Retarded Capitalism in Tanzania

Abstract

To accuse an African ruling class of retarding capitalism and its principal classes is virtually unheard of. However, this is what has happened in Tanzania, where state capital has consistently acted to forestall the development of a bourgeoisie and a proletariat by basing accumulation on the expansion of middle-peasant household production. The reactionary utopianism of Russia's Narodniks has actually been institutionalised here and labelled socialism. Lenin's predictions have come true; labour and capital have been confined to their most primitive state, and middle peasants are increasingly squeezed as the State intensifies the production of cash crops which demand more inputs and must conform to rigid quality and quantity controls. From the perspective of the market, middle peasants are expected to act like capitalists while constrained by both their smallness and their lack of capital, and like labour without any of the benefits of fully socialised labour. With the intensification of commodity production, middle peasants are simultaneously subject to all the horrors bf producing for an increasingly demanding market and none of the benefits of capitalism over previous modes of production. By forestalling 'the direct separation of household producers from their means of production', the State has fettered 'the accumulation of indigenous capital within smallholding production'. This fettering plus the continuous expansion of smallholdings forecloses the possibility of significantly developing the productive forces. The result is overwork and under consumption. the continuation of hand production, and the reassertion of backward, semifeudal relations of productidn as middlepeasant producers who are unable to reproduce themselves under these conditions become informal tenants for others and whole families (including children) become part of this overworked and underfed work force.