Kate Currie

State and Class in Kenya: Notes on the Cohesion of the Ruling Class

This article attempts to situate the recent power struggle between President Daniel arap Moi and the ex-Minister for Constitutional Affairs, Charles Njonjo, in the context of class antagonisms in the Kenyan state. Over the past few years, Moi survived a number of crises partly as a result of the consistent support he has received from Njonjo. During the run-up to the general election of 26 September 1983, however, Moi was hoping that he could mobilise sufficient support amongst Kenyas political elite to be able to dispense with Njonjo, and thereby remove the only politician powerful enough to pose any threat to his leadership. SinceJomo Kenyattas death in 1978, Njonjo had been regarded as the third member of a ruling triumvirate, with Moi and Vice-President Mwai Kibaki. In the following analysis, we examine the class context for conflict with the figure most closely associated with the conservative, capitalistic, and pro-British tendency in Kenyan nationalism.

On the Class Location of Contract Farmers in the Kenyan Economy

The purpose of this paper is to address some contemporary issues in the debate about rural social transformation: the so called ‘peasantry debate’. In order to clarifty these issues, we discuss material collected in Kenya on tobacco contract farming. Our intention is to integrate theoretical and substantive analyses of the current Kenyan situation. Tobacco farming is, we argue, a particularly clear instance of a form of subsumption of petty commodity production to capital. Although British-American Tobacco concentrates all the moments of capital–productive, circulating, and merchant –within a unified organisational framework, it enters the local growersapos; economy in the form of merchant capital. Combined with the active support of the Kenyan state, this has the effect of shoring up the household productive form. However, it does not (as some would argue) create a class of rural accumulators. Household production is sustained only at subsistence level. Contract farming is not, in our view, an ‘agent of ...

The asiatic mode of production: Problems of conceptualising state and economy

ConclusionThe tendency on the part of Kosambi, Joshi and Alavi to characterise pre-colonial India as predominantly feudal can be appreciated in the context of a critique of colonialism. The problem of the transformation of the AMP has been left largely unanswered by Marx who vacillates between two accounts of this question. In the New York Daily Tribune articles the AMP is perceived as inherently static and it is this statism that legitimates the colonial intervention. By contrast, in the Grundrisse and Capital I, a more dynamic view is expressed in which the AMP gives way to other modes. Marxs primary thesis provides an indirect justification of colonialism and imperialism, but that justification cannot be upheld if it is established that the prevailing mode in the immediate pre-British India era was feudal rather than Asiatic. By claiming a feudal heritage, Kosambi, Joshi and Alavi can maintain a position in line with Marxist analysis while rejecting Marxs legitimation of imperialism. If, however, it can be established that the AMP does have an inherent dynamic then the defence of the feudal view is weakened. Arguably, the maintenance of massive standing armies — which consumed two thirds of the surplus product but were essential for the reproduction of the mode —constitute the location of such a dynamic. The point at which the maintenance of armies becomes prohibitive is the point at which the mode must start to disintegrate since its reproduction can no longer be guaranteed. In the case of the AMP, unlike the capitalist mode of production, there are no offsetting factors.The explicitly ideological and geographical connotations of the term “Asiatic,” which are central to Melottis characterisation of Marxs analysis, are both misleading and unessential. It is difficult to a) reject the term ‘Asiatic’ without b) negating the mode to which that term has been applied. The rejection of the term, however, does not necessarily entail the negation of the mode. For Marx it is the tribute-raising state which appropriates the surplus product from the direct producer and which stands in the same objectively antagonistic relationship to that producer as does the slave-owner to the slave, the feudal lord to the serf, and the capitalist to the wage labourer. Thus, it is the means whereby the surplus product is appropriated which sets apart the mode in question — which may legitimately be designated “tributary”I have discussed this notion elsewhere: see note 13 and Currie (1980). — from other modes. This is the sense in which the tax/rent couplet does have theoretical validity. However, while the tax/rent couplet may constitute the dominant mode of appropriation of the surplus product in a particular geographical location — Asiatic or otherwise — and at a specific point in time, this does not justify the conflation of mode and society.

British colonial policy and famines: Some effects and implications of free trade’ in the Bombay, Bengal and Madras presidencies, 1860–1900†

Abstract The focus of this paper is twofold: a) to show how the underlying tension between libertarian and paternalistic aspects of utilitarianism were expressed within the ranks of the Indian Civil Service, with specific reference to colonial famine policy; b) to consider the effects of aspects of colonial policy in relation to famine (specifically: free trade and famine relief, revenue and debt, famine victims and constructions of mortality, transportation and irrigation). Here, the relationship between scarcity and need in relation to social class is paramount.

Problematic Modes and the Mughal Social Formation

(1956) to characterize the pre-colonial era in India as feudal. In the late twenties and early thirties, discussions by Soviet scholars on pre-capitalist modes of production were directly related to the necessity of developing and maintaining the correct analysis of revolutionary struggle in China. These discussions reached a climax at the Leningrad Conference of 19311 which concluded by rejecting the validity of the Asiatic mode of production (hereafter the AMP) as a useful starting point for the analysis of China and, by implication, other complex pre-capitalist social formations. Henceforth, China and other social formations hitherto conceptualized by the AMP were subsumed as variants of the feudal mode of production. In the period 1930-1964 Marxists2 within the sphere of Soviet influence displayed some reluctance to transcend the theoretical dogmatism inherent in Stalin S3 rigidly mechanical evolutionary progression of historical epochs in which the AMP played no part. The author of The German Ideology (1970), however, was also the author of the Grundrisse (1973) and few would now deny the paucity of the Stalinist account in the light of this latter work. In the twilight of Stalinism and the dawn of revolutionary struggle in China, South East Asia, India, Latin America and Africa, interest in pre-capitalist social formations has been rekindled resulting in a proliferation of theoretical4 and substantive discussion

Gender, Subaltern Studies and the Invisibility of Women

This article addresses the issue of gender and women’s invisibility. The first section considers traditional anthropological approaches to gender. The second section illustrates how feminist histor...

The Indian stratification debate: A discursive exposition of problems and issues in the analysis of class, caste and gender

ConclusionIn order to analyze the interrelationships between class, caste and gender, it is essential to analyze the relationship between anthropology and political economy. In non-Marxist anthropology, elitism, cultural relativism, and evolutionism are still influential. The tension in Barrington Moore between a materialist and idealist view of the class/caste relationship is finally resolved in favor of idealism. Moores idealism sharply contrasts with much contemporary work on peasant struggles in India, in which the peasants are no longer denied access to the historical stage. This shift in focus to the oppressed is only partially reflected in the field of gender, caste and class. While some work on gender, caste and class is both evolutionary and elitist in focus, the emphasis is now changing,See particularly the publications: Manushi, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Economic and Political Weekly, South Asia Bulletin, Journal of Contemporary Asia and THe Journal of Peasant Studies. and giving way to a more critical historical materialist perspective in which the historical subject is not permanently and inexorably relegated to the wings.There is also a growing interest in post-modernism (particularly discourse analysis) in relation to the analysis of those \ldhidden from history.\rd. This is expressed in the writings of some of the Subaltern Studies group and, K. Sangari and S. Vaid eds. Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1990), reviewed by K. Currie, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 22, 1 (1992).