The agrarian question in Tanzania: the case of tobacco
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Citation
Abstract
Since independence in 1961, Tanzania has pursued a policy of institutionalizing
a middle peasantry, while stymieing the development of capitalism's principal classes. The policy has taken an extreme form following a 1973
decision to forcibly reorganize the majority of Tanzania's peasants on individual
block farms within nucleated villages and to bring the sphere of production
more directly under the control of the state and international finance
capital. This attempt to subordinate peasant labor to capital by perpetuating
middle peasant households increasingly confines capital to its most primitive
state. The pursuit of this policy in an export-oriented agricultural economy
has particular contradictions and limitations. As long as labor and capital
are not separated, they cannot be combined in their technically most advanced
form. Hence the contradiction of the state's attempts to extract greater
surplus value while simultaneously acting to expand and preserve middle peasant
households. This paper explores the implications of such a course of
action within the framework of Marxist writings on the agrarian question.
Using tobacco production as, an example, it discusses the ways in which middle
peasant households are being squeezed and pauperized by this backward capitalist
system. It argues that the system inhibits the formal and real subordination
of labor to capital and tends to perpetuate the extraction of absolute
as opposed to relative surplus value. Household production fetters the
concentration of capital and prevents the socialization of labor, while perpetuating
the hoe as the main instrument of production.
Description
African Studies Center Working Paper No. 32
License
Copyright © 1980, by the author.