class formation. In understanding class formation it is useful to begin where Marx began, with the search for a principle of differentiation and stratification that reveals the processes through which classes are developed, rather than with a list of classes that may share nothing more fundamental or enduring than certain shortterm interests. The process of class formation is more usefully approached from analysis of the process than from analysis of the apparent results of the process, or what seem to be classes (Marx, 1973: 83-111). A decision to begin with a search for principles of class formation does not necessarily simplify the inquiry into class formation in Africa. There are two competing principles of class formation, each of which has produced one major class with internal differentiations. African class formation is proceeding concurrently through both Marxian and neo-Marxian processes. Marx's principle of class formation was access to control of the means of production (ibid.). African peasants are a class according to this criterion. Peasants are small-scale rural