Uncivil society, capitalism and the state in africa

Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 21-53

  Markovitz, Irving Leonard ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CAPITALISM; CIVIL SOCIETY; POLITICAL ECONOMY; STATE ROLE;

AFRICA;

EID: 0031789933     PISSN: 03063631     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14662049808447766     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. For a recent example which argues that state and civil society interrelate but not in the sense of this article see further, for example, Larry Diamond, 'Civil Society and Democratic Consolidation: Building a Culture of Democracy in a New South Africa', in Rukhsana A. Siddiqui (ed.), Subsaharan Africa in the 1990s: Challenges to Democracy and Development (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 3-23. Diamond envisages state and civil society in terms much like those of John Keane and Naomi Chazan. (See below.)
2. This is perhaps a difficult distinction that many contemporary political scientists do not see. The founders of the American constitutional system not only understood this conceptual
3. distinction but embedded their insight into the American system of government. See further my 'Checks and Balances, Civil Society, and the Federalist Papers', prepared for the symposium on 'Constitution and Constitution-making', sponsored by the Constitutional Commission of Eritrea, Asmara, Eritrea, 1995.
4. The term 'embedded' has recurred with increasing frequency in recent,times in the social science literature. Peter Evans employs the term to particularly good use in his Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transfonnalion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
5. For an insightful discussion of the necessary requisites for a 'culture of civility', of a society that values 'self-expression, self-restraint, reasonableness, openness, intellectual independence, diversity, free thought', cf. Burton Zweibach, Civility and Disobedience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975); and also his Tlie Common Life (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988) for his analysis of the political boundaries of moral conflict. This is not, however, what either Diamond in 'Civil Society and Democratic Consolidation: Building a Culture of Democracy in a New South Africa', or Naomi Chazan (especially in 'Africa's Democratic Challenge', World Policy Journal, 9, 2 (Spring 1992)) want. Rather, they want 'boyscoutism', good behaviour on the part of select groups, before they will admit them to 'their' civil society. Chazan demands among other things 'specific and well-defined objectives, participatory governing structures, activities that go beyond catering to the immediate interests of their members', 287. See further below.
6. Cf. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), who argue that 'industrialization transformed society in a fashion that empowered subordinate classes and made it difficult to politically exclude them', vii. However, democracy did not occur automatically, nor, as others have suggested, was it a result of the generosity or of the liberating battles of the bourgeoisie. Rather, the working class won rights through severe contestations. It was successful only under certain structural circumstances, and when it enjoyed a propitious balance of alliances and class coalitions.
7. Moin Siddiqi, 'African Stock Markets: A Slow but Sure Surge', African Business (Nov. 1997), 226, 17.
8. Ibid., 19. According to Global Development Finance, Volume 1 (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1997), net private flows in 1996 to sub-Saharan Africa, although concentrated heavily in a few countries, especially South Africa, increased sharply: 'Private flows have risen from less than $1 billion in the early 1990s to $11.8 billion in 1996 and now account for 45 per cent of net flows to Sub-Saharan Africa', 159. Most of these monies, of course, went to South Africa.
9. Ibid.,18.
10. Cf my definition and discussion of the 'organisational bourgeoisie' in terms of networks of families in Power and Class in Africa (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977), 198-229; in Studies in Power and Class in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 8-15; and in 'From Socialism to Capitalism: A Study of Paradigm Shifts With a Focus on Senegal'
11. f] (Orlando, FL: African Studies Association, Nov. 1996), mimeo.
12. JO. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern
13. -'J Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ).
14. See, for example, Anders Aslund, How Russia Became A Market Economy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995); Anatoly M. Khazanov, After the USSR: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Joseph Blasi et al., Kremlin Capitalism: Privatizing the Russian Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
15. CfNew York Times, II Oct. 1997.
16. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (London: Phoenix, 1992; previous edn. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1953).
17. John Keane (ed.), Civ/7 Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London: Verso, 1988), 'Introduction', 1-32, and 'Despotism and Democracy: The Origins and Development of the Distinction Between Civil Society and the State 1750-1850', 35-72.
18. Ellen Meiksins Wood, 'The Uses and Abuses of "Civil Society'", in Ralph Miliband (ed.),
19. The Socialist Register, 1990 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991), 60-84. See also her stimulating set of essays in Democracy Against Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially 'Civil Society and_the Politics of Identity', 238-63.
20. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 208-9.
21. (IJ. Norberto Bobbio, 'Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society', 73-100, in Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State, 73.
22. Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan (eds.), The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa (Boulder, CO, and London: Westview Press, 1988). See especially by Chazan, 'Patterns of State-Society Incorporation and Disengagement in Africa', 121-48; and 'State and Society in Africa: Images and Challenges', 325-41. Cf. Chazan: 'The New Politics of Participation in Tropical Africa', Comparative Politics, 14, 2 (1982), 169-89; 'Ghana: Problems of Governance and the Emergence of Civic Society', in Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset (eds.), Democracy in Developing Countries, Vol. 2, Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1988), 93-140; and 'Liberalization, Governance, and Political Space in Ghana', in Goran Hyden and Michael Bratton (eds.), Governance and olitics in Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991 ), 121 -42.
23. Jean-Francois Bayart, 'Civil Society in Africa', 109-25 in Patrick Chabal (ed.), Political V Domination in Africa: Reflections on the Limits of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). See also by Bayart, L'État au Cameroun (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale de Sciences Politiques, 1985); and, especially, Tlie Slate in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (London and New York: Longman, 1993), originally published in French as L'État en Afrique, La Politique du Ventre (Paris: Librarie Artheme Fayard, 1989).
24. The term comes from the The Precarious Balance, cited previously.
25. Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the Stale, 1.
26. Ibid., 1.
27. Cited in Keane (ed.), OV/7 Society and the State, 64.
28. Ibid., 64.
29. Ibid., 64. Keane notes: 'Like all monistic interpretations of the alteration of political language, they selectively - that is, one-sidedly - scrutinise and emphasise only one of the characteristic dimensions of the breakdown and subdivision of the classical concept of civil society. Other dimensions of the same process of conceptual transformation are suppressed arbitrarily or illegitimately judged to be of little or no "relevance".'
30. Ibid., 65.
31. Ibid., 66.
32. Wood, 'The Uses and Abuses of "Civil Society'", 60.
33. Ibid., 60.
34. From Hobbes to Hegel, Norberto Bobbio points out, modem political thought conceives of the state as 'a product of reason, or as a rational society, the only one in which human beings can lead a life which conforms to reason'. Bobbio, 'Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society', 73. Hegel's state contains civil society and transcends it.
35. Marx in Capital, quoted in Bobbio, 'Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society', 73.
36. Bobbio,'Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society', 75.
37. Wood, 'The Uses and Abuses of "Civil Society"', 61.
38. Ibid., 61.
39. Wood declares: 'The strategy of dissolving capitalism into an unstructured and undifferentiated plurality of social institutions and relations cannot help but weaken both the analytical and normative force of "civil society", its capacity to deal with the limitation and legitimation of power, as well as its usefulness in guiding the new social movements. The current theories occlude "civil society" in its distinctive sense as a social form specific to capitalism, a systemic totality within which all other institutions are situated and all social forces must find their way, a specific and unprecedented sphere of social power'. Ibid., 66-7.
40. Wood has stated that: 'It represents a particular network of social relations which does not simply stand in opposition to the coercive , "policing" and "administrative" functions'of the state but represents the relocation of these functions, in a new division of labour between the "public" sphere of the state and the "private" sphere of capitalist property and the imperatives of the market in which appropriation, exploitation and domination are detached from public authority and social responsibility." Wood, 'The Uses and Abuses of "Civil Society"', 73.
41. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 20S"-9. This passage, like most of the work in the Prison Notebooks, is suggestive; it is not founded on case studies oron a great deal of empirical evidence; neither is the logic of the conception spun out in great detail. Nevertheless, it rings true.
42. Cf Frederick Engels, 'On the history of the Communist League', quoted in Bobbio, 'Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society', 76.
43. Quoted from Tlie Prison Notebooks, 12, in Bobbio, 'Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society', 83.
44. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 238.
45. Ibid., 263.
46. Ibid., 263. Hoare and Smith in their introductory remarks find a difficulty in Gramsci's writing of conflicting definitions of the state: 'The state is elsewhere defined as 'political society + civil society', and elsewhere again as a balance between political society and civil society. In yet another passage, Gramsci stresses that 'in concrete reality, civil society and State are one and the same' (Ibid., 208). Most of these difficulties are resolved, however, if we keep in mind the way Gramsci envisaged state and society as interdependent.
47. Clyde W. Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 4-5.
48. Ellen Wood again seems closer to the mark when she reminds us that, first, 'Gramsci's conception of "civil society" was unambiguously intended as a weapon against capitalism, not an accommodation to it'. Wood, 'The Uses and Abuses of "Civil Society'", 73.
49. Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell, Jr, How the M'est Grew- Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 1986); and Peter Berger, Tlie Capitalist Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1986). Cf. among the most interesting examples of a burgeoning literature on state-market relations in general, and privatisation in particular: Charles Wolf, Jr, Markets or Governments (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990); Arthur Seldon, Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); John Vickers and George Yarrow, Privatization: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988); Ezra N. Suleiman and John Waterbury (eds.), Tlie Political Economy of Public Sector Reform and Privatization (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990).
50. Keane (éd.), Civil Society and the State, 19. For a very thoughtful critique of reductionist perspectives as well as of a wide range of contemporary theories of the state and of power, see Jeffrey C. Isaac, Power and Marxist Tlieory: A Realist View (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. See also Anthony Giddens and how he came to accept Marxist categories, but within his analytical framework. See the difference in his approach between an early work, such as A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (first published in the United States in 1981, by the University of California Press, Berkeley), and The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
51. See for example J.H. Plumb, Tlie Growth of Political Stability in England: 1675-1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967).
52. See further Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973).
53. Power and Class in Africa. Cf, Studies in Power and Class in Africa.
54. Rosenberg and Birdzell, Jr, How the West Grew Rich, 24.
55. Rosenberg and Birdzell state that the key to the success of the West was: 'an absence of more than rudimentary political and religious restrictions on experiment; and incentives which combined ample rewards for success.' Ibid., 33.
56. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984), and From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: Random House, 1978). 'Multiple sovereignty' is related to, but distinct from 'fragmented societies' discussed by Tilly.
57. Alberto Melucci, 'Social Movements and the Democratization of Everyday Life', in Keane a (ed.), Civil Society and the Stale, 248.
58. Ibid., 248.
59. Cf Gary Gercffi and Donald L. Wyman (eds.), Manufacturing Miracles: Paths of Industrialization in Latin America and East Asia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). See especially the discussion in Tun-jen Cheng, 'Political Regimes and Development Strategies: South Korea and Taiwan', 139-78.
60. Plumb, Tlie Growth of Political Stability in England: 1675-1725, 173.
61. Rothchild and Chazan (eds.), Tlie Precarious Balance, ix.
62. Naomi Chazan, 'Patterns of State-Society Incorporation and Disengagement in Africa', 121-48, in Rothchild and Chazan (eds.), The Precarious Balance, 123.
63. Ibid., 123.
64. Cf. Janet McGaffey, Entrepreneurs and Parasites : The Struggle for Indigenous Capitalism in Zaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
65. Chazan, 'Patterns of State-Society Incorporation and Disengagement in Africa', 126.
66. Ibid., 127.
67. A similar point is made by Nelson Kasfir in his review article and critique of Goran Hyden's work, 'Are African Peasants Self-Sufficient?', Development and Change, 17 (1986), especially 352-4.
68. Ibid., 133.
69. I disagree with Chazan's position, stated in summary of the point in her concluding chapter. Ibid., 329. Rather than simple deterioration, the process is one of'transformation' involving a shifting of priorities, and a consolidation of particular interests.
70. For a fascinating example, consider the case of cocoa in Ghana. In African Business (Nov. 1997). Mr John Newman, chief executive of Ghana Cocoa Board, appealed to the world to consume more cocoa products, especially chocolate: 'Eat more chocolate', he enthused, 'it's delicious, it's nutritious! It is good for you. We want more people, especially those who do not have a culture of eating chocolate, to discover its delights.' In Ghana, 600,000 cocoa farmers employ 45 per cent of the agricultural workers, cocoa contributes 40 per cent of the countries foreign exchange earnings and 18 per cent of the gross domestic product. (Anver Versi, 'Cocoa: Let the Sweet Times Roll', Africa Business, 26 Nov. 1997,19-20.) The Ghana Cocoa Board buys the total output of all Ghanaian cocoa farmers at a fixed price. Mr Newman might be reaching out to the sweet-toothed members of civil society. However, the entire history of Ghana's political development might be viewed in terms of stages when cocoa farmers' friends or foes sat in organs of the state, and where the interrelationships between state and these elements of civil society determined policy.
71. G.B. Kay, for example, in his 77;e Political Economy of Colonialism in Ghana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), offers a brilliant interpretation of the dynamics of colonialism in the Gold Coast. He argues that the key for an understanding of the evolution of colonial policy was the emergence of an African capitalist class. The British failed to promote the trade of the colony because this would have meant encouraging the African cocoa farmers. This could have been done, Kay maintains, only at the expense of British mining interests. Miners and cocoa competed for scarce resources and, therefore, for a favourable governmental policy in fields as diverse as transportation - feeder roads for isolated farms versus railroads for gross tonnages - education and fiscal policy. See further, inter alia, David Apter, Ghana in Transition (2nd rev. edn., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972); Dennis Austin, Politics in Ghana, 1946-1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); Polly Hill, The Migrant Cocoa Farmers of Southern Ghana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963); Beverly Grier, 'Contradiction, Crisis, and Class Conflict: The State and Capitalist Development in Ghana Prior to 1948', in Markovitz (ed.), Studies in Power and Class in Africa, 27-50; and Gwendolyn Mikell, Cocoa and Chaos in Ghana (New York: Paragon House, 1989). Part of what makes Mr Newman's governmental role, and his outreach to civil society, so fascinating is that now the state is involved not only in trade but also in manufacturing, representing a different stage in the development of Ghanaian productive systems.
72. Tlie State in Africa, 163. Cf. L'État au Cameroun, and L'État en Afrique. See also the interpretation of Ndiva Kofele-Kale, 'Class, Status, and Power in Post-reunification
73. Cameroon: The Rise of an Anglophone Bourgeoisie, 1961-1980', in Markovitz (ed.). Studies in Power and Class in Africa, 135-69. Most of the investigations in this volume would raise doubts about Bayart's contentions in L'État en Afrique that a 'true' bourgeoisie does not exist in Africa - that there is only 'L'illusion bourgeoise', 119-38; that a true state, in the 'Weberian' sense does not exist in Africa: 'Les elements de divergence,entre l'État postcolonial subsaharien et le type idéal bureaucratique cher a Max Weber'sont patents.' Ibid., 320; and that the key distinguishing fact about Africa is a 'politics of the stomach' where everybody crops their fodder close to the ground like goats.
74. Ibid., xiv.
75. Ibid., 11.
76. Ibid., 33.
77. Ibid., 37.
78. Ibid., 176 and 177. Bayait declares that 'It is important to continue to argue against the abundant literature and to refuse to relate the post-colonial State to an existing dominant class, which is its tenant... most analysts continue to address the themes of the national, bureaucratic and "comprador" bourgeoisie, in spite of the evidence against their existence." Ibid., 177.
79. Ibid., 267. If one cannot generalise about either the state or civil society, then surely Bayart is inconsistent when he declares 'civil society re-appropriates the post-colonial state but without escaping dependence.' Ibid., 267.
80. Bayart, 'Civil Society in Africa', 110.
81. Ibid., 112.
82. Ibid., 112.
83. Bayart defines 'civil society', 'provisionally', as 'society in its relation with the state... in so far as it is in confrontation with the state or, more precisely, as the process by which society seeks to "breach" and counteract the simultaneous 'totalisation' unleashed by the state.
84. Bayart, 'Civil Society in Africa', 113.
85. 'The argument that civil society has atrophied and that it is increasingly dependent on the state must, therefore, be qualified. Here and there it stands in a more equal relation with the state and where it does, it is of some consequence for democracy'. Ibid., 114.
86. Ibid., 115.
87. Nor is it helpful to learn that: 'The degree of autonomy from the state of the channels of accumulation within civil society is equally significant. In Africa the state is the prime (though usually not the only) channel of accumulation, except in some extreme situations where the structures of accumulation have absorbed the state', Ibid., 115. What are these 'channels of accumulation'? How can they 'absorb the state? What does this do to a theory of 'civil society'?
88. Ibid., 116.
89. Wood, 'The Uses and Abuses of "Civil Society"', 73.
90. See, for example, Report on the Economic and Social Situation in Africa, 1996 (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Economic Commission For Africa, 1996) for an analysis of divergent growth in output among African sub-regions, and especially about how market-friendly macro-economic policy reforms have made a tremendous difference in capitalist development. For an earlier critical view of the significance of the establishment of stock markets, see Ken Brown, 'Taking Stock in the Third World: A World Bank Unit Tries to Jump-Start Capitalism', New York Times, 11 Nov. 1995. See also Themon Djaksam, 'Higher Stocks', (f'est Africa, 25-31 March 1996, 474, who, after discounting currency over valuations and other complicating and negative factors, concludes that there is 'a real dynamism' in African markets.
91. See, for example, Keith Marsden, African Entrepreneurs: Pioneers of Development (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1990), for a thin, but provocative, discussion paper, interesting in part because of its sponsor. See also my 'African Capitalism in Comparative Perspective: African Entrepreneurship in Senegal'.
92. See above discussion on accumulation of capital in African stock markets. See also World Bank, The State in a Changing World: World Development Report 1997 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) especially Table 5, 'Distribution of Income or Consumption", 222-3. However, hard data is difficult to come by; this contention can only be impressionistic.
93. For reports of the conflict, see the accounts of both the official newspaper, Le Soleil (Dakar, daily) and the opposition press. Cf 'Sénégal-Mauritanie, Union Sacrée Dans La Vallée', Le Soleil, 16 May 1989; 'Pour Une Offensive Diplomatique', Sopi, 16 May 1989; 'Les Actes Infamants Des Fidèles D'Allah', Promotion, 50 May 1989; 'De La République Islamique A La Republique Satanèque', Le Politician, 249, 16 May 1989; 'Et Quoi Demain?', WalFadjri, 160, 28 April I989. For a recaptitulation of what happened in Senegal in 1'989 and what the situation was like in the aftermath of the violence, years later, see, for example, Howard W. French, 'Where Proud Moors Rule, Blacks Are Outcasts', New York Times, 11 Jan. 1996.
94. See, for example, the story in Le Soleil, 'Commerce de Detail: Les Jeunes Derrière Le Comptoir", 17 May 1989.
95. See, for example, among many, the reports commissioned by USAID, Charbel Zarour, La Reorganisation du Secteur De La Distribution De Detail: Propositions Pour Un Programme D'Ation (Dakar: USAID/ Senegal, Aug. 1989, 59 pages mimeo); and John McKenzie, A Study With Strategy Recommendations Towards the Design of a Small Enterprise Credit Activity in Dakar as an Extension of the Community and Enterprise Development Project (Dakar: USAID/ Senegal, Oct. 1989).
96. Wood, 'The Uses and Abuses of Civil Society", 65.