The historical origins of Tanzania's working class
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Citation
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: This paper discusses the historical conditions which prevented the
emergence of a strong capitalist ruling class along the Kenyan lines in
Tanzania. In Kenya, a nascent big bourgeoisie controlled African political
associations as early as the 1930s, while in Tanzania, teachers, traders, and
clerks were the mainstay of the independence movement, with kulak farmers
participating (Awiti, 1972; Bienen, 1969; Hyden, 1968; Maguire, 1969), but
never predominating as a class "to the extent where they could become an
important political force at the national level" (Shivji, 1976: 50). A
productive class of capitalists thereby came to engineer the state in
independent Kenya, while in Tanzania the dominant force rested with an
unproductive "bureaucratic bourgeoisie," a class awkwardly termed and poorly
understood. The result in the case of Kenya was a capitalism which matured
along rather classic lines, that is by increasing the productivity of labor
without resulting in absolute immiseration, whereas in Tanzania, capitalism
was retarded along the lines suggested by the Narodniks with the
predictable consequences of absolute pauperization described by Lenin. [TRUNCATED]
Description
African Studies Center Working Paper No. 35
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Copyright © 1980, by the author.