The political economy of Guinea-Bissau: second thoughts

Abstract

legitimation crisis. I was sceptical of giving politics primacy. To me the heart of the problem was economic: the attempted monopolisation of the economy by the government of Guinea-Bissau. I identified this as the primary source of peasant alienation and felt that a restructuring of the economy to meet the needs and desires of the majority was the necessary stimulus for a rebirth of the political process. My argument was that trade liberalisation, for example, would lead to a demand for a more democratic politics from the people who had the most to gain from economic restructuring. Our collaboration made me realise that to prioritise either politics or economics was to create a false dichotomy. The two are inseparable. Realising this made me understand that the current leaders of Guinea-Bissau could not on their own enact a policy of restructuring. No matter how enlightened they were individually or as a group, no matter how well intentioned, the structure of politics and economics they inherited from the Portuguese was too much a part of their experience of power for them to change it voluntarily. In other words, the country's leadership was not about to commit class suicide, despite Amilcar Cabral's admonitions. Outside pressure was necessary and the kind of transformation that would take place depended upon the source of that pressure. It was in this context that peasant political organisation was necessary. The framework of analysis we adopted in order to understand the political economy of Guinea-Bissau entailed, first of all, examining the overall social relations of production and exchange in the country. This examination revealed that a kind of class relationship had developed in which state officials-whether in rural development programmes or in the state marketing agencies-assumed an essentially exploitative position vis-a-vis rural producers and workers. Characterising this relationship was not a simple matter. On one level, exploitation was of a state capitalist or, perhaps more appropriately, of a state socialist nature since appropriation of surplus value from the countryside was said to be carried out in order to lay the foundations of industrialisation. The fact that this development strategy was abortive and