Peasants and Economic Development: Populist Lessons for Africa

Abstract

This study argues that in technical terms the usual economic models of international trade and development are misspecified because they deal only with market relations and omit important social and political equations (i.e., the social relations of production) which are important variables in the development matrix. This omission has led to development strategies which favor the “modern sector” at the expense of the traditional sector; the agricultural communities are undermined and impoverished. The traditional sector is maintained as a reservoir for cheap labor and as security for the old and the indigent to cushion off crisis in the capitalist modern sector. The traditional sector is undergoing a prolonged crisis without a smooth transition to capitalism or socialism. A more humane and viable process of development of the African economies is suggested: it is argued that Third World policymakers shift from the “dualistic” paradigm of economic development—a post World War II neoclassical paradigm associated with the work of Lewis (1954), Fei and Ranis (1964) and Jorgenson (1970)—to a version of the populist strategies of the Narodniki (Russian) and Maoism in transforming the backward agrarian economies of the Third World (Walicki, 1969; Gurley, 1975). Most Third World economies may be classified as subsistence economies with industrial enclave sectors. The majority of the world's population live in an agrarian environment. Yet neoclassical and Marxist economists, having preoccupied themselves with the study of the capitalist system, have ignored agrarian economics (Georgescu-Roegen, 1970). Noncapitalist economies have simply not captured the interest of most economists.