Democracy And Socialism In Africa (African Modernization and Development Series) [1 ed.] 0813380529, 9780813380520

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Democracy and Socialism in Africa

African Modernization and Development Series Paul Lovejoy, Series Editor Democracy and Socialism in Africa,

edited by Robin Cohen and Harry Goulbourne

Herders, Warriors, and Traders: Pastoralism in Africa, edited by John G. Galaty and Pierre Bonte

South Africa's Labor Empire: A History of Black Migrancy to the Gold Mines, Jonathan Crush, Alan Jeeves, and David Yudelman

Children of Ham: Freed Slaves and Fugitive Slaves on the Kenya Coast, 1873 to 1907, Fred Morton The Black Man's Burden: African Colonial Labor on the Congo and Ubangi Rivers, 1880-1900, William J. Samarin Psychoses of Power: African Personal Dictatorships, Samuel Decalo African Cities in Crisis: Managing Rapid Urban Growth, edited by Richard E. Stren and Rodney R. White

Patriarchy and Class: African Women in the Home and the Workforce, edited by Sharon B. Stichter and Jane L. Parpart

The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa, edited by Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan

Published in Cooperation with the

Review of African Political Economy

Democracy and Socialism in Africa EDITED BY

Robin Cohen and Harry Goulbourne

First published 1991 by Westview Press Published 2018 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 1991 by Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Democracy and socialism in Africa / edited by Robin Cohen and Harry Goulbourne.    p. cm. — (African modernization and development series)   “A number of chapters in this book, now thoroughly revised and updated, were originally presented as papers at a conference held at the University of Warwick in late 1989.”   “Jointly organized by the Centre for Modern African Studies at Warwick University and the Centre for African Studies at Coventry Polytechnic.”   Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 0-8133-8052-9   1.  Africa—Politics and government—1960– —Congresses. 2. Democracy—Congresses.  3. Socialism—Africa—Congresses. I.  Cohen, Robin.  II.  Goulbourne, Harry. III.  University of Warwick. Centre for Modern African Studies.  IV. Coventry (Lanchester) Polytechnic. Centre for African Studies.  V.  Series. JQ1879.A15D46 1991 320.5′096—dc20 91-12567 CIP ISBN 13: 978-0-367-01580-0 (hbk)

Contents Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations and Acronyms About the Contributors 1

ix xi xiii

Introduction: Socialism or Democracy, Socialism and Democracy, Robin Cohen

1

Part One: Controversies

2

Economic Democracy, Socialism, and the "Market,"

Peter Lawrence

15

3

The State, Civil Society, and Democracy in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues, Ken Post

34

4

Taking Democracy Seriously: Democracy-Bureaucracy Relations, Bola Dauda

53

5

Democracy and the Agrarian Question in Africa: Reflections on the Politics of States and the Representation of Peasants' and Women's Interests,

6

Pepe Roberts and Gavin Williams

70

Discourses of Democracy in the South African Left: A Critical Commentary, Daryl Glaser

93

Part Two: Cases 7

The National Resistance Movement, "Grassroots Democracy," and Dictatorship in Uganda,

]. Oloka-Onyango

vii

125

Contents

viii

8

Inching Towards Democracy: The Ghanaian "Revolution," the International Monetary Fund, and the Politics of the Possible, Jeff Haynes

142

Pastoralists, Socialism, and Democracy: The Sudanese Experience, M. A. Mohammed Salih

165

10

The Peasantariat, Politics, and Democracy in Botswana, Jack Parson

180

11

Gender, Participation, and Radicalism in African Nationalism: Its Contemporary Significance, Chris Allen

199

12

Beyond the Nation-State? Democracy in the Regional Economic Context, Carol B. Thompson

216

13

Conclusion: The Future of Democracy in Africa, Harry Goulbourne

229

9

References About the Book and Editors Index

243 259 261

Acknowledgments The relationship between democracy and socialism in Africa is now widely accepted as the burning political and social issue facing the continent in the 1990s. It is a testament to our authors that they have responded so well to our editorial insistence that they combine scholarship with contemporary relevance. This task involved thoroughly revising and updating a number of the chapters, which were originally presented at a conference held at the University of Warwick. The conference was sponsored by the Review of African Political Economy and was jointly organised by the Centre for Modern African Studies at Warwick University and the Centre for African Studies at Coventry Polytechnic. Behind such inanimate bodies are the real bodies who make them work. It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the central contribution of Mark Webber, who acted as conference organiser during the crucial months preceding the conference. He and Selina Cohen "pulled out all stops" on the days of the conference and ensured its smooth functioning. Other colleagues who deserve mention are Sammy Adelman, Bjorn Beckman, Angela Brown, Doris Burgess, Lionel Cliffe, Della Cohen, Peter Gutkind, David Hughes, Charles Mavuso, Judy Mohan, and Roy May. They served on the Local Arrangements Committee, organised the creche, and remembered the 101 other things we forgot to arrange ourselves. We would also like to thank the series editor, Paul Lovejoy, for his early support for the project, and Barbara Ellington, senior acquisitions editor at Westview Press, for her help. They, together with Mick GusindeDuffy, Deborah Lynes, and Stephen Haenel at the press, made this an easier book to complete.

Robin Cohen Harry Goulbourne Warwick

ix

Abbreviations and Acronyms AID

ANC ASP BCA BCM BOP BG BNF BPP CCM COSATU CP CPP DP DUP EIU FBIS FRELIMO HSM IAF IMF JFM KANU KAU LN MOM MPLA MWU MyW NCC

Agency for International Development African National Congress (South Africa and Northern Rhodesia/Zambia) Afro-Shirazi Party (Tanzania) Beira Corridor Authority Black Consciousness Movement (South Africa) Botswana Democratic Party Botswana Government Botswana National Front Bechuanaland People's Party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (The Party of the Revolution, Tanzania) Congress of South African Trade Unions Communist Party Convention People's Party (Ghana) Democratic Party (Uganda) Democratic Unionist Party (Sudan) Economist Intelligence Unit Foreign Broadcasting Information Service (Uganda) Front for the Liberation of Mozambique Holy Spirit Movement (Uganda) Inter-American Foundation International Monetary Fund June Four Movement (Ghana) Kenya African National Union Kenya African Union Legal Notice Mass Democratic Movement (South Africa) Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola Mine Workers' Union (Zambia) Maendeleo ya Wanawake ["Women's Development"] (Women's Movement in Kenya) National Consultative Council (Uganda)

xi

xii NEPU NIF NRA NRANC NRC NRM PDCs PNDC PNP PRG PRP Renamo SACP SACTU SADCC SCP SPLA SPLM SRSP

ssu

TANU TNC UDF UNCTAD UNDP UNIP UNITA UNLF UPC UPM USAID USSR

woes

ZANC

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Northern Elements Progressive Union (Nigeria) National Islamic Front (Sudan) National Resistance Army (Uganda) Northern Rhodesia African National Congress National Resistance Council (Uganda) National Resistance Movement (Uganda) People's Defence Committees (Ghana) Provisional National Defence Council (Ghana) People's National Party (Ghana) People's Revolutionary Government (Grenada) People's Redemption Party (Nigeria) Mozambique National Resistance South African Communist Party South African Congress of Trade Unions Southern African Development Coordination Conference Sudanese Communist Party Sudan People's Liberation Army Sudan People's Liberation Movement Somalia Revolutionary Socialist Party Sudanese Socialist Union Tanganyika African National Union transnational corporation United Democratic Front (South Africa) United Nations Conference on Trade and Development United Nations Development Programme United National Independence Party (Zambia) Uniao para a Independencia Total de Angola (Union for the Total Independence of Angola [Angolan guerrilla movement]) Uganda National Liberation Front Uganda People's Congress Uganda People's Movement United States Agency for International Development Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Workers' Defence Committees (Ghana) Zambian African National Congress

About the Contributors Chris Allen lectures in politics at the University of Edinburgh and is the author of many seminal articles on African politics. Recent publications include a book entitled Benin, the Congo, Burkina Faso (1989) and an article on "State, Society and the African Crisis" in Third World Quarterly (1989). Robin Cohen is professor of sociology at the University of Warwick. He is author and editor of numerous books on Africa, the Caribbean, ethnic relations, and small island states. His books on Africa include Labour and Politics in Nigeria (1975, 1982) and Endgame in South Africa? (1986). He is also author of The New Helots: Migrants in the International Division of Labour (1987, 1988) and Contested Domains: Debates in International Labour Studies (1991). Bola Dauda was a Nigerian civil servant and is now lecturer in public administration at the University of Liverpool. He is a member of the African Studies and Political Studies associations of the United Kingdom. His research interests are in representative bureaucracy and on the relationship between bureaucrats and politicians. He is author of The Will to Succeed (1982). Daryl Glaser received his B.A. (Hons.) and M.A. degrees in sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He is currently a doctoral student at the University of Manchester. He has published on the South African state's reform strategies and industrial decentralisation policies. His current interest is in democratic theory and, in particular, the forms of political representation appropriate to socialist democracy. Harry Goulbourne is principal research fellow at the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, Warwick University. He has taught at Dar es Salaam and the University of the West Indies and has written extensively on Tanzanian and Caribbean politics. He is author, inter alia, of Teachers, Politics and Education in Jamaica, 1892-1972 (1988) and Ethnicity and Nationalism in Post-Imperial Britain (1991). Jeff Haynes teaches at the Department of International Relations and Politics, Staffordshire Polytechnic. His research interests include West African regional integration, Ghanaian politics, and Libyan foreign policy. xiii

xiv

About the Contributors

Peter Lawrence is one of the founding members of the Review of African Political Economy. He is lecturer in economics at the University

of Keele and edited the first volume in the series of conference volumes sponsored by the Review under the title World Recession and the Food

Crisis in Africa (1987). J. Oloka-Onyango is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at Makerere

University and describes himself as a "student of law and underdevelopment." His publications focus mainly on the political economy of law in underdeveloped countries and on human rights and democracy. Jack Parson is associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. His research on the relationship between class politics and democracy began during a five-year period (1973-1978) at the University of Botswana and continued during subsequent periods of research as a Fulbright scholar. He is author of Botswana: Liberal Democracy and the Labor Reserve in Southern Africa (Westview, 1984) and articles in Africa Today, the Journal of Southern African Studies, and the Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics. His chapter in this book is part of a comprehensive political analysis of the process of proletarianisation in Botswana. Ken Post has for the last twenty years been professor of political science at the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague. Prior to this he taught in Nigeria, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Jamaica. The first phase of his work was on West Africa, more specifically on Nigeria, and resulted in four books. The second phase covered the Caribbean, specifically Jamaica, and produced three volumes. For the last twelve years, he has been working on a five-volume history of the Vietnamese Revolution, which is now almost complete. His next planned books are on the Philippines and South Africa. His latest book (with Phil Wright) is Socialism and Underdevelopment (1989). Pepe Roberts is lecturer in sociology at the University of Liverpool. In 1989-1990 she spent a year at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. She has written a number of articles on gender relations and on agrarian societies in Ghana, Nigeria, Niger, and Kenya and is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy. M. A. Mohammed Salih is at the Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Sweden. His master's thesis at the University of Khartoum was entitled "The Socio-economic Basis of Intertribal Conflicts in South Kordofan." He is also author of a recent chapter on "Tribal Militia, SPLAjSPLM and the Sudanese State: New Wine in Old Bottles" (1989) and coeditor of Ecology

and Politics: Environmental Stress and Security in Africa (1989). Carol B. Thompson is associate professor of political science at the

University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She is active in the African Studies Association of the United States and edits its journal

About the Contributors

XV

African Studies Review. She has published extensively on development

problems in southern Africa. Gavin Williams is a fellow of St. Peter's College, Oxford, and has edited and contributed to several books on the political economy of Nigeria and rural development in Africa. He is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy and the Journal of Historical Sociology. He is currently writing a comparative and historical study of the development of agrarian social structures in South Africa, Kenya; Nigeria, and Tanzania.

1 Introduction: Socialism or Democracy, Socialism and Democracy Robin Cohen Debates about the relationship between socialism and democracy are as old as the social movements for these practices and the ideas themselves. Although the discussions of socialism and democracy in Africa have a special tone and flavour, the African experience is being increasingly drawn into a global forum. This introduction thus provides a broad historical and comparative analysis before returning to the particularities of the African context in a concluding chapter. Let me start with a few preliminary comments on what is normally seen as the historically prio~ movement, namely democracy. Throughout the development of the philosophy and history of democracy, sceptics made clear that as a form of government, or of representation, democracy has not meant, and perhaps can never mean, what its literal Greek translation implied-"government by the people." In ancient Greece, though the great philosophers Plato and Socrates proclaimed their interest in democratic forms of government, Plato in The Republic thought it impossible to govern without the aid of separate, specialized, and privileged upper strata-for him the soldiers and the guardians. Socrates was perhaps more democratic in his instincts, but in Athens as in other prosperous city-states, he was prepared to accord democratic rights only to all Athenian "citizens," a category that conveniently excluded women, slaves, and subjected peoples-the vast majority of the ancient Greek population.

Socialist and Communist Critiques of Democracy By the time socialist movements (as opposed to socialist ideas that had been embryonic earlier) had developed in Europe in the mid1

2

Robin Cohen

nineteenth century, the extension of democracy had barely moved beyond the defence of the bourgeoisie from the depredations and overweening privileges of the royalty and the nobility. Of course, the power of the urban masses had already been glimpsed in the jacqueries of the French Revolution and the widespread riots of the year 1848. But the franchise was extremely limited in most European countries, still ignoring women and also excluding the propertyless, wageless, and ill-educated. Equally, the notion of "rights," despite the declarations of the revolutionaries, was poorly recognized in political and legal systems. The simple association of democracy with the abolition of feudal privilege on behalf, principally, of the bourgeoisie was probably the origin of the potent (yet, we shall argue, dangerously erroneous) jibe by sections of the left-namely that democracy in most Western capitalist states could be reduced to the pejorative expression "bourgeois democracy." It is all too easy to see how socialists might have been suspicious of any extensions of democratic rights. Were these, they argued, simply not grudging concessions, or Machiavellian tidbits, tossed to the masses by conniving regimes that had no real intention of devolving their power or diminishing their privileges? Such derogatory conceptions of Western democracy by those acting in the name of socialism have taken many forms, in the industrialized as well as the nonindustrialized world. The conventional socialist critique was to look to the origins of

representative bodies like parliaments (and to see in them the manifest

interests of the emergent bourgeoisie) or to the development of liberal and conservative parties (and to see them only offering cynical and well-timed concessions to the working class). The domination of labour and social democratic parties by opportunist politicians was also depicted as a "betrayal" of the working class. This accusation was not particularly revelatory, for the oligarchic tendencies of such parties were already extensively analysed by early political sociologists like Michels (1959). For those socialists who were revolutionaries, only the destruction of "the state" or "the system" -catch-all categories covering a wide range of social, legal, and political institutions-would usher in a democratic possibility, and that after a period of "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and "the withering away of the state"-both rather open-ended projects and conceptions. The implication of socialist critiques that coupled the words bourgeois and democracy was not only that socialism was in some manner incompatible with democracy, but that it was also in some manner superior to and above democracy. In this view, democracy was no substitute for socialism. Rather its attractiveness was used and manipulated by the bourgeoisie to curtail and sidetrack the masses' true needs (sometimes it was difficult to find powerful demands) for socialism.

Socialism or Democracy, Socialism and Democracy

3

This kind of reasoning suited conspiratorial and exile parties. It was particularly appropriate to communist parties recognized by the Comintern-which with rare exceptions (France and Italy come to mind) were either forbidden to take part in electoral processes or, where not outlawed, were incapable of commanding popular support. Despite the exaggerated claims of communist parties to be speaking in the name of "the masses" or "the working class" or the "common people," it is remarkable how few communist regimes were established as a result of the exercise of the popular will. Instead "vanguardism" and "democratic centralism" prevailed on the orthodox left. Lenin (cited in Gray 1963: 481) had advanced this tradition by arguing that communists should work within the framework of "bourgeois" or parliamentary democracy only in order to prepare for the "dispersion of parliament" by soviets. A good many-too many-socialists with democratic instincts were misled by these self-interested and simplistic concepts. It is time, indeed it is now long overdue, for socialists to say unequivocally that the history of communist regimes since 1917 has demonstrated that "vanguardism" meant "the party first, the masses later" while "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and "democratic centralism" meant "secretive and authoritarian rule by the politburo."

Third World and Student Critiques of Democracy Around 1960, the year that Africans called "the golden year of independence," constructing a neutralist and nonaligned path between the great power blocs suddenly appeared an attractive possibility-a "third" way in a "third" world, with its own identity and its own egalitarian political philosophy, based on its own indigenous roots. Such was the dream. Even Fidel Castro (cited in Paczuska 1986: 130), who in the 1990s is seen as one of the last outposts of orthodox communism, in 1959 placed the Cuban revolution firmly in the nonaligned camp: "Our revolution is neither capitalist nor communist. Capitalism sacrifices the human being, communism with its totalitarian concepts sacrifices human rights. We agree with neither one nor another." The nonaligned movement attracted dissenting communist regimes like Yugoslavia, those states emerging from an armed national liberation struggle like Cuba, and the bulk of states that had gone through a peaceful decolonization process. One after the other, Third World leaders weighed in with their particular versions of their novel routes between capitalism and communism. Nehru evolved a notion of "democratic collectivism," Senghor one of "African socialism." For Nyerere the objective was "communitarianism," for Sekou Toure, "communocracy,"

Robin Cohen

4

for Nasser a "democratic, socialist, cooperative democracy" (Sigmund 1963: 12). More often than not these "third ways" involved a preference for one-party democracy rather than a two- or multiparty system. Nyerere was probably the most articulate defender of a democratic one-party model. For him, African traditions of democracy were closely attuned to the ancient Greek ideal-which he characterized as "government by discussion among equals" (Nyerere 1963: 197). By contrast, he saw the Anglo-Saxon tradition as a contest between two classes, one defending wealth and the status quo, the other the masses and the desire for change. He further claimed that, as "with rare exceptions" class was "entirely foreign to Africa," there was no need for two such parties. Nyerere saw the 1960s as a time of national emergency, when all had to unite against colonialism and tribalism and for the rebuilding of the economy, the eradication of disease, and the banishment of ignorance and superstition (Nyerere 1963: passim). The 1960s "Third Worldist" criticism of capitalist democracy was followed by the more indiscriminate attacks promoted by the student movement of the 1960s. Both critiques shared an even-handed dislike of the two cold war power blocs. Indeed, the revolutionary-minded students in Paris, London, and Berkeley directed their fire at Bolshevism as much as capitalism. According to Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit (in Oglesby 1969: 261), who were strongly involved in the "May Events"

in France:

it is true to say that Communists, and also Trotskyists, Maoists, and the rest, no less than the capitalist state, all look upon the proletariat as a mass that needs to be directed from above. As a result, democracy degenerates into the ratification at the bottom of decisions taken at the top, and the class struggle is forgotten while leaders jockey for power within the political hierarchy. ·

Instead of a revolutionary party, a vanguard, or a rearguard, the CohnBendits and their student allies looked to "a host of insurrectional cells, be they ideological groups, study groups [or] street gangs" (Oglesby 1969: 266). For them, the setting up of a party inevitably reduced freedom of the people to freedom to agree with the party. Democracy was not corrupted by bad leadership, but by the very existence of leadership. As in the student movement, the idea of building democracy from below was very much the guiding principle for a recent, but ultimately doomed, experiment-the creation of "people's power" on the Caribbean island of Grenada in the wake of the collapse of the eccentric and

Socialism or Democracy, Socialism and Democracy

5

corrupt Gairy regime. Mobilization campaigns, rallies, and solidarity celebrations, as well as production, disciplinary, education, and emulation committees, were all instituted to try to foster direct democracy from below, rather than to buttress the conventional structures of representative democracy. Supplementing the work of these committees were mass organizations like the National Women's Organization, the National Literacy Campaign, and the Young Pioneers, all of which were designed to increase the level of popular participation. The leader of the People's Revolutionary Government (PRG) in Grenada, Maurice Bishop, like Nyerere before him, denounced the "discredited" Westminster model and its "superficial" democracy. According to Bishop (cited in Payne, Sutton, and Thorndike 1984: 35), "the type of democracy where people walk into a ballot box [sic] and vote for five seconds every five years is not real democracy at all. [This was] a Tweedledum and Tweedledee situation with two parties which were two sides of the same coin simply replacing one another." So long as it was the old and impotent former colonial power, Britain, that was in the dock, Bishop's rhetoric was disregarded internationally. But President Reagan found the PRG's attacks on U.S. democracy less than palatable and an ideal pretext for the invasion of the island on the grounds that the PRG was in the hands of the communists. This was a bitter lesson in the realities of hemispheric politics-for, in the end, the Bishop regime found itself abandoned by all the Caribbean governments other than Cuba-and all, including Cuba, were impotent in the face of the U.S. military occupation.

The Collapse of Alternatives to Western Democracy A generous view of the PRG in Grenada could see it as a brave experiment laid low by the political calculations of a vainglorious president of a nearby Great Power, anxious to score propaganda victories to counteract national humiliations in Vietnam and the Middle East. Such a characterization of the collapse of people's power in Grenada is accurate, while being insufficient. Closer scrutiny of the PRG's style of governance reveals an inherent contradiction between nominal control from below and real control by the leading cadres. The tension between the fervour of the leading cadres and the relative lack of zeal by the people in whose name they act reveals common and deep-rooted flaws to the alternatives to Western democratic forms proposed by revolutionaries of many hues. Some of these flaws were raised as early as 1899 by Edward Bernstein, the German Social-Democrat and first major exponent of "the peaceful road to Socialism" (see Gray 1963: 401-407). Bernstein saw an inherent

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Robin Cohen

inconsistency between revolutionary conspiracy in the name of socialism on the one hand and democracy on the other. He was probably the clearest thinker from within the socialist movement of the view that socialism could not be established by revolutionary class struggle, because the very condition upon which this form of change was premised, that is, mass involvement, was characteristically absent. Far from jettisoning truly democratic forms of struggle, Bernstein saw the first requirement for the transition to socialism as democracy itself. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which Marx proclaimed and Lenin seized on, was "political atavism." Democracy needed "justice" and "equality of rights for all members of the community." Once they had the vote, workers were "citizens," not just "proletarians." Against the Marxist-Leninist scorn for such bodies, he argued that liberal organizations, including the state, were capable of change and development. They should be developed through "organization and energetic action." It was not only the revisionists and the Fabians who warned the socialist movements against the abandonment of democratic principles. The great German-Polish revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg (in Looker 1974: 246-247), was equally prophetic in her attack on the likely trajectory of the Russian soviets: The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress. Public control is indispensably necessary. Otherwise the exchange of experiences remains only with the closed circle of the officials of the new regime. Corruption becomes inevitable . . . with the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life in which only the bureaucracy remains as an active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Luxemburg's vision proved to be all too germane to the state socialist regimes of the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. In nearly every Comecon country, the legitimacy of the ruling party has collapsedWestern democracy and "the market" are triumphant. Only in a few outposts where the old men with their bloodstained hands precariously hold power-Albania, China, Pol Pot's region of Kampuchea-do primeval notions of vanguardism, the party acting in the name of the proletariat, still hold sway.

Socialism or Democracy, Socialism and Democracy

7

While the crisis of the state socialist world has notably been at the political level, as Peter Lawrence suggests in his contribution to this book, socialist economic rationality has also been fundamentally confounded. The apparently irrefutable notions that production should be geared for need, not profit, that rationality and cooperation under socialism could replace waste, greed, and exploitation under capitalism-these ideas have been largely discarded in the countries where they were once proclaimed from the mountain tops. As Lawrence makes clear, even socialists cannot now avoid the conclusion that advanced capitalism has produced goods people want, under conditions where the lot of the majority has been improved, and where the political system, however limited, is more open and democratic than anything state socialism has been able to achieve.

Pressures for Democracy in Africa What is the relevance of this comparative discussion of socialism and democracy to the African context? For a start, it is clear that African states cannot remain insulated from the world currents in support of Western-style democracy. As I write (early in 1991), the demands for pluralism and multiparty democracy in Kenya and Zambia are making headline news. President Kaunda has been forced to concede a referendum on the future of one-party rule in his country. As Goulbourne documents in the final chapter in this book, in many other African countries similar demands are increasingly becoming less sotto voce, even within the governing parties and elites. The pressure to join conventional patterns of representation and democratic expression has also deeply affected the liberation movement in South Africa. In a tightly argued theoretical and practical analysis, Glaser exposes the indifferent record and vacillating commitment to democracy that the South African left displayed in the past. As he anticipated, however, at least formally, even the most orthodox section of the liberation movement, the South African Communist Party (SACP), is now using the universal code language of the "good democrat." According to the SACP's general secretary, Joe Slovo (Sunday Times 22 July 1990): "It's absolutely clear that, apart from rare moments in history the single party system, the absence of political pluralism, leads to tyranny, . . . corruption . . . and the assumption of power by a small, self-perpetuating elite." The external pressures on African regimes to conform to the prevailing Western models (and limits) to democracy have also emanated from financial institutions like the World Bank. As Haynes shows in his chapter on Ghana, the strictures of the International Monetary Fund

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Robin Cohen

played a role in the abolition of the Workers' Defence Committees (WDCs) in 1984. Even though power was held firmly in the centre, the WDCs were established by Rawlings as an important part of his public commitment to people's power. However, because the WDCs did not fit the policies deemed necessary by the IMF-the attraction of foreign investment and the need to reassure senior managers that they were in control of the workplace-they had to go. Despite this example of political change at the behest of an external economic agency, it would be both patronising and false to blame all the ills of Africa on outsiders. The economic and political crises of a number of African states were also propelled by internal factors, graphically described by Roberts and Williams in their contribution to this book on the agrarian question. As they state: In Ghana and Nigeria, peasants have suffered from a combination of excessive taxation of export producers, overvaluation of currencies, wasteful government spending, private land grabbing, official extortion, extensive plunder of the state's coffers. . . . In both countries, these practices have undermined the conditions for the continuation or reestablishment of democratic institutions. In some cases, like that of Uganda, discussed here by Oloka-Onyango, the politicians and soldiers did so much damage that forms of popular expression and organization almost become a precondition for survival. Indeed, Museveni was only able to seize the political initiative by persuading many in Uganda that he was fighting for "democratic rights" and "human dignity," precious values that were treated as so much detritus by Obote and Amin in their lust for personal power and selfaggrandisement. Despite the progress towards stability made under Museveni, Oloka-Onyango is sceptical about the capacities of the "resistance committees" to transform themselves into autonomous and evolving organs of grassroots democracy. In a sustained legal attack on the resistance committees, our contributor argues that the only ultimate safeguard for popular rights remains free elections. The devastations of many ruling elites have been so arbitrary that, as Dauda argues in his contribution, there is a good case for reexamining the traditional hostility that democrats have to bureaucrats. Instead of seeing the bureaucracy as overstaffed, overpaid, and overpowerful, democrats should remember, so Dauda cautions, that African bureaucracies can represent a force for stability and development-both preconditions for a democratic possibility. Even where reasonably efficient bureaucracies are in place, but especially where they are not, a number of political scientists (discussed by Ken Post in this volume) have noticed a high

Socialism or Democracy, Socialism and Democracy

9

level of disengagement with the African state-as peasants smuggle goods across frontiers, old ethnic and local identities are asserted, and an informal economy is built in defiance of state planning, investment, and taxation decisions. For particular segments of the African population, the reach of the state has never been particularly great. For example, Salih, in an important case study of the pastoralists of the Sudan, argues that African states have been incapable of incorporating groups that owe a fealty to "traditional" leaders who base their authority on kinship ties, ascribed values, and age-old ideologies. Though these ideologies have considerable democratic content, they share little with the uneasy alliances postcolonial states have forged with workers, urban elites, businessmen, and wealthy farmers. Where African regimes have espoused a socialist ideology, this ideology has proved largely incompatible with "pastoral democracy/' especially where plans for settlement, political modernization, and the incorporation of pastoral production into the market and state marketing boards have flown in the face of the continuing desire of pastoralists to evade administrative control and to remain free to practice their hallowed ways of life.

The Struggle for Democracy in Africa In devising a thematic statement to announce the conference that gave rise to a number of chapters in this volume, 1 the organizers argued, inter alia, that: • Democracy has recently become a central concern for the left in Africa and in the Caribbean, as we learn from bitter experience. Democracy is a contested term: as between left and right and also within the left. Democracy has historically been given several different meanings: popular government (rule by the demos), government by elected representatives, accountability to electors. • These ambiguities of meaning have facilitated abuse of the term Democracy. They also point to the broad range of conditions required for the realization of democratic aspirations: freedoms of speech, conscience, and association; the recognition and protection of individual and collective rights; protection from discrimination on grounds of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation; equality before the law and in access to opportunities; competitive elections; accountability of representatives and officials to voters, constituents, and members. Critical for socialists is the formation of democratic organizations of workers, of peasants, of communities, of students, and of other social groups, whose policies are shaped

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by, and whose leaders are accountable to, their members. Without these conditions, and especially the last, popular or constitutional forms of government become instruments for class exploitation and abuse of power. • Marxists originally identified democracy as the natural form of government under capitalism, as in the couplet "bourgeois democracy." However, workers have always been more concerned to defend democratic rights than capitalists. But governments of all kinds, bourgeois, nationalist, and socialist, have all too often refused to allow democratic elections and failed to respect democratic rights, notably those of workers and their organizations. Equally, critical decisions concerning African countries are often made outside their borders by multinational corporations, foreign governments, and bankers. Increasingly governments have conceded control over their economic policies to the IMF and the World Bank. Democratic decision making and popular organizations, particularly trade unions, stand in the way of the programmes that the IMF and the World Bank, with the collaboration of national governments, have devised for economic recovery. In Africa perestroika (structural adjustment) does not seem to require glasnost! The two components of "national democracy" need to complement one another if people are to take power over the societies they live in.

• Democracy requires an effective state and appropriate legal and

political institutions to secure people's rights and to enable them to elect their own governments and make their own laws. There is no single formula for democratic political institutions, and democratic forms may mask authoritarian and arbitrary government. Democracy is not achieved by promulgating a constitution; it must be renewed and fought for within workers' and popular organizations, within political parties, and in society at large. Socialists must take Democracy seriously, in the struggles against apartheid and national oppression and for liberation from colonial rule, in countries with one-, two-, and multiparty systems, under capitalist and imperialist domination, and under governments attempting or claiming to build socialism.

This statement can stand both as a marker of the problems confronting those who are arguing for socialism and democracy in Africa and as an indication of how far there is to go. It is now apparent that the "Third Worldist" notion of a unique path between West and East is implausible, not least on the logical grounds that one of the antagonists who defined the polarity has given up. However, this is not to say that what happens in Africa (and Latin

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America, the Middle East, and the poorer parts of Asia) is by way of a marginal footnote to the course of world history. As Post reminds us in a trenchant footnote in his chapter, the "periphery" is defined as such in terms of its power, not in terms of its geographic, demographic, economic, environmental, and cultural importance. Within the African continent there are also encouraging signs both of a new realism in political thinking and in respect of the growth of grassroots initiatives in defence of basic democratic principles and human rights. For example, Thompson in her chapter shows how discussions of development in southern Africa have transcended the limits of the nation-state and turned on an appreciation of the need for democracy to ensure that the goals of equity are met. In the case of Botswana, which uniquely in Africa has held five Westminster-style multiparty elections, Parson accepts that the system masks a high level of barely concealed class domination. At the same time, he looks to the possibilities of the dominated classes using existing institutions to deepen and strengthen democratic impulses. He argues that the village development committees, the brigades movement, and the producer cooperatives, as well as the political parties, all provide the means for the empowerment of "the peasantariat" and a way of transcending the limitations of the inherited mode of government. In a contribution using data from Kenya and Zambia, Allen questions whether the image of women's apoliticism is correct. Instead, an examination of the literature on and experience of women's organizations shows that women's power and political participation have not significantly declined. The alternatives facing women are not only withdrawal or incorporation by the state, but also the remaking of the rules of the

political game.

Conclusion: "Ex Africa Semper Aliquid Novi'' "Out of Africa, there is always something new," said the Roman general Scipio Africanus. This observation still has force in the contemporary African context. All over Africa, workplace, village-based, street-based, local-level committees have sprung up to defend the dominated classes and to advance their interests. Few owe their existence to elaborated notions of "people's power." Instead, many have developed reactively, as a means of surviving the scourge of the politicians and the soldiers. Others, like those in Ghana and Uganda, have been institutionalized by radical military regimes or, as in Botswana, have become established under the aegis of conventional parliamentary democracies. Yet others, as in South Africa, have arisen as auxiliaries to the movement for basic majoritarian

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rights. In each case, however, the people's committees provide the potential for empowering the powerless, acting as channels for greater social equity, and as bastions for the defence of human rights. Socialists need to support such local initiatives, while being aware of the possible dangers that they can descend into "necklacing" parties or other prejudiced and particularistic expressions of mob rule. Local committees need to operate within a framework of due process, respect for universal values and rights, and regard to their own democratic practices. Many little Hitlers may be no less damaging than one national dictator. At the level of the national state, socialists should be sufficiently confident to advance their basic critique of unbridled capitalism: that it tends to private greed and public squalor. But they also have to accept that the working models offered in contrast-be they communist, state socialist, or African socialist-have failed to provide adequate safeguards against the abuse of power or to ensure the necessary protection of · human rights and liberties. Socialism cannot be posed as an alternative to democracy, the two are organically related and inextricably woven into the process of progressive change. The one cannot be advanced without the other. This is not just a theoretical conclusion, but one based on the bitter experience and disappointed hopes of those who thought they could discard

"bourgeois democracy" and install socialism by fiat. Such a project is

a chimera. Whatever the limits of social democracy, these cannot be transcended by undemocratic means. Workers and peasants need rights and a legal order to facilitate organization, negotiation, and struggle. Poor peopleall people-need protection from arbitrary power. The institutions characteristic of a social democratic state can be made to work more fairly and more comprehensively, drawing hitherto excluded groups into the polity, society, and economy on more equitable terms. If this be deemed "revisionism," so be it. As hopefully we can now all see, it was Bernstein not Lenin who pointed the way to the progressive movements of the twenty-first century. Notes 1. The original text was drafted by Gavin Williams, then slightly modified after collective discussion by the editors of the Review of African Political Economy.

PART ONE

Controversies

2 Economic Democracy, Socialism, and the "Market" Peter Lawrence Socialism has traditionally been presented as a social and economic system that eliminates the irrationalities of the market and of the processes of accumulation for profit that the market is supposed to represent. A socialist system establishes a different rationality-production for need rather than production for profit. Needs are determined by the free expression of emancipated individuals coming together in democratically elected representative assemblies to determine what is to be produced, how and where, and by whom. Economies are planned by free people acting together to produce what they need in a manner that uses resources rationally, eliminates waste and duplication, and satisfies expressed needs. Prices have a purely accounting function; they no longer are needed to indicate how resources might best be allocated-this is a decision taken at a political level. Indeed money is expected to disappear because under full communism (towards which socialism is a transitional stage), its function, even as a medium of exchange, will become redundant as people take from the abundant social store what they need for the reproduction of their conditions of existence. After a decade or more of the neoclassical (or classical) orthodoxy dominating economic discourse, the idealism of this view of socialism may seem outrageously misplaced. Not only have the existing capitalist economies apparently swallowed the whole neoclassical package about the efficiency of free competitive markets, but also many of the existing socialist countries have now eagerly embraced this package and accepted it more or less reluctantly as sour medicine to be taken as often as possible by the debt-ridden low- and middle-income economies that, at one time to a greater or lesser degree, had followed a dirigiste approach to economic management, an approach that many, especially in Africa, explicitly termed "socialist." 15

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And so there is confusion. Socialists still believe that capitalism is wasteful, irrational, and exploitative and that it can be replaced by a healthier, more cooperative, more rational, and qualitatively higher form of social organization. However, they see the results of the socialism constructed in the countries going under that label, and they know that advanced capitalism has produced goods people want, under conditions that have improved the lot of the vast majority of its inhabitants over time. Capitalist societies also have political systems that give space for democratic structures and action, however limited, which is still nowhere near granted in most of the socialist world. Meanwhile, in parts of the socialist world, the recognition that democratic centralism and administrative planning have produced stagnation and shortages has led to the embracing of the "market" as the panacea for their economic ills. Privatization, unemployment, deregulation, and the freeing of wages and prices are all regarded as essential for the liberation of these stagnant economies. Socialism and the market are no longer antithetical. The adoption of the market allows for the dismantling of an authoritarian state machine and its replacement by emancipated economic agents interacting in a deregulated ("free") market. Socialists and many nonsocialists in the capitalist economies (who have been through all this and come to the point of view that markets often fail and governments have to intervene and participate in, if not direct, economic activity) can only wonder at the apparent naivety of the new orthodoxy, West and East. This chapter addresses the proposition that the development of the market as the principal means· and locus of decision making for the allocation of resources is an essential part of the process of democratization and socialist economic development. The first part reviews the state of the debate among socialists about the relative roles of the state, planning, and market. The second part discusses conceptions of the workings of markets and their relationship to planning, the state, and concepts of democracy. The third part assesses the relevance of the foregoing to debates about markets and states in Mrica and to arguments about the role of the market mechanism in structural adjustment programmes. Finally, an attempt is made to identify some features of African economies and societies that might form the basis of a collectivist economic and political democracy.

Market, Plan, State, and Democracy: Where Are We Now? The debate on and in the countries of "actually existing socialism" has shifted ground considerably over the last twenty years. This chapter

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is not the place to review the whole of that debate, from its origins in the 1920s with the New Economic Policy in the early Soviet Union to current reform packages in the USSR and Eastern Europe, but it is interesting to observe that although its beginnings involved a discussion of how to bring in market incentives to improve economic performance while leaving systems of property rights intact, more recent economic reform debates are about altering property rights to allow privatization of state assets and the development of small- and medium-sized enterprises subcontracting work from state agencies or operating independently in domestic and foreign markets. Early post-Stalin economic reformers stayed within the sphere of economic policy, but current reformers are political reformers, too, matching their advocacy of pluralist economics with pluralist politics. Indeed, these are no longer debates: The countries of Eastern Europe, starting with Hungary and Poland, are well on the way to multiparty democracy, as are parts of the USSR. The issue for reformers now is not the role of markets in planned economies, but the role of a reduced state in the regulation and development of markets. For socialists unhappy with what they see as a return or move to a system of unregulated markets with their attendant irrationalities and inequalities, but also aware of the rigidities and distortions arising from socialist central planning, the issue is different again: how far, if at all, to recognize the value of market mechanisms, while asserting the moral and economic value of collectivist structures and reasserting the traditional socialist;communist project outlined above. The nature of this debate can best be summarized by reference to a series of articles in New Left Review prompted by the publication of Alec Nove's The Economics of Feasible Socialism in 1983. Nove's project was to map out the structure and mechanisms of a socialism attainable "in some major part of the developed world within the lifetime of a child already conceived and without our having to make or accept implausible or farfetched assumptions about society, human beings and the economy" (p. ix). The socialism he outlined accepts the necessity for large state monopolies, centrally controlled (the public utilities for which national coordination requires centralized management-for example, the national electricity grid and large vertically integrated private corporations and financial institutions where decisions about the operations of the corporation as a whole have to be made centrally); state or socially owned enterprises autonomously managed with management responsible to the work force; cooperatives owning their enterprises and appointing their managers in a democratic elective fashion; small-scale private and privately owned enterprises; and, finally, individual selfemployment. Nove envisaged the existence of prices to balance supply

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and demand, the continued existence of managers and managed, of a hierarchical division of labour, and of pay differentials. Profit would also continue as a measure of efficiency, however imperfect, while competition between autonomous enterprises would exemplify the embodiment of "market forces" in the overall schema. The role of the state would be to handle the large investments and to regulate enterprises, stepping in when failures occurred, overseeing foreign trade, dealing with pollution, subsidies, regional imbalances, and so forth. Nove's work was clearly heavily influenced by the experience of actually existing socialism and the various economic reforms that have been proposed for the socialist economies. Socialist economies are largely characterized by the pervasiveness of state ownership from the largescale public utility and industrial sectors through to the distributive and retail service sectors. This pattern has resulted in the absence of the small enterprise-the workshop making specialist tools or parts for other products, the small shop, the small- or medium-sized family restaurant, the small garage, the self-employed craftsman-those economic agents who fill gaps in the economic system that are too small to be bothered with by the large enterprises. Hence the first task of an economic reform is to allow that gap to be plugged, individually or cooperatively, and to allow state financial institutions to lend money to the small entrepreneurs so that they can do. so. Larger-scale enterprises not operating under conditions of monopoly should operate autonomously and, therefore, determine their supply price in competition with similar enterprises. Their performance would be judged on the degree to which they could sell their product nationally and internationally under conditions in which consumers are able to choose between different versions of the same product. The objective of this reformed economic structure is to improve the quality and supply of the products, increase labour productivity, and generate more advanced technologies and products. Monopoly suppliers, however, would operate under price surveillance, be given targets to aim for, and be rewarded when they achieve targets. In one sense this model is a feasible socialism because it starts from where actually existing socialism is: The question of ownership is already "decided"; what is at issue is creating conditions in which the system of collective ownership can work. This system has relevance also to poorer state socialist economies. Nove's model does not start from where existing capitalism is, nor from where many capitalist developing countries are, and it does not satisfactorily address the problem of the large transnational corporations and their control of international production. But Nove's work is a starting point, and it does incorporate a strong critique of the position held by right-wing liberal economists on the

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primacy of markets and the iniquities of the state, a discussion to which we shall return below. It should also be noted that many capitalist countries, advanced and "intermediate," contain several elements of Nove's socialist structures: state ownership of some of the commanding heights of these economies, workers' cooperatives, consumer organizations. What is missing is generalized social ownership with worker management. Nove's book has attracted a great deal of attention, not only because he was brave enough to attempt to construct a socialist system that might work, but also because he was able to present arguments for it based on the failures of the market and the failures of Stalinist central planning. Yet as the famous Polish economist, Brus, pointed out in a sympathetic review (1985), it is the viability rather than feasibility of socialism that is at issue, and that viability is closely tied up with political pluralism: the existence of a multiparty democracy andjor of independent organizations representing different groups within the society. Brus was writing before the upheavals of perestroika in the USSR and the moves towards political pluralism in Poland and Hungary and, clearly, like many others, did not foresee how quickly these changes would come. Now what is in reality on the agenda is not the kind of socialist construction of Nove, which now Brus might accept as viable, but the transformation of property relations to permit the development of private capital, even in the large enterprises. Privatization is, of course, a worldwide phenomenon, but it means that bigger steps will have to be taken towards Nove's form of democratic socialism in the existing socialist countries than would have been required only a few years ago. Now the project of perestroika is to sell state enterprises, let market forces rip, encourage unemployment to shake out inefficient labour, and introduce a capital market. These developments are a function of the degree to which very few economists in socialist countries wish to see the continuation of an administered economy, which they see as the cause of all their ills. What they want is the free movement of economic impulses, which they believe has brought advanced capitalism to its present level of technology and production. The most ardent neoclassical economists are to be found now in Poland and Hungary. But even they are aware of the problems. Who is going to buy state assets? Will economic restructuring, with attendant unemployment, bring rapid disillusionment and political disintegration? Will foreign capital come to the rescue? These questions are questions of class: Who will own capital (individuals, cooperatives, universities, existing managements, transnationals?), and what will become of workingclass organizations and what role will they play?

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Against this backdrop of debate, both outside and inside the socialist world, is the traditional Marxist socialist position exemplified by Ernest Mandel, who maintains that socialism is about a transition to communism, to a society of abundance, in which a consensual hierarchy of needs can be satisfied by collective resource allocation through "the planned self-rule of the associated producers" (Mandel 1986: 36). "Self-rule" is exercised through a system of "articulated workers' self-management": "workers and popular councils" making decisions about the planned allocation of resources nationally, about money incomes, and about pricing policy. Self-managed production units decide the quantity and technical level of the output by calculating the "technological average" with reference to the highest prevailing level of technology. Less productive units would be phased out when popular needs could be satisfied by the more efficient units and when alternative employment could be found for those whose work would no longer be needed. Consumers represented by consumer conferences would signal the kinds of goods they would want to see produced and their product specifications. Public services would be run in the same way. This period of "self-rule" would be a transitional stage towards "pure" socialism in which small-scale entrepreneurship would still exist on an individual or cooperative basis but in which people would not be forced to be employed in this "private" sector because they would have guaranteed consumption. Thus labourpower would be freely contracted by workers (Mandel 1986: 27-28). The most obvious query to raise at this stage (once again) is how far such a vision of a transitional socialist society relates to the characteristics of existing capitalist and socialist societies and to developments within both. Mandel asserted that, even under modern capitalism, planning is a major feature of corporate activity and is taken out of the sphere of the market. He does concede, however, that corporations ultimately compete in final goods markets and that determines their overall level of output and, therefore, the input volumes for which they plan for themselves and their suppliers. Labour is increasingly socialized on an international scale, market signals do not result in consumers switching from their regular suppliers: The socialist bureaucracies and the capitalist markets are held together by "acts of informal cooperation" (Mandel 1986: 22), which overcome the inadequacies of centralized bureaucratic decision making and the irrationalities of the market. It is not, therefore, so much of a leap to get from where we are now to the system Mandel proposed, at least in respect of planning taking over from the market. Next, there is the question of complexity. Modern economies have a myriad of activities, purchases and sales, inputs and outputs, that must be known and that change rapidly over time. Mandel sees little problem

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with this situation given the capacity of computers to handle large sets of equations and, therefore, make the calculations required to plan and execute the plan. People's needs do. not have to be articulated via their consumer preferences exercised in free markets using money but can be ascertained simply by asking people what their needs are. Finally, there is the question of power relations. For Mandel, Sovietstyle central planning was a failure, not because it was planning but because it was rule by a bureaucratic despotism, which corrupted the socialist ideal. Mandelian socialism would not suffer this fate because his system would be "a democratically centralized system of workers' management" (Mandel 1988: 109). No doubt. But how long would it last as such? What safeguards could be brought in to ensure that rival claims on scarce resources would not result in political degeneration into the very despotism Mandel assures us would not occur? Simply because advanced capitalist countries produce in abundance relative to the early Soviet Union does not mean to say that all claims on resources can be settled without conflict. So far then we have a situation in which a reassertion of a traditional view of socialism does not sit well with market principles. In a contribution to the New Left Review debate, Diane Elson (1988) transcended the planjmarket dichotomy of the Nove-Mandel debate: first, by emphasizing the centrality of the production and reproduction of labour-power as the guiding thread of a socialist economy, which means emphasizing the household and the consumer as much as the producer; second, by attacking the question of what markets are and how they work; and third, by setting out the elements of an economic system that "socializes" markets: A socialized market is one in which the market is made by public bodies, which are financed out of taxation of enterprises and households, rather than out of sales. It is also one in which the "invisible handshakes," the relations of goodwill and reciprocity, which market economies have found it necessary to construct at least to some degree, are made into public information networks with open access rather than "charmed circles" or "gentlemen's clubs" which exclude "outsiders." Such networks would have secretariats financed by taxation, rather than by sale of these services.

A further key feature of the system of open information would be the ability of those less able to understand the information they could receive to take on advisers, through trade unions for example, to help access and interpret this information, which would be stored electronically. This device overcomes in part a major objection to the system, namely

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that inequalities in skill and training would result in the information being closed to most people. However, what is really required to overcome this problem is the production of what Bahro (1978: 408) has termed "surplus consciousness," with universal access to the highest levels of education, such education not being directed towards the existing division of labour, but towards the emancipation of all individuals in society so that they can participate fully in a meaningful process of democratic decision making. Elson's system requires prices and freely available information to producers and consumers on how particular prices are formed. It allows and indeed encourages freedom of entry to groups of workers wishing to produce ·particular products, and it allows for central regulation and for intervention where enterprises find themselves in difficulties. A socialized labour market is also proposed, again based on maximizing the amount of information available to participants in it. Final consumer markets would also be socialized through giving consumers both organization and open access to information about the quality and pricing of goods. Planning is then based on the ability to coordinate economies through these information networks and the ability to formulate plans on the basis of real and freely available information. Elson's model is clearly an advance on those of Nove and Mandel. It sets out a framework for producer and consumer democracy that incorporates both cooperative and competitive elements and therefore suggests a dynamic economic system, rather than some utopian "economy of repetition," as Elson termed Mandel's model, in which everything works because people establish routinized functions and links between them. Apart from the boredom that would ensue in such an economy, there is the question of whether such an economy would not simply stagnate. Elson's approach accepts the importance of the market as an institution but challenges Nove's assumption that markets involve bargains between buyers and sellers and thus incorporate higher efficiency and more optimal resource allocation than do centrally planned allocative systems. As with Nove's model and to a lesser extent Mandel's, it is possible to see a transition to Elson's model as more likely in those economies where capital is not in control, even if the economies are moving more strongly, and naively, towards a fully fledged capitalist market system. Such a movement has, for example, been balanced somewhat by talk of glasnost, which ought to be about open access to information. It is less possible to see a transition to such a system in a capitalist economy, as here trends are towards greater secrecy and limitations on access to information, especially in respect of the state. Elson did, however, suggest ways of moving forward with socialized market objectives in view.

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Market regulation, legislation controlling restrictive practices and cartels, the environment, consumer protection, industrial democracy, and open government are all issues in developed capitalist societies around which more or less powerful agencies have become established and that chip away at the power of capital to frame the way the system operates and to withhold information. The development of these features, around the issue of open access to information, is seen by Elson as a way forward. Another recent contribution to the "market socialism" debate stressed the distinction between market forces and market exchange and argued for a system of planning based on "negotiated coordination" involving market exchange but not market forces (Devine 1988; 1988a). The operation of market forces results in a coercive system of coordination. So does that of central planning. The answer is for enterprises to get together with all interested parties-suppliers, consumers, communities, competing enterprises-in negotiated coordination bodies in order to work out investment levels, product characteristics, output levels, environmental measures, and so on. The stress is on the value of the cooperative rather than on antagonistic methods of problem solving and decision making and on the free flow of information. Although Elson's model, to which Devine's bears some similarity, retains some elements of what Devine would call market forces, and what might be better termed market mechanisms, "negotiated coordination" would rely heavily on the development of mutual trust and socially altruistic behaviour. Whether or not any of the models proposed in response to Nove's model lie sufficiently close to existing realities to be feasible or viable, the possibilities of operating an economic system without price signals to provide the guiding light to producers and consumers, savers and investors, however they are constituted, are highly questionable. In the next section a distinction is drawn between forces and mechanisms operating within markets, which may help to clarify the point just made.

Markets, Plans, and the State In the course of her discussion, Elson criticized participants in the planjmarket debate for never really explaining what markets are and what goes on in them, and this is certainly true. What is also true is that the terms "markets," the "free play of market forces," and the "market mechanism" are often used interchangeably as though they all meant the same thing. The popular conception of a market entails a place (the marketplace) where buyers and sellers meet. Sellers mark their prices individually with reference to their costs of production or distribution. They may gather information (by looking at other sellers) on the going rate for the product concerned either before the buyers

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arrive or in the course of business when they may discover from consumers that their prices are lower or higher than others. As trading proceeds, sellers may find themselves with excess stocks, which they try to offload by lowering the price. Competition between sellers is such that the tendency is for the price to find a level around that of the lowest. Consumers vote with their feet, only buying from the lowest price seller, so that everybody has to sell at that price to do business. In some marketplaces, sales may (or may not) take place after bargaining. In any event, the process of buying and selling leads to marketclearing because of price flexibility brought about through competition among sellers for buyers. The consumer rules through power over expenditure. Goods that are left unsold at any price result in losses of potential :Profit for the producer/distributor. Goods for which demand is buoyant result in higher profits, which in turn attracts investors with capital who are looking for the highest rate of return. Resources, including labour, will therefore be allocated through this system of markets for goods and money, so that they can be used most profitably. All markets clear. This conception is pretty close to the pure theory of markets (with the exception that there buyers and sellers are given anonymity as "demand and supply," "firms and consumers") in that collusion is ruled out of the pure competitive model (Sawyer 1988). Collusive or cooperative behaviour does take place and it can be shown that this behaviour does leave individual agents better off than they would be if they did not cooperate (Lipton 1985). The mechanism for clearing markets is the signalling system generated by price flexibility. The interact,ion of supply and demand produces a price that equates the two. Other factors may affect supply (the weather, for instance) and demand (a change in the level of income of consumers), but these lie outside the system, and if the mechanism is allowed to operate with price flexibility, this situation poses no great problem. Adjustment will take place and once more markets will clear. Similarly, if firms in a particular industry make high profits relative to the going profit rate, then more firms will enter until the profit rate of the last firm entering is equal to the rate of return to be earned on the next best investment. In the labour market, the wage acts as a tap increasing or reducing the supply of labour to satisfy demand. Economists have for a long time recognized that this ideal-type market system, of which only the barest elements are exposed here, is nonexistent. Indeed the presentation of a theoretically pure, abstract market system has to be judged on the assumptions made. The question is what happens when the assumptions are changed, when it is realized that imperfections abound? Do we reject the whole schema because of the presence of imperfections? Do we seek to remove the imperfections? Or do we accept

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that markets do not need the ironing out of imperfections to function (Sawyer 1988)? In what ways then do real world markets differ? As Elson pointed out, we live in a fixed-price world. Consumers, final or intermediate, enter into purchases facing regular suppliers and set prices. They can go shopping around, but this is not (as yet) a costless operation because information is not easily available. An assiduous player of the market will look around each supplier, examine the goods, compare specifications, check tests on reliability, and compare prices. This process is probably a justified investment of time for a major purchase, but is unlikely to be spent in getting the best deal for every item of the weekly shop. Also, as each retailer knows more or less what others are selling the same good for and each producer is trying to produce roughly the same commodity to the same competitive specification, this search may be unnecessary. In some instances it is possible to negotiate special deals based on regular custom, an instance where assumptions of anonymity break down. Market forces can therefore play freely if there is a full supply of information. But what are these forces? The impersonal force of supply fronts a host of different suppliers, some monopoly suppliers, some competing against a small number of large firms, some very small enterprises and self-employed individuals. The large suppliers will often subcontract the output of specialist goods or services to smaller ones, creating an interdependency between enterprises that transcends market relations and certainly lacks anonymity. The existence of these large enterprises with so much economic power over the supply of small ones suggests that the market has failed in some way. Large enterprises have become so by swallowing less successful small ones or by putting rivals out of business by making higher profits through higher productivity. This is an (ac)cumulative process in which the distribution of profits and market power shifts towards capital. Yet for capital, this process is a successful outcome of playing the market and competing well. The justification for state intervention in the provision of goods and services conventionally rests on the notion of "market failure." The classic example is industrial pollution, of which the costs to society in terms of public health and quality of life are not borne under a free market by the producers of the pollution. State intervention is required either to legislate and provide monitoring capacity or to decide that public funds should be used to effect a clean-up. Conversely, improvements in the quality of the air we breathe will not be provided through the market because the benefits of these provisions will be collective and not individual.

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Transport services, education, health, and other social services fall into this category, as well as defence and the police, though the latter are the only two "public goods" (recognized by the neoclassical right) to require not just state provision but state control. The notion of market failure has also been extended to "natural monopolies," such as the electricity supply industry or the railway system, where, because unit costs continue to fall with rising output, there is no optimum output level (Musgrave and Musgrave 1976: 694). Even though the thrust of neoclassical policy is now towards private ownership of such industries, there is recognition of the need for public regulation. In the end, however, the dividing line between what is to be provided by the state and by the private sector continues to be the subject of debate, which in the case of "natural monopolies," at least, can only be decided by the political process. The state/market dichotomy that emerges from the debates about the privatization of state assets, or the crowding out of private investment by state borrowing and expenditure or the "demarketization" resulting from the state taking over private assets, is largely a false one. The existence of state-owned corporations does not mean that market mechanisms are any less operative than in the absence of these enterprises. The evidence shows that in terms of conventional indicators of efficiency, state enterprises fare no worse than privately owned ones (Millward 1988). What the literature shows is that given clear targets by government and effective management state-owned enterprises can perform competitively alongside domestic private enterprise and in international competition. In achieving these levels of performance, state enterprises use market mechanisms both to raise loans to finance investment and to sell their goods. Their performance is judged according to the rate of return on capital and compared with other public and private enterprises. The state is structuring markets in particular ways by ownership intervention, by forms of regulation of the activity of agents engaged in exchange (trading standards, fraud, safety, minimum wages, are some examples), by demanding labour in the labour markets, in effect by becoming one of the market forces, but what it is not doing is undermining or diminishing the market. Brett argued forcibly that: "the viability of a potentially open market sphere is itself a function of the state in which it must operate, and that the integrity of that system cannot be seen as a mere reflection of an underlying production structure" (1988: 65). The state intervenes not only because of market failure, in the narrow sense of externalities noted in the previous paragraph, or because of the failure of labour markets to clear and produce full employment, but also to regulate the successes of forces operating in markets so that accumulation of power does not result in social dis-

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integration. Of more interest here is the notion that state intervention can effect more cooperative behaviour (adherence to environmental concerns by using compensation as a carrot, for example), thus moving away from a Prisoner's Dilemma outcome in whiCh everybody loses (Lipton 1985). The market/plan dichotomy is equally unhelpful. In an illuminating contribution, Auerbach, Desai, and Shamsavari (1988: 73) argued that "Markets, like other economic forms, are a product of human action and human consciousness as manifested in acts of planning, and not entities whose necessary existence can be postulated away from the sphere of planning and decision-making." In their view, capitalist countries and enterprises have sought to plan and coordinate activity in such a way as to strengthen markets and to increase competitiveness and competition in markets. Contrary to Mandel's view that increased corporate planning involves a reduction in the scope of the market, their view is that there is a dialectical relationship between planning and market that results in more planning generating more effective markets and in turn generating more attempts to direct market forces in particular ways. It is no accident that the U.K. Conservative government's attempt to liberalize markets to make them work in a less centralized and more efficient way has come from a government in some ways more interventionist than any the United Kingdom has had before. All this surely suggests that a clearer look at market forces is the key to understanding the way in which markets can be fashioned to serve particular interests. The notion of socializing and democratizing markets would appear to attack this question head on. But what about democracy? Are not markets already democratic? In the classical economic system expounded in the economic theory textbooks, everybody can participate in the market as individuals-entrepreneurs and labourers alike. There is freedom of entry: All that people must decide is whether they want to play the game (if the price is right) as a rate of return on capital or as a wage. And, in Milton Friedman's well-known phrase, there is "freedom to choose." If people choose not to participate, that is their democratic right, and the same is true of their freedom to choose their patterns of consumption. Competition in the market guarantees freedom and militates against exploitation (Matthews 1985). Monopolies and collusive oligopolies limit freedom, and so do trade unions who hold a monopoly over the supply of labour. However, nothing is perfect and the state is required to ensure the maximum freedom of operation of players in the market. Economic democracy is therefore safeguarded by a political democracy, which allows competition for authority in elections so that people can choose

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how far the market is to be regulated in order to maintain economic democracy. For socialists, at least those of the Marxist tradition, this notion of democracy neglects several features of competition and markets, some of which we have alluded to above. Monopoly power can be constrained by state power, but it also has an enormous influence on how state power is wielded. Trade unions protect the employed from the power of enterprises over the deployment of capital and the level of wages. Different enterprises have different levels of power in the markets in which they operate. But, most importantly, those who sell their labourpower do not have the freedom not to do so, otherwise they starve. Through the political process electoral democracy has meant the implementation of policies to take account of market failures: unemployment benefits and social security so that people do not starve, monopoly and merger regulation, and laws relating to enterprise behaviour for both shareholders and consumers. These measures, together with legislation to control trade unions, also have the effect of reinforcing the power of agents operating in markets. Unemployment benefits and redundancy payments reduce the resistance of workers to being sacked and encourage enterprises to sack them. It is no accident that Hungary is introducing unemployment benefits in order to encourage unemployment as a means of shaking out labour from inefficient low-productivity enterprises that were hitherto "feather-bedded" by state subsidy. Ultimately, in this kind of system the choice between political parties determines to what extent economic inequalities and imperfections are corrected or moderated by state action. As Matthews (1985: 8) observed, this is an aU-or-nothing choice, and the government then legislates according to its programme for those who wanted that programme or parts of it. What is missing from this process is any kind of continuous control over decision making by the voters. Of course democracies of this type allow for autonomous movements, not just unions but campaigning organizations on behalf of many different interests. Not everybody has the time or energy to join whichever organization is closest to their concerns, and these groups may not achieve their objectives, but the space is there for mobilization to take place. Socialist democracy has the conscious control over economic life by the producers (originally) and consumers (in more recent models) as its central guiding feature. This control is exercised by a democratically elected government, but also by a decentralized system involving workplace and household-based democracy. The key to the successful operation of such a democratic framework, whether the socialized market of Elson, the negotiated coordination of Devine, or the "pure" socialism of Mandel, is open access to information by a largely highly informed and educated

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people. Otherwise such a system can easily allow the abuse of power by those with access to information and with the ability to use that information to their advantage. Whether or not people would be prepared to participate would depend on the degree to which they felt participation gave them control over decisions and the extent to which the system was sufficiently productive to allow these decisions to be made as part of the normal work process.

The State and Market Liberalization in Africa What is the relevance, if any, of the foregoing to African economies? We are now at the end of a decade in which the virtues of the market have been expounded by Washington and in which governments have been forced to adopt a package of reforms that has at its centrepiece the liberalizing of markets and "getting prices right." More recently the World Bank has claimed success for its packages (World BankfUNDP 1989). Although its methodology has been subjected to criticism by the Economic Commission for Africa and by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the continued need on the part of most African countries for loans and balance-of-payments support ensures that the World Bank will pursue even in moderated form its "liberalization" strategy. Does this remove from the agenda any discussion of socialist alternatives, because even those states carrying the socialist label are being forced to adopt "structural adjustment" policies? There are two reasons for answering in the negative. First, it is not evident that the policies are working on their own terms. Second, it is evident that much of World Bank/IMF activity is about controlling and coordinating economic policy on a world scale and therefore denying any form of economic self-determination to individual nation-states and communities. This activity may or may not be effective in delivering economic development of some sort, but it is not democratic. So the socialist alternative ni.ust start by working out a democratic alternative. In this case there is much to be learned from the debate discussed in the previous sections. Much of the literature on Mrican economic performance in the last two to three decades has been premised on the degree and type of state intervention required to sustain economic development. In an earlier period the state was expected to take a directing role in planning, at least indicatively, in investment, infrastructural development, and agricultural transformation and was expected to play the leading role in mobilizing foreign and domestic resources. Now we have moved to a period in which the state is said to have been inefficient in performing this function, to have crowded out private

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initiative either by making it illegal or by cornering investment resources for purposes of current expenditure on state activities, to have rewarded agricultural producers inadequately and so reduced levels of marketed production, and, thereby, to have been responsible for the economic decline of the 1970s and 1980s. To reject these propositions as being too simplistic does not mean that they do not provide some of the explanation. They still beg the question of why states should have performed in this way and whether in their absence economic performance would have been better. The answers to these questions depend on the theory held about the nature of the state. If we take the argument of Bates (1981, 1983) that politicians wishing to remain in power (if they are acting rationally) will first of all need to keep the urban population sweet, and that means keeping food prices low, but will also need to channel patronage to some sections of the rural population that will continue to furnish political support even through a fall in agricultural producer prices, then it is pointless speculating what would have happened otherwise. The structural characteristics of Africa's political economy ensured that no other outcome was possible. Another set of politicians would behave the same way under whatever "ism." If we accept the analysis that the state is captured by one or more factions of an incipient (or real) bourgeoisie, then this still allows for resources to be diverted according to the interests of political survival, because the dominating classes depend upon the survival of those politicians to serve their own class interests. This sort of reductionism does not allow for other possibilities that might result in more complex stories with less clear endings being told, as Bienefeld (1986) pointed out in a vigorous critique of Bates (1981). States may well start with the objective of setting agricultural prices at a level that will allow enough accumulation to take place, not only to reinvest in agriculture but also to build up industrial capacity. This policy may reflect political pressures from below and from all classes to raise living standards and to increase the level of economic activity. The need to show that progress is being made may result in unplanned and uncoordinated investments that do not generate sufficient foreignexchange earnings to pay for the projects and that do not generate surpluses in domestic currency because they are operating below capacity or because of inefficiencies associated with the process of learning, or both. The state therefore needs to generate more revenue and seeks to do this by squeezing agricultural producers in the expectation that these producers have no alternative. But they do. They retreat into subsistence agriculture, they smuggle across borders and therefore reduce marketed output. This process of decline can be arrested and reversed by increased

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export prices or by devaluation or both, though devaluation will increase costs in domestic currency for the industrial producers. What emerges here is that producers do not throw out governments that lower prices to them because they have alternatives. They do respond to price signals sent to them by the state. The more powerful of them may well have other interests in trading or they may be rich enough to invest in higher productivity farming and so ride the lower prices. Of course, if prices rise they will send more to the market and exports will increase. If this is done through devaluation, import prices will rise and enterprises will be unable to rehabilitate production, reduced because of shortages of foreign exchange in earlier periods. All this may happen in this way; but it may not. The point is that it is difficult to attribute blame to a process that develops its own momentum and can be knocked off course by international price movements. The irony is that the very market the African economies are supposed to play has the last word and makes it difficult to play the market domestically. The irony is also that the state has developed enterprises in the absence of the market generating such production. That this development has not happened through market forces is a reason given for African states' relative failure. Yet, if African economies are to progress, can they dispense with industrialization? A final irony is that the state is expected to carry out and sustain the restructuring of markets. Governments set producer prices and are expected under reform programmes to raise them. Governments set exchange rates and interest rates. Governments must license traders and other subcontractors and ensure that the markets in which they operate function effectively by providing the necessary infrastructure. The market does not do this. The importance of the state's role (in African economies especially) lies in the absence of strong domestic capital to match and act as a counterweight to international capital.

Economic Democracy in Africa? The purpose of this chapter so far has not been to propose a framework of economic democracy for a socialist Africa, or indeed to try to find some balance between market and plan or state and market. Such dichotomies are unreal and therefore unhelpful. A political and economic blueprint for socialist economic democracy in Africa would not only be presumptuous but would also be indicative of failing to learn from all other attempts to prescribe universalist structures for very different economies and societies. However, some guidelines, which might form the basis of a future democratic collectivism, can be constructed from several features of

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African economies and social organization. Most countries labelling themselves socialist have a large state sector with state-owned enterprises dominating production. Worker-management could be introduced and could have beneficial effects on output and productivity, but would only work effectively if autonomous worker organizations were allowed to flourish. Negotiated subcontracting between large enterprises and small industrial workshops, whether for repairs or for supplying intermediate goods, would also build on what is available and has been argued for by many studies and agency reports. Consumer organizations and cooperatives could also be established with contractual arrangements made at agreed prices and deliveries. Because of the need to keep tight control over foreign-exchange flows, foreign trade would have to be in state hands, though again contractual agreements to deliver goods at negotiated prices could be made between the central trading corporation and consumer cooperatives. Through their cooperatives consumers could decide what kinds of goods they would like to see made available and what prices they would be prepared to pay for them; information could be provided on prevailing prices and the availability of goods. In conditions of shortage the collective prioritization of goods, in which everybody received a share of what was available and arrangements for pooling particular goods were made, would cement cooperative values and result in the more efficient use of scarce resources. None of this involves a major leap from what has existed in some countries, but the initiative would have to come from below, with the state underwriting whatever contracts were made and setting up a system of rules circumscribing this system of exchange. Smallholder farmers have cooperated in marketing and producing their crops. They may not want to pool their land, but even in cases where collective farming has taken place, and the Tanzanian experience has many such cases, successful cooperation requires noninterference by state agencies, in other words, requires the toleration of autonomous peasant organizations. Effective state provision of new technologies to agricultural producers will require farmer cooperation, if only to cut the costs of dissemination. Independent smallholders could form cooperatives for the purpose of sharing new techniques. A lesson could be taken from the Hungarian experience. Here independent smallholders entered into a symbiotic relationship with collective farms, of which they were members. In this way, grain crops and fodder successfully produced under large-scale mechanization can enable members to rear animals and acquire small-scale equipment to run successful household plots; the smallholders can then put themselves in a strong bargaining position and in this way acquire some control over their lives, knowing that their produce can be sold back to the collective or on the open market.

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The idea of encouraging cooperative developments that are already in embryo is nothing new. Experience in those African countries that have gone for collectivist strategies is that grassroots efforts in this direction have been smothered by all-embracing states operating under single-party systems. Neighbourhood committees, village collectives, and agricultural producer associations have been seen in different contexts as major threats to existing structures of power. Multiparty systems would not necessarily solve this problem because there might be a tendency for the winning party to co-opt the other by the use of patronage, thus ensuring its continuation in office. Political reforms would have to include the toleration of autonomous organizations of workers, producers, consumers, and communities. The link between the experiences and socialist potential of advanced capitalist and actually existing socialist economies lies in autonomous organizations in different countries supporting each other's development. Trade-union organizations already cooperate in this way, and this support could even be extended to producer organizations in Africa and consumer groups and cooperatives in the developed countries. These links could help maintain autonomous organizations in societies with a limited democratic tradition and weak constitutional guarantees for democratic structures.

Conclusion In this chapter I have raised issues associated with concepts of market and democratic socialism. I offer no blueprint for an ideal relationship between state, plan, market, and socialism. Instead I have tried to show, with reference to the latest debates on market socialism, that the state needs to structure markets as institutions in such a way that they generate democratic participation by producers and consumers and in a way that uses the signals given in the market to help resource allocation in an organized fashion. I have suggested that the idea of a socialist economic democracy in Africa is not far-fetched, that there are, or have been, institutions on which a collective strategy can be built, and that these will require a democratic cooperative framework in which to exist with central coordination rather than control. Given the characteristics of government machines and state apparatuses in Africa, it is likely that autonomous institutions and movements will require considerable support from their sister organizations in other countries.

3 The State, Civil Society, and Democracy in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues Ken Post

In the past few years, the topic of democracy has become a major focus of political discussion. In Asia, events in the Philippines, South Korea, and Pakistan have raised the issue of transition from authoritarian to liberal democratic regimes, and in Latin America the same phenomenon has demanded attention in Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, and Uruguay and, perhaps less clearly, in Paraguay. Current developments in the USSR, Poland, Hungary, and China have with startling speed put on the agenda the po-ssibility of the collapse of state socialism and its replacement by more open, pluralist, and diverse systems. At least in social democratic circles, debate in Western Europe has started to take into account the implications of state socialism's failure and the upsurge of the "new social movements." With the exception of the special cases of Namibia and South Africa, however, it does not seem that the states of the African continent have yet been located within this debate. The overall purpose of this chapter is to raise some theoretical and, to a lesser extent, practical issues that seem to arise, of course in very different ways, on a worldwide basis in connection with democratization and certainly if we are to speak of democratization in Africa. Indeed, Africa may be of particular interest (and complexity) because it shares a history of colonialism and problems of location within a world capitalist system with other Third World regions, has regimes based on the state socialist model (Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola), and is obviously open to strong Western European intellectual influences. Returning to the literature on African political economy, I have been struck by the validity of Naomi Chazan's emphasis in a recent essay (1988: 121) on the importance of "the state" as a key concept in African .34

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studies, taking it as "the central organ for the extraction and distribution of resources, the determination of binding principles for society, and the maintenance of external and internal security, social harmony, and political and economic well-being." Although the concept of the state is not without inherent difficulties (a point to which I shall return), I take it that most people can accept Chazan's characterization of the state's centrality. Obviously, this must also be the case if we begin to focus on democracy, but up to now the link has not been very strongly made. This question has also to be seen in terms of a more recent trend reflected by Chazan, in the face of the failure of state policies throughout Africa, to focus on "survival strategies." Work carried out in this vein has explored how specific social groups define their identity and interests, how they mobilize their resources and construct alliances to pursue their goals, and how they cope with their fickle environment (Chazan 1988: 122). Because Chazan's work has centrally involved the issue of "disengagement" by social groups from the state, this tendency to locate analysis in society (another difficult concept) has not of course broken with the previous work, but in effect builds on it. My suggestion, therefore, is that a useful way of situating discussion of democracy, which would permit taking advantage of earlier work, but even more important furnish helpful concepts, is within the state-society-disengagement problematic. Such a positioning of the discussion of democracy is the object of this chapter, if only in a preliminary way. I will examine the following issues: • The nature of the state-society relationship as an internally differentiated unity • "Civil society" as the key element in liberal (bourgeois) democratic theory and practice and potentially so in any alternative theory and practice • The underdevelopment of civil society in Africa as a basis for democracy • Some possible lines of action to strengthen civil society in this respect I would emphasize that I am not arguing for any "African exceptionalism" in this approach. Although with obvious great differences in historical background and concrete conditions, the problematic of democratization in other parts of the capitalist periphery, the state socialist systems, and Western Europe (with its historical outliers in North America and Australasia) can be seen in the same way. 1

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One further necessary preliminary is to establish a few things about the concept of "democracy" itself. By that term I mean the ineffable right of all of us as human beings, without distinction of gender, race, nation, or class, to control the decisions that determine our daily lives and future prospects. Further, it is our right to insist that neither our physical persons nor our capacity to develop and utter our thoughts be violated by anyone else. I do not consider such ideas to be utopian, but rather a concrete political programme; they have been such since the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (the language already begins to bring out some of the difficulties) in 1789. Nor do I consider that the obvious origins of these ideas in Western European thought make them in some way culture-bound and inapplicable elsewhere; in 1791 the slaves of the French colony of St. Domingue proved the crosscultural appeal of these declarations by rising in revolt in response to them. 2 This having been said, let me make it clear that we must in fact break with the origins and mainline development of our democratic programme, as historically they are linked with the rising bourgeoisie and the consolidation of capitalism, even though that social system does not always find it necessary to reproduce its own democracy. 3 Rather, we must remember that the origins of our struggle for democracy (leaving aside the myth-making about Athenian slave owners) were inextricably coupled with those of socialism, a link personified in the career of Gracchus Babeuf, executed in 1797. Despite the cumulative experience of systems calling themselves socialist since 1917, I hope it is not merely obstinacy or intellectual and moral bankruptcy that causes me to insist that democracy and socialism cannot be separated in our political strategy and that, so linked, the former is not what the "parliamentary socialist" organic intellectuals of capital would have us believe. These differences must be picked up in a later section.

State and Civil Society

The key proposition of this chapter is that the essential preconditions for democracy are established by the nature and level of organization in civil society and the ways in which these conditions impinge on the state.

Both are difficult concepts. The term "state" suffers from two problems. It is not a homogeneous entity but in fact involves a range of aspects that are not usually clearly distinguished; and it is subject to a peculiar anthropomorphism, which causes it to be treated as though it were an actual person, acting directly upon society.

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When we speak of the state, we may be using the term to mean a sovereign entity engaged in international relations, which in the present context also establishes the boundaries of the civil society. Perhaps most often the state is seen as the constellation of institutions (apparatuses) that regulate and direct the common affairs of that society by providing a structure within which policies can be made and executed. Those influenced by Marxism at least would see those apparatuses as in some way biased towards particular classes and groups that seek the state's authoritative definition of what the "common affairs" are and how they should be handled. Following from this definition, another aspect of the state is that its institutions serve as an arena within which representatives of various interests, either based in society (politicians) or in the apparatuses themselves (bureaucrats), struggle to secure a dominant influence. The state also represents a concentration of resources (material and ideological) and hence of power for those who can control the apparatuses. However, the state is not an entity that does things, as it time and again appears in discussiops. Only people can do things; obviously, therefore, the people who can gain access to and acquire a monopoly over the institutions within which the authoritative policymaking process occurs (or who already staff them and thus also control the state-asresources) can use them and state policies to favour some groups either directly or indirectly. It follows that the state as some discreet entity can never be autonomous or even have a more qualified semiautonomy. Use of these terms indicates, first, that the nature of the aggregation of people with access and control is complex, especially in terms of their relations with forces in society, and, second, that the analyst has not gone far enough in researching those factors. It may be that the nature of the people involved, their wider social relations, and of the state institutions makes it possible for them to display some autonomy from otherwise important social classes, but that is not state autonomy. These points will doubtless prove controversial, but space forbids developing them further. 4 Rather, let me ask the question, What can we derive from the above discussion of the state that is relevant to a programme of democratization? I suggest two things follow. First, it is clear that such a programme would involve a complex interplay among a number of social and institutional factors that the method of disaggregation employed here can help to distinguish and so make useful in analyzing a given situation. Second, from this discussion we may derive three concepts that are central in assessing the nature of any supposedly democratic system: access, representation, and control. Access, thus, is the question of what social classes or other social groups, actually what parts of them, are able to find a direct voice in

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the policy process (formation, execution, evaluation, and confirmation; amendment/abandonment). This situation in turn implies representation of various interests, because even in the most plebiscitary of democracies whole groups could not be involved. Control follows from the securing of access by representatives: Key elements will be the nature of the power base outside the state apparatus, the form in which the policy process is actually institutionalized (for example, cabinet system or executive presidency), and the relations between interest representatives and bureaucrats. Implicitly from the above, we may take it that, compared with the state, civil society is larger, internally more complex, but incomplete (in the sense that certain decisions have to be taken for it). However, civil society's exact nature is still difficult to establish. In the Marxist tradition alone, it has been identified with the economy, with the political and ideological "superstructure," and with both together. 5 The social democratic theorist John Keane (1988: 3), in a book that is likely to be influential, defined civil society as "the realm of social (privately owned, market-directed, voluntarily run or friendship-based) activities which are legally recognized and guaranteed by the state." This definition seems to me untenable on two grounds. First, it can apply only to capitalist societies. Second, the last clause is seriously restrictive; perhaps revolutionary parties are in a sense outside civil society, but in what realm do we locate, say, the U.S. drug business, with its huge capital resources and many employees? Again "social activities" is vague and in fact tautologous ("civil society" = "social activities"-what other kind could it represent?). I suggest that civil society is basically an organizational concept and includes the whole web of organizations, defined as coordination of actions with a common end that can be reproduced over time and thus including both "formal" and "informal" instances. Basically, therefore, we are talking about kinship structures, economic, cultural, and ideological organizations (including religious ones), and political organizations seen as interest aggregations for the purpose of gaining access to the state apparatuses. There is a further problem involved in the common tendency to see the state and civil society as a dichotomy, as when Chazan (1988: 123) defined them as "two intersecting and potentially independent variables with political process as the dependent variable." Keane at least half recognized that in fact the organizations are given shape (not only legally) by their relations to the state, which may be passive (existing within legal parameters drawn by it) or active (influenced by its direct intervention, as when changes in the abortion law affect kinship structures by reducing patriarchal authority, or directly flouting its authoritycriminal gangs, revolutionary parties). I would suggest that in fact civil

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society and the state are an internally differentiated unity of organizations. The distinction comes in the specific nature of the states, which, first, are held to be authoritative over all members of society (whereas all other organizations are in some way exclusive), second, act as vehicles to set policies for the whole society, third, have an overriding allegiance from all citizens claimed for them, and, fourth, are supposed to have a monopoly over the use of legitimate coercion. Let us ask the same question of the presentation of civil society that we asked of the state. What can we derive from it that is important for democratization? Basically, that access to, representation within, and control over state institutions are essential to members of any organization that is actively supposed to further their interests because only state action has the scope to adjust one organization's interests in terms of others' (compromise is the essence of democracy). Following from this, insufficient organization or a complete absence of it means that an interest group lacks the wherewithal even to begin to participate. Generally, the point is that a democratic system requires a complex institutionalization of the relationships between the organizations of civil society and those of the state, and one that will not be subject to change with a shift in the balance of access, representation, and control among classes and groups.

African Realities The situation in the great majority of African countries seems to be quite different from the general principles I have drawn from the discussions of both state and civil society. Rather, two related phenomena seem dominant. First, what Thomas Callaghy called the "state-society struggle" prevails, in which the former, to quote his description of Zaire (1984: 418-419), "does maintain basic order, but at a very high cost. It brutally exploits the population, weakens or destroys liberty, local autonomy, intermediary authorities and associations, and community spirit." In other words, President Mobutu and his cohorts weaken or destroy the organizational preconditions in civil society for democracy, whether in a liberal or socialist variant. 6 Nevertheless, not only societal organizations are weakened; often the state institutions themselves begin to decline, with cumulative policy decisions being made by the. class elements having access to them, having the effect described by Chazan (1983: 26) in the Ghanaian case: The functional uses of power, limited by resource manipulation of an unfortunate kind, set in motion patterns that placed most resources, and hence power bases, beyond the reach of the state. From a situation in

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which the ability of the Ghanaian regimes to handle the problems inherent in Ghana's political economy was limited by resource constraints, there developed one in which constraints multiplied through resource misuse. The result was to create conditions for the dissolution of much of the state apparatus within the boundaries of the country. In these circumstances, the state (in various aspects) becomes a kind of "invertebrate species." As Rene Lemarchand (1988: 149) put it: "Peasants avoid it, urban workers despise it, military men destroy it, civil servants rape it and academics ponder the short- and long-term results." This trend is closely linked to the second apparently dominant phenomenon today, what has been termed the "disengagement" of important parts of civil society from the state; given the inability to sever contacts completely, disengagement would in most cases mean a sharp reduction in the link between state and civil societies. Again, we may generalize Chazan's (1983: 194) characterization of kalabule (informal trade) in Ghana: "constructing parallely [sic] to the formal economy, an informal one, which bred on the formal sector, diverted its resources, and set out to manipulate the state in order to serve the needs of diverse groups within its boundaries." This form of disengagement required "malpractices of various sorts involving an attempt to skirt existing controls or to knowingly defraud in order to maximize one's own gains." 7 Among other things, the result has been to tie up many resources and take them out of the control of the state apparatus. In 1973, for example, it was estimated that 150,000 people were working an average of fifteen days a year each to transport" smuggled cocoa out of Ghana (Chazan 1983: 194), and by another estimate in 1985 more than half of Senegal's groundnuts were smuggled out of the country (Lemarchand 1988: 162). In the face of these kinds of disengagement, which have involved reorganization of kinship and ethnic relations and new ideological forms, those controlling state apparatuses have abandoned single parties and mass mobilization and even generalized patronage systems. 8 In fact, it seems somewhat misleading to term these processes disengagement at all, at least in any absolute sense. Chazan speaks of "economic encapsulation," manifested as "either a lack of incorporation in the state or withdrawal from contact with it" (1988: 127). Some phenomena, such as smuggling or migration across frontiers, can be seen in this way, but a more common development seems to be that, in particular economic activities, a new relationship arises between those who have access to the state apparatuses and those they represent (but in a situation where, as noted above, state resources and authority have diminished so control is weakened). Building upon points made by Lemarchand (1988: 162), we may postulate three main forms taken by

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the new relationship. First, perhaps most often at the local level, there is a sort of mafia solution, a protection racket in which people make a deal to buy off predators. Second, patronage systems may continue and even extend, though often with a decline in the reciprocity that should characterize such a system. Third, the bureaucrats whose place in the state apparatus is assured by profession rather than as representatives, and who may be under the pressure of declining real incomes, often organize relationships outside the formal structures and regulations in which favours are sold in order to bring them income and other perquisites additional to their official salaries. This situation gives meaning to the allegations of corruption that have become so widespread. Obviously what all this amounts to is a new constitution of the relations between the state and civil society. To quote Chazan (1988: 14) again: The public domain is being reconceptualized not in terms of official structures, but in terms of the points of intersection between various existing power sectors. . . . The absence of coincidence between formal institutions, power networks and political actions suggests that African countries may be reorganizing themselves in heterogeneous ways away from the strict constructions of centralized organs.

This trend seems to transcend regime forms (single party, multiparty, or nonparty; military or civilian), but in no sense does it involve any real degree of democratization.

Liberal Democracy and Africa Recent scandals in established .democracies (such as the arrest of the mayor of Washington, D.C., for involvement with drugs and the convictions of national politicians in Japan and Greece for being "on the take") have shown that corruption is in no way confined to the periphery and may be found in liberal democratic systems with a wide range of historical origins. Opportunities for corruption, it might be argued, are particularly wide in this form of regime and the impulses to it strong. The issue must be set on a broader level, however, because the more fundamental question concerning us is the basis of bourgeois liberal democracy as a class phenomenon. If we pursue this line, it can be shown that, except for a few cases like Botswana, where parallel though not historically identical conditions existed (Jamaica was another one on the periphery), the necessary preconditions did not and cannot exist. (I speak now of long-term trends, rather than short-term conjunctures.)

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The fact that liberal democracy emerged as a hegemonic ideology and political form for the bourgeoisie from sixteenth century beginnings and took until well into the twentieth century to consolidate (votes for all women in Great Britain not until 1928) should be enough to convince us of the unlikelihood of reproducing supporting conditions elsewhere. (Japan, once again, displays an exceptional character, though even then it required total defeat and devastation and rule by General Douglas MacArthur.) Ideologically the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the old landowning classes and the absolutist states emphasized two related ideas. First, the position of the rulers was based on a contract with their subjects, implying that the latter should be able to delegate representatives to ensure that the formers' side was being carried outhence the key role of the Third Estate in France in 1789. Second, the concept of a disembodied Law provided the basis for the idea of a Rule of Law as a desocialized source of authority and a basis for human rights-the element that still makes liberal democracy superior to any authoritarian regime. Institutionally its key feature is the plurality of points of access that it provides; this plurality not only copes with the demands that come from a multiplicity of sources under capitalism by permitting a wide range of aggregation of demands into policy form, but also makes it possible (resources permitting) for more interests actually to get something, which is the real meaning of representation. In practice, therefore, a developed liberal democracy is a powerful instrument for handling the complex issue of a policy process that is the focus of attention of a multiplicity of competing capitalist interests. Nor must it be forgotten that liberal democracy can also handle other class demands. Although the importance of liberal democratic ideology as a manipulative device in dealing with the working class in the capitalist centre cannot be denied, if the working-class movement can gain access through its own unions and parties it can take advantage of the institutionalization of the policy process to secure some concessions. (The Thatcher government has been trying to erode this phenomenon for the past decade, with considerable success.) This brings us to a key political point. Liberal democracy is not merely the historical product of class struggle between bourgeoisie and landowners; its full consolidation came through the struggle of the labour movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the fight was as much for extending the franchise as union rights (see Therborn 1977). The other key struggle, on a gender basis, was to gain votes for women. It seems safe to say that had the new capitalist class not been so pressured, it would have been quite content to have stopped short of universal suffrage and broad representation.

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Similarly, we should not allow a natural chagrin provoked by the later trajectory of most nationalist leaders to push totally out of our minds the democratic content of the independence struggle that marked at least some African countries and even took an armed form. Conversely, the balance of historical .evaluation must undoubtedly see liberal democracy as both a vehicle for decolonization and ideologically and institutionally a manipulation by the colonial powers. We should also remember the hurried nature of this exercise: British capital only began it in 1946, the main French form was Gaullist presidentialism after 1958, the Belgian effort was a last-minute gesture, and a fascist-corporatist Portugal had never tolerated liberal democracy in any case. Although there had been African adherents of such a system since the late nineteenth century, the impulse to establish liberal democracy came basically from outside. There was no bourgeoisie-becoming-acapitalist class to provide its social and political base, which meant in turn no class struggle to push through its development. A weak indigenous capitalist class has meant that the proliferation of organizations that has always marked the rise of liberal democracy (not merely its business companies but the legal and other forms it requires and the necessary interest organizations like chambers of commerce) has not occurred. Conversely, because of the strength of foreign capital, many capitalist class organizations in Africa are either direct extensions of foreign ones, and therefore not concerned with a full development of liberal democracy if they can get what they want without it-which is usually the caseor are local organizations that serve the foreigners. What this all adds up to is a weakly organized indigenous capitalist class, which in consequence opts for an authoritarian system, even though it is less flexible. In a similar way, the professional and white-collar middle strata, which in the capitalist centre tended to support the struggle for democracy because it opened up possibilities of education and careers for them, in Africa are inclined to conservatism. After all, they have as a class a strong impulse to follow capital (though in some circumstances some among them turn against it). Probably the decisive factor is the employment of most of them in the state bureaucracy, from which, through the kinds of processes outlined earlier, they can build up networks in the economy that supplement their family income. Again, subordinate class struggle takes on forms other than those that typified nineteenth century Western Europe, North America, and Australasia. There is no hegemonic ideology of democracy to dictate certain goals, either taken over from the bourgeoisie, as in the earlier cases, or developed within the subordinate classes. Probably the most dominant ideological strands are a kind of "familism," an adherence to

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kinship, either real or fictive, which at its worst can resemble the U.S. Mafia's emphasis on "family." This familism shades into ethnicity, which again, especially when manipulated by politicians, might better be termed pejoratively "tribalism." By definition, neither of these can be hegemonic because they are based on exclusion. For this reason, they also serve to hamper the emergence of class consciousness among workers and peasants. The latter are in any case, as we have seen, often involved in evading the unwelcome attention of the state apparatus and the enforcement of its policies and seeking social relationships that permit survival and perhaps a modest level of life above that. Workers are involved in finding ways to survive in urban slum conditions with supplies of even staple foods sometimes uncertain and subject to inflated prices. The usually numerous petty bourgeoisie of artisans and traders share these characteristics of both peasants and workers, and, like their class everywhere, have aspirations to move up into the capitalist ranks. All of these conditions, of course, typified at least parts of the subordinate classes in Western Europe and North America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These conditions did not prevent struggle for better conditions, human rights, and access to the policy process. A further factor of great importance is the nature of organizations. Here I suggest that African civil societies and states show an even greater discrepancy than that of our earlier cases. African states in almost all cases are lineal descendants of their colonial predecessors; even countries that have experienced a revolutionary rupture display continuities. No one can doubt that the colonial state was inherently authoritarian, whatever cosmetic surgery it may have undergone in the British and French cases in its last years. Institutional inertia is a potent force, even if the postindependence bureaucrats did not often have their own good reasons to hew to the old traditions of command and punish. As for the organizations of civil society, my point is that for the most part these are either the wrong kind or too weak to secure the access to the state that democracy requires. Weak indigenous capitalist and middle-strata organizations find it safer to shelter behind authoritarian regimes than to press for the pluralism and relative openness of liberal democracy. Organizations of the subordinate classes, such as peasant associations, trade unions, and market traders' associations, are faced with the inherent problems of their "constituents"-lack of funds and knowledge, necessary focus on immediate family survival-and usually are led by members of the inherently ambivalent middle strata. It seems probable that in almost all African countries (South Africa is an exception) the bulk of actually effective organizations are situated on the kinshiptribal axis that I earlier discerned in terms of ideology (clustering also with religious groups, often of a "fundamentalist" kind). Like their

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ideologies, these groups are inherently exclusive, seeking access to the state apparatus in order to secure benefits on a rather narrow basis and finding it difficult to ally with others, as class organizations do. 9 Further, because they are often local in nature, but more profoundly because kinship and tribalism relate organically and historically to precolonial political systems headed by elders and chiefs, kinship-tribal organizations are usually controlled by socially conservative elements with no particular interest in, and even active antipathy for, democracy. Despite possibilities for adult male participation, and even provision for special places for women in the decision-making structure, I do not feel that there was any inherent democracy in precolonial political systems (see Simiyu 1988). The same is true of kinship systems as such. On the whole, chieftainships had a poor record of defending their members under colonialism, forming rather the subaltern levels of state control, which has continued since independence. When emirs, paramount chiefs, and the rest are given access to the state apparatus and the policy process, they rarely take more than a small minority of their subjects with them.

Socialist Democracy and Africa In the previous section I have tried to establish the reasons why Africa has not been characterized by the emergence of liberal democratic regimes. Were that to occur, it would be an improvement on what we find now, if only because there would be more respect for human rights. However, I do not think there will be any move in that direction, except in the atypical case of South Africa, where the most likely immediate scenario is that the black majority will be taken into the liberal democracy (tempered at present by emergency measures) already enjoyed by whites. Beyond this, it should not be the ambition of socialists to establish liberal democracy, either in South Africa or anywhere else, except perhaps as a tactical move towards a quite different goal. The limitations of liberal democracy, which is a political form historically associated with the rise of the capitalist class, are well known, but let me repeat them briefly in terms of the key concepts I have already used. First, therefore, is the question of access. In practice access is never equally possible for all. Not only does it require preliminary organization, as I have argued above, but even the chances of some organizations to be heard and exert influence are much smaller than others. In fact, it is crucial to remember that liberal democratic systems are in fact dualistic; they have political structures to which access is through election, and bureaucratic structures (also of course political in what they do, because they help to reproduce existing distributions of power) that are even

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less open. To secure the election of its representatives, an organization must be able to mobilize electors, which requires money and access to mass media. Elected representatives must remain accessible after election. Access to bureaucratic structures is often not institutionalized, and informal approaches require special knowledge of channels and people. All these things together frequently involve nepotism and corruption, which demand resources. Second is the issue of representation. Usually representation can only be secured informally within the bureaucracy and can be another source of corruption. For reasons of socioeconomic status and culture, but sometimes with kinship or tribe playing a part, individual bureaucrats are much more likely to "represent" some organizations than others. As for the election of political representatives, even in developed liberal democracies the average voter chooses among candidates in whose selection he/she had no say and upon whom no judgement can be passed, however poorly they perform, until the lapse of some years. The last factor is crucial for control, the third key issue. Between elections, there is no effective control that can be exerted by voters over their "representatives" (who incidentally are likely to be nothing of the kind in class or other socioeconomic terms). In fact, it is probably quite difficult even to know what they are doing. As for control over the bureaucracy, it follows from what has been said above that opportunities for control are even smaller, so that recourse to often extralegal measures like demonstrations and sit-ins may be necessary. This point is made the more important by the fact that much of the policy process, including even the taking of basic decisions, is now handled by bureaucrats and in private. Legislators may have a watchdog function, but can only bark if they see something, and if they do, it may well be the guide dog that turns the blind eye for class or cultural reasons or even corrupt ones. This chapter is not the place, nor do I have the competence, to develop full socialist alternatives. 10 However, some basic points can be made. First, as a general principle I would endorse the argument by John Keane (1988: 3) that the. counterproductive identification of socialism with centralized state power can be shattered only if the term "socialism'' is redefined in a radical way, so that it becomes a synonym for greater democracy-for a differentiated and pluralistic system of power, wherein the decisions of interest to collectivities of various sizes are made autonomously by all their members.

Obviously, some application of this principle would go a long way towards meeting the question of democratically organizing a plurality

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of kinship-tribal groups. However, it does raise acutely the issue of scale. A modern sovereign state has to operate as a large-scale unit as long as the rest of the world is composed of such states because in a capitalist world system that is how power is managed and reproduced globally (a major challenge to socialist internationalists). The "collectivities of various sizes" in civil society have thus to be integrated to handle societywide issues of external relations and internal development. This condition makes it necessary to have a national party system. In the spirit of Keane, this system would be pluralistic, but I suggest that in the conditions of African civil societies, which are particularly fragmented and in special ways, a single socialist party is preferable. This has tremendous inherent problems, as we all know, but the challenge is then to make such a party internally democratic; there is no reason why pluralism and even opposition cannot be institutionalized within the party. A pluralistic national party system would mean, for example, contested elections to national legislatures, another way in which the democratic collective organizations of civil society would be bound together (and probably through regional assemblies also). Openness would have to be secured by popular participation in candidate selection. Even more important, the replacement of "representation" by a principle of "delegation" would help meet both that problem and that of open access. 11 Delegation implies institutionalized consultation and reporting back to constituents, the right of recall at any time by majority vote and limits on consecutive reelections. As for access, representation, and control in terms of the bureaucracy, three basic principles need to be applied in a socialist bureaucracy. First, there should be extensive decentralization of execution of policies, once these policies had been established in general principle at the higher levels. Second, as much as possible, professional bureaucrats should be replaced by elected delegates (see above). Third, every single bureaucratic body at every level should be responsible to a counterpart body of elected delegates, a kind of institutionalized "parallel state."

Strategy and Tactics The preceding paragraphs will no doubt appear profoundly, even dangerously, utopian to some readers, but they are not, and should certainly not appear so to socialists. Of course, the ideas are entirely dependent upon mass participation with the aim of ensuring everyone's ultimate control over the policy process as it affects their lives. Very complex issues of strategy and tactics are involved, of course. As for strategy, I would urge serious consideration of a "radical populism-

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passing-directly-over-into-socialism" formula. Socialism must be reached and institutionalized as discussed above, but the timing should be subject to national circumstances so that the populist phase might be quite protracted. (The formula is thus neither the Trotskyist permanent revolution nor the Leninist "stages" of the revolution.) Three problems in particular seem to arise in connection with this strategy. First, use of the word revolution raises the issue of how state power is to be seized. Let it be clear that, unlike some new social movement enthusiasts, I firmly believe that socialism cannot be achieved without such a seizure. Of course, I reject the social democrats' position that an existing liberal democratic state can be used to build a socialist society; in any case, such a state scarcely exists in Africa. A number of other possibilities exist, however. 12 Unfortunately (given the resulting damage and disruption), it would seem that state power in some African countries, such as Zaire, will only be captured through armed struggle. Almost everywhere, the alliance of foreign and domestic capital has itself chosen to foreclose on strictly parliamentary means; where elections are held they are usually rigged or, if necessary, at least partly ignored. 13 The only answer seems to be mass movements employing a combination of legal, extralegal, and illegal means and including, above all, demonstrations and strikes. The efficacy of such movements, even in the face of massive state violence, was proved in Iran at the beginning of 1979. Mass action is crucial, because the populist-socialist revolution cannot be carried out by some elite on behalf of the masses. Although I salute the memory of the murdered Captain Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, even radical military men cannot take state power and give it as a gift to the oppressed. However, mass action, especially in a revolutionary situation, has to be organized and directed. Iran in 1979 provides an example of how power can be seized through a quite loosely coordinated base organization. However, after power was seized that loose network provided no structure through which the leadership could be controlled. Conversely, a celebrated vanguard party, despite pretensions to internal democracy, does not in practice control leadership either. I am convinced both that such a party is in fact necessary and that more democracy can be institutionalized within it, but there is a profound contradiction: The conditions of seizing power on the capitalist periphery almost certainly make a leading party necessary, but the leading party carries within itself the seeds of a later usurpation of democracy. A second major problem in my proposed strategy is the exact nature of the initial populist emphasis after state power is taken. This issue is particularly important because as an ideology populism is also open to use by the political right. The advantages of a left populism that insists on devolving power to the oppressed masses seem to be threefold. First,

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it has the proper emphasis, while in effect recognizing that the ultimate basis for socialism in African countries will be labouring people in general not just a vanguard working class. Second, left populism permits a more gradual transformation, with the hope that this slow pace will prove less frightening to, above all, foreign capital and the U.S., British, and French governments. Third, left populism gives a chance for the labouring people~ kept ignorant under capitalism, to learn and gain experience before the full institutionalization of socialism, while at the same time giving them tangible gains, which they have a right to expect. 14 In grasping the potential meaning of a left populism, it is extremely important to come to grips with the experiences in Ghana in the period 1979-1984 and Burkina Faso from 1983-1987. In many ways, these experiences were previews of actions that can be taken immediately after seizure of state power, for example, in terms of the Sankara government's emphasis on peasants and women. The Ghanaian creation of a "dual power" situation (with the web of the National Defence Committee and its People's and Workers' Defence Committees and their associated Public Tribunals, Citizens' Vetting Committees, and National Investigations Committees to replace the apparatus of the state) is a model to be studied both for its successes and failures (see Atim and Gariba 1987; Rothchild and Gyimah-Boadi 1989; see also Chapter 8, "Inching Towards Democracy"). We must also grasp the broader issues of, for example, foreign influence and the nature of the leadership, which first blocked further progress then led to retrogression in both cases (see cited sources and "Burkina Faso: Why You Can't Make a Revolution Without the Masses" 1988). The third major problem of my strategy is its tactics. What must be done, beginning now, in order to work toward truly democratic regimes in Africa? The key to future progress must lie in organization within civil society, an absolute necessity for a democratic programme of any kind. Such work will have to be done usually in conditions of secrecy and repression. It also will be done over the long term and, initially at least, on a small scale. This strategy must concentrate on strengthening existing groups (peasant associations, trade unions, petty trader and craftspersons' organizations, student and secondary school pupils' unions, and any other popular, democratic, and secular-or religiously progressive-group) and on forming new ones as well as alliances between groups. At the same time, the idea would be to develop a left populist, democratic, and socialist-leaning ideology that could gradually become hegemonic in the Gramscian sense, that is, in advance of any attempt to seize power. Cadre-formation is an important task. At first, cadre-formation probably will take place outside the country; in any case, young men and women

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must be found-and I am sure they exist-who would be willing to become full or part-time activists. These activists must be trained as the future cadres of the socialist parties who would coordinate the struggle back in their own countrie~. Existing organizations such as the Institute for African Alternatives as well as informal networks linking universities both inside Africa and outside could play key roles here. As a preliminary tactic, a coordinating organization should be ready for each country, perhaps operating in exile; the Movement for Justice in Africa-Liberia is a good example of an existing organization whose experience could be studied as a basis for creating other such groupings. Obviously, to be realistic, this tactic might in some cases mean struggle with existing groups, leading to fusion, conversion, or dissolution; if the existing group won, it would not matter provided the group accepted the general line. This sounds like dangerous talk. There should be a "line" of general agreement on strategy and tactics, but not enforced by one "international," and there should be democratic debate among all organizations on a continentwide basis to share experiences and information and give mutual support. The international level is also where people like myself would come in, using our privileged access to libraries and archives, capacities for electronic communication and desktop publishing, and possibilities to lobby in the liberal democracies of the centre for all necessary support work. Conclusion

The world is changing as the twentieth century lurches to a close, and Africa can change with it. Old orthodoxies are being challenged as economic and political configurations change in the world. Soviet imperialism is crippled, while the military strength of the United States is coupled with a severe long-term economic decline. A united Western Europe and Japan are emerging as major economic forces. Capitalism as a world system is redeploying its strength, involving attempts to put the periphery to new uses but at the same time driving more of its own workers-including migrants, perhaps a key link in a democratic socialist global strategy-into poverty. The socialist camp, which fell apart in the early 1960s, is now witnessing patterns of disintegration in various of its former members, with increasing numbers of their people demanding democracy. (How tragic that we do not have a rigorous socialist version to offer.) The women's movement, environmentalism, and other social movements are changing the terms of conventional politics and not only at the centre. It would take another chapter-and competence I do not have-to trace out the full implications of these and other trends for the struggle for democracy and socialism in Africa.

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Nor shall I even attempt to sum up the complexities of this chapter, but end with a question: The challenge is there-are we prepared to accept it?

Notes 1. In speaking of "periphery" there is a big problem of implying a relative unimportance to the capitalist world system as a whole. On the contrary, as a "Third Worldist" I believe that the future of that system will be determined by what happens in its periphery, which is such in terms of power, not geographic, demographic, economic, environmental, and cultural importance. The term Third World is, however, basically misleading because it is not a separate entity (as well as being extremely heterogeneous) but a subordinated part of either the capitalist or state socialist worlds. 2. In citing the classic account of this splendid event (James 1963), let me take the opportunity to salute C.L.R. James, who died in 1989 at the age of 88 still fighting for democracy. 3. This is a very complex issue for which space does not permit discussion here. I have gone into it, and much else touched on in this chapter, in a manuscript, "Regaining Marxism," which is currently being rejected by publishers far and wide. 4. For a useful survey discussion of various views on the nature of class control of the state in Africa, see Forrest 1987. 5. See the discussion in Bobbio 1988, though this view is vitiated for me by his insistence on remaining within the base-superstructure model, a dichotomy that in my view should be abandoned (see Post 1978: 16-18); this issue is taken up and modified in my new manuscript (see note 3 above). 6. Let me insist that it is Mobutu, etc., who weaken these preconditions, not a personified Zairian state, which is in fact Callaghy's actor. 7. See further her general discussion of "survival techniques" (Chazan 1983: 191-223). For other cases see Azarya and Chazan 1987 and MacGaffey 1983. 8. On the noneconomic aspects, see Chazan 1988: 128-131. 9. However, for an interesting theoretical discussion of ethnic coalition-building, see Rothchild 1986. 10. Lack of space forbids discussion of the economy, in fact the more fundamental level. I am assuming a mixed economy in which: (1) there are controls on both foreign and local private capital, and it is assumed that, even if very slowly, these controls will be phased out wherever possible; (2) land, mines, and other key means of production, distribution, and exchange outside the private sector are socially (not state) owned and held in trust by a set of elected bodies; (3) actual use of these resources is entrusted to either worker self-managed enterprises (with consumer and trustee representation also) or agricultural and craft cooperatives, with either group responsible to society as a whole for the use of the resources entrusted for economically and socially reasonable periods.

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11. I agree with Keane that questions of scale make it impossible at regional and national levels to apply a principle that everyone "must make the decisions which affect their lives" (1988: 12-13, and see also Post and Wright 1989: 163166 on central planning in this context). My definition (above) is thus in terms of control, not necessarily exerted directly. This condition means that someone has to be delegated to represent others at the higher levels and then tightly controlled. 12. For a general discussion of the whole issue of the seizure of power and socialism in the periphery, see Post and Wright 1989, Ch. 2. 13. See, for example, Fatton, Jr. 1987: 16-18 on the 1983 election in Senegal, where, despite his own account, he takes the "liberal democracy" he thinks exists there seriously. 14. The question may be raised by some comrades, How does my populist emphasis differ from the Marxist-Leninist "national democratic stage"? Briefly, it does not make the error of committing socialists to completing the historical tasks of the bourgeoisie, seen doctrinally as land reform and establishing democracy; land reform must be in a socialist perspective, already envisaging voluntary collectivization of production and certainly the collective handling of inputs and marketing, and the democracy, as argued above, must be socialist oriented, not bourgeois liberal.

4 Taking Democracy Seriously: Democracy-Bureaucracy Relations Bola Dauda

In an attempt to postulate a "conceptual framework for comparative politics," Potholm (1970: 52) identified five areas of capability of a political system: the regulative, extractive, distributive, rejuvenative, and symbolic. He defined capability as the measure of "performance of the political entity in organizing and utilizing its human and natural resources in order to accomplish the goals of the decision-makers." He concluded that, taken together, what he listed and termed as capabilities "represent the political system's collective capacity for action." In the context of the theme of this book, capability for democracy is defined in terms of consensus among African elites to produce institutional frameworks for political stability and peaceful change of government. Specifically, democracy is interpreted in terms of political and economic institutions to (1) sustain the rule of law or equality before the law, (2) guarantee inalienable human rights, and (3) redress violation of such rights as freedom of speech, religion, employment, and movement. Hence taking democracy seriously implies an evolution or institutionalization of a generally accepted or (in political science terms) legitimate means of mobilizing Africans to participate in deciding matters that affect them. Paramount among such matters are those relating to basic needs of shelter, food, employment, and self-actualization. Because such institutions (organizational or executive, legislative, and judicial) depend almost solely on the form of bureaucracy and the relationship between it (as personifying the state) and the rest of the society, this chapter is concerned with the relationship between democracy and bureaucracy in Africa. Nonetheless, I feel cautious about treating Africa as a homogeneous and monolithic entity. Generalizations are therefore to be viewed in the same way as the generalizations scholars at times make about Europe. 53

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It is imperative to recognize that former British, former French, and former Portuguese colonies are distinct from each other. A problematic issue about the future of democracy in Africa, in'cluding that of the few states professing to practice democracy (Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, Malawi, and Senegal), is that leaders have not accepted the reality of the need to institutionalize protest and simple dissension. They are unwilling to tolerate and to respond constructively without necessarily stifling, repressing, or ignoring opposition, which is often divided against itself. Very often, as in Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana, and Ethiopia, given the slightest "opportunity and disposition" (Finer 1976), the result is termination of democracy by the military. I argue that the continued exaggeration of the role of the bureaucracy in policymaking in Africa is unfounded. In most countries, military intervention, which was often accompanied by administrative reform, has greatly reduced the power and influence of the bureaucracy. For example, the 1975 coup in Nigeria marked the beginning of reduced bureaucratic influence. Since then, the "purge," retrenchment, and politicization of the public service have further reduced the strength of the bureaucracy in Nigeria. There is frequently also a misplaced assumption that soldiers are "just Khaki boys, who, like politicians, know nothing" and can be pushed around to do what they are told by the civil servants. There is hardly any truth in such an assumption. In Nigeria, apart from a regular training programme for soldiers, they also have a military university and an institute for strategic policy studies. Admission to the institute is open only to senior military officers, a few permanent secretaries, and general managers of public corporations. It follows that strategies that try to reduce the role of bureaucracy in order to enthrone democracy are reactionary and thus unrealistic both for political and bureaucratic institutionalization. It is recognized that organizational, legislative, judicial, and normative instruments for bureaucratic control are weak in many African states. An interpretation of bureaucracy as overextended and all-powerful, however, underestimates the constraints that do prevail, especially those relating to breaking down the nexus of bureaucrats emanating from elected politicians and the reliance that the same politicians, whether democratic or military, have on the bureaucracy. The constraints include technical incapacity, ideological dissent over what government should or should not do, and the divisive forces of ethnicity, religion, and regional imbalance in economic and political development. The conclusion here is that, as models of "administrative states" (Peters 1987: 266), the experiences of France, Japan, and the Soviet Union confirm that bureaucracy represents a force for stability and development in all its ramifications rather than a hidden government.

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Ironically, taking democracy seriously in Africa may mean having to strengthen and develop nationalist and confident African bureaucracies that, paradoxically, are presently misconceived of as overstaffed, overpaid, and too strong for democracy.

The Debate About Bureaucracy and Democracy Discussions about African governments and policies have recently moved away from their former ethnocentricity and now encompass a broader perception of social science. Authors such as Chabal (1986), for example, cover theory, practice, and empirical reviews of administration in general, which are neither culture-bound nor peculiar to Africa. In an empirical review of the management of development, Rondinelli (1987) was as critical of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as he was of African bureaucracy. He discusses Korten's and Uphoff's view that learning requires changes in bureaucratic structure and in attitudes and behaviour of staff of both the donor and the clientele. Most recent literature on relations between democracy and bureaucracy, however, seems more charitable to political actors than bureaucrats. It also demonstrates a greater understanding of the issues than the literature of the 1960s and 1970s. However, because of the continuing controversy over the hegemonic issue of the state and the rest of society and because the question of what governments should or should not do remains unresolved, there is a debate that is still as fresh and controversial as ever. It will remain continually lively, too, because both concepts-democracy and bureaucracy-are simply not personified in politicians and bureaucrats of various shades but have eternal, universal, and (in)dependent lives of their own. Whatever a person's political, economic, social, religious, cultural, or ideological claims and stance, he or she will inevitably come in contact with the (im)possible realm of bureaucracy and will cherish some form of democracy. Although to declare "the end of ideology" (Bell 1988) remains arguable and utopian, notwithstanding recent changes and openings in Moscow and Eastern Europe (Rice 1987; von Beyme 1988), the reality is that, be it Western capitalist, Soviet communist, Zambian humanist, African (Tanzanian) socialist, or any "ism," there is a real faith in democracy, however mythical the reality. Above all, there is definitely more to contemporary politics than the celebrated Laswellian principle of who gets what, when, and how. Continuing political instability in Africa and threats of nuclear war and of radiation in (and desertification of) the world have proved that politics is not simply a zero-sum game; in the case of some eventualities there may be no survivor ·and certainly no winner. If conflicts are bound to

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occur in any human society, democracy will remain popular, not necessarily as a means of "public contestation" and "inclusiveness," which Robert Dahl (1971) associated with polyarchy and used as a synonym for democracy, but as a guarantee of the ability to have one's "say" rather than the ability to get one's "way" (Bealey 1987: 690). For example, the police officer (currently incarcerated in Nigeria) who stopped the entourage of the governor's wife in Lagos for driving through a red traffic light and who insisted that the law must be obeyed when his colleague told him that she was the governor's wife is crying for the rule of law and freedom to discharge his duties of protecting the law. He wanted to have a say. He wanted the simplest form of democracy. Democracy, in Africa, remains illusory because political actors (civil and military) have not been confident or felt secure enough to tolerate opposition and dissension against a double standard and abuse of position, even in the form of protest in the course of duty from a harmless and poorly paid and clothed constable. And here lies the paradox. Bureaucracy provides political elites with the most immediate and effective means of achieving their civilizing, public or self-interest, and yet it is regarded as the most threatening source of opposition. Achieving any professed form of democracy inevitably requires an efficient and effective bureaucracy. The Japanese economic miracles and French and German economic performances since the end of the Second World War have all been associated with efficient and nationalistic bureaucracies that have also served as training grounds for future politicians, hence the so-called bureaucratic colonization of politics in France, in particular (Suleiman 1984). John Dunn (1979: 172) was unequivocal about the need for a powerful state structure "actively committed to planning and organizing many aspects of development of their economies." In an ethnically plural society (i.e., virtually all African states), a bureaucracy operating within the Weberian tradition of anonymity, neutrality, professionalism, and meritocracy is the most effective institution for forging national unity among the diverse factions. Kenyatta's rule as "Mzee" (father of the nation) was manifested in his reliance on bureaucracy rather than on the party or the legislature, both of which were entangled in ethnicity and factionalism. In other words, the test of democracy lies in operational relations among, on the one hand, state institutions (health, education, security, rural-extension services, judiciary, and legislature) as they interact with their clients (the rest of the society) and, on the other, among societal institutions (media, trade and student unions, consumer associations, political parties, and academia) as they also interact with the state. Taking democracy seriously in Africa has to do with producing institutions that will judiciously handle the allocation of available scarce

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resources among ethnic, religious, and regional factional groups. Here, judicious means a transparent discharge of public duties to the satisfaction of the affected clients. We must appreciate that Africans are aware of what is going on in government even if they feel helpless. Nigerians, for instance, supported Murtala Muhammed, wept over losing a "leader," and, indeed, were unanimous in their wish to punish his assassins. This was because they recognized Muhammed as a sincerely repentant "sinner," who genuinely wanted to restore democracy to Nigeria. He was swift in creating more states to break the regional cleavages and was revolutionary in establishing local governments, not as councils but as a tier of government. Again, there has been no published or rumoured dissatisfaction with Professor Ransome-Kuti who has been minister of health in Nigeria since 1985. The obvious reason for this satisfaction is that his styles of operation and of living demonstrate to all that he is making the most of the opportunity given to him. Though there may be problems with health, Nigerians now accept that primary health policy is geared to the needs of the people and of the economy and that this policy is achieved by allocating areas of specialization to different teaching hospitals. The moral of Muhammed and Ransome-Kuti's administrations, and hence their contribution to democracy, is that they both set out to decentralize. Democracy without a decentralization of powers to the masses is sooner or later bound to fail.

New Forms of Democracy and Bureaucracy In its crudest form, democracy is government of the people. In his famous Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln defined representative democracy as government of the people, by the people, for the people. Long before him, however, Aristotle and other ancient critics of democracy argued that human society is structured in a manner that leads democracy to degenerate into rule by orators and ultimately into tyranny. According to Burnheim (1985: 3), the bigger and more passive the audience the more this degeneration is likely to happen. In effect, questions posed by new forms of democracy hinge on real and effective participation of ordinary people from all walks of life. Held and Pollitt (1986) examined democracy in specific areas, such as industry, the local community, within feminism and sexuality, the political party, bureaucracy, and the nationstate. These are areas in which the contemporary privileged actors in the political parties, unions, and the media, particularly radio and television, are seen as the equivalents of the orators in the small Greek polities. Bumheim also examined the practical problems of democracy and noted that for government by the people to occur the people must make the decisions that constitute the content of government. He asserted

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that there is no way these decisions can be made on a sound basis when they affect as many people in as many different ways as do decisions involved in legislating and administering a modern state. He also noted the "inherent difficulties in the vague concept of 'the people.'" While highlighting the inadequacies of the conventional instruments of democracy (elections and participation), he proposed statistical representation, which he termed demarchy (Burnheim 1985: 912) (though Nigeria presents a good case study of the abuse of statistical representation). On the question of "who are the people," Bobbio (1987) lucidly summarized the almost limitless inflation of political activity and the problem of insufficient knowledge among electorates. According to him, the problems cannot be solved by adopting more participatory democracy in the workplace or in local government; after all, even on small committees minorities can be consistently denied an effective voice by the majority (Bobbio 1987: 8). It is this major weakness in "the-firstpast-the-post" or majoritarian democracy that has made the use of proportional representation (West Germany) or consensual democracy (Japan and Switzerland) or corporate democracy (Sweden) of such recent interest. Advocates of a developed form of participation are also contradicted with a further assumption of socialist pluralists, namely that equal weight can be given to different interest groups by virtue of allowing them to be as self-managing as possible (Bobbio 1987: 9). Ambiguity, confusion, and disputes over "who are the people" have led to various forms of democracy, ranging from the Swiss consensual model through the Swedish corporate way to the Brazilian type of "democracy from above" (Cohen 1987: 30-54). In Switzerland, most issues are resolved by referendum and (in an extreme contrast to the United States) a nonsacrosanct attitude to constitutional amendments. Hence there is a form of democracy characterized by participation, neutrality, and radical federalism (decentralism or localism, what the Swiss sometimes call Kantonligeist) (Barber 1988: 31-50). It is interesting to note that Nigeria has been seemingly successful in operating federalism (even within a military system) because the inherent decentralization in federalism allows some sort of autonomy among the economically differentiated ethnic, religious, and regional groups. This is not to underestimate the federal government's tendency to abuse its "power of the purse" as the collector and distributor of oil wealth, which accounts for more than 90 percent of Nigerian foreignexchange earnings. Recently the Nigerian government recruited over 30,000 people through its state-based offices and posted (or more appropriately imposed) them on states and local governments as part of its antistructural adjustment programme. Whatever the good intentions

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of such a relief programme, state and local governments had no jobs for such officers but were nonetheless forced to take them. Indeed, democracy has been impossible in Nigeria because the unitary strategies of a single police force, a unified salary structure, streamlined directives from federal government to state and local governments on all policies (health, education, industry) are antithetical to the inherent institutional framework of federalism and democracy. Early in 1989 the Nigerian federal government instructed all local and state governments with access to the Central Bank of Nigeria to transfer their accounts from commercial banks (most of which are owned by states) to the Central Bank. Such centralization is obviously an erosion of the principles of federalism and democracy. It has far-reaching implications for the operation of state and local governments as independent tiers of government. Sweden has evolved a blend of innovation and conservatism to create what Hecla and Madsen (1987) described as a country neither exemplifying the middle way nor an uncontrollable bureaucracy nor an ideal welfare state, but a country in which the social democratic movement has achieved a subtle form of hegemony over the life of the nation, a hegemony that grows out of labour's internal divisions, increment policymaking, extensive consultation, and indecisive election results to produce the emasculation of political opposition. African leaders can achieve democracy by accepting the reality that there is a myth in participation and that having a say is gratifying and satisfying to opposition. To have a say is the first step to democracy; for governments to respond positively with a rational explanation (though not necessarily a pleasant one) is the second step. But to attain that level of democracy African society must accept certain universal norms of sharing and of responding to opposition. Without any apology for being subjective, such norms require the fundamentals of what is just and fair. We cannot talk of democracy if the sharing or allocation of resources is based on discriminatory criteria such as ethnicity, religion, or place of birth. Such criteria are the bane of democracy in Africa. Under African circumstances taking democracy seriously means adopting superior values like merit, nationalism, and equal opportunity, which will be unifying, easy to justify, and yet selfactualizing. Indeed, Africa requires a structural adjustment to institutionalize and rationalize the allocating mechanism so that the criteria for what people get can transcend their religion, place of birth, who they know, and their access to the state apparatus. The problem with democracy in Africa is that the newly independent states are fragile and vulnerable, while their politicians (civil and military) lack political skill and have not evolved a consensus on how best to transform politics from a zero-sum game into a harmonious and syn-

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chronized form of social engineering that can accommodate deep divisions among political actors without necessarily being divided against the nation. According to John Dunn (1979: 172), political leaders in Africa seek to compensate for their increasingly blatant organizational impotence by spiralling the application of terror, thus creating what Diamond et al. (1988: 20) described as a "swollen" state, that is, one that is both too large and too weak. Considering the reality of the African situation, Sklar (1986) appears rather too charitable in his identification of five types of democracy in Africa: developmental dictatorship, guided democracy, social democracy, participatory democracy, and consociational democracy. These are types of government rather than of democracy and barely even fit into the Swiss-Swedish-Brazilian continuum. For instance, in 1984 Nigerians were happy at the demise of the Second Republic, which they interpreted as the end of "them-all-crazy"-a pejorative term for democracy. While democracy remains popular among the elites, who both have access to and benefit from the states, the average citizen is apathetic because political regimes in Ghana, Nigeria, and elsewhere in Africa have behaved in the same unresponsive way. Taking democracy seriously in Africa, therefore, means social mobilization and reassuring people of the capability of democratic government to meet their (the people's) basic needs. For this reason bureaucracy has to be seen in a different light, not as a hidden government but as a means to achieving democracy. Bureaucracy, like democracy, poses conceptual problems of definition, perception, and clarity. In both popular and scholarly writings it suggests inefficiency, red-tape, delay, the building up of unneeded staff, and other such dysfunctional pathologies of the (ideal-typical model of) bureaucracy. This view is represented in Parkinson's law on the expansive and wasteful tendency of the public service. Others, such as Weber, Simon, and Taylor, see bureaucracy as a sizeable organization with structures and functions. Such an organization is administered with defined goals (functions) and clearly written operative procedures for relationships and interactions between and within line and staff (structures). For the purposes of this chapter, unless the context indicates otherwise, the word bureaucracy is used in the second sense, in a neutral rather than a derogatory or Marxist deterministic sense. It refers simply to any large administrative mechanism (as characterized in detail by Max Weber) marked by modernday versions of the key characteristics of hierarchy, impersonality, meritocracy, and career progression. Bureaucracy is also viewed in terms of the three developments identified by Held and Pollitt (1986: 175-178)professionalization, technological change, and decentralization. In particular, they noted that professionals tend to develop relatively "flat" hierarchies and to stress collegiality rather than lines of command.

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Professionals also often lay emphasis on maintaining the "trust" of their clients. Computerization of routinized jobs, Held and Pollitt observed, is increasing the size of middle management and thus bureaucratic "pyramids" are becoming misshapen, with thinner bases and bulging middles. They also noted that computerization has greatly assisted agencies wishing to expand their surveillance activities. In Africa professionalization and computerization have not become topical in the sense in which Held and Pollitt discussed them. What is topical is their absence. Because of the role of professionalism in promoting democracy at work, professionalism will no doubt in the immediate future be viewed in the same way and become as important as decentralization. At work it breaks down the autocracy of amateurish generalist administrators and hence promotes decentralization. Decentralization is defined as the transfer of planning, decision making, or administrative responsibility from the central government to its field units, local administrative bodies, semiautonomous or parastatal organizations, local governments, or regional organizations (Rondinelli 1987). Rondinelli and Cheema (1987) classified four aspects of decentralization-deconcentration, delegation, devolution, and privatization. Today privatization is in vogue throughout the world. This trend is perhaps because of a negative public attitude towards bureaucracy, an attitude that arises from a fear of bureaucracies and from a presumption that bureaucrats might misuse their privileged positions within the state apparatus. An intractable problem for the present and future debate on the relations between democracy and bureaucracy in Africa was vividly (though implicitly) raised by Sklar (1986: 18), who noted that common requirements for social progress can be met only through a judicious mixture of capitalism and socialism. Similarly, Dunn (1972: 173) noted that both socialist and liberal political theories grossly understate the causal importance of skill in political life. He asserted that both capitalist and socialist development can benefit enormously from the organizational efficiency and the simple probity of the state apparatus. Socialist political theory, he emphasized, is especially lamentable in its almost complete failure to acknowledge the exceptionally exigent demands for economic and political skill (and one may add bureaucratic skill) in the effective design and management of a socialist economy. Hence Staniland (1986: 59) was right to say that democracy was irrelevant, not because it was culturally specific, but because it required social and economic conditions that Africa lacked. Among such preconditions, he added, were high rates of urbanization and industrialization, widespread literacy, adequate and equitably distributed incomes, and a widely shared sense of national identity. Without such preconditions democracy was unlikely to work and Africa was, for

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the most part, without them. What he failed to say is that it is impossible to create such preconditions without an effective and efficient state apparatus, the bureaucracy. In a historical review of politics and administration in Nigeria, Ladipo Adamolekun (1986: 169) concluded that Nigeria needs more than the development of political institutions. According to him, the most useful prescription for Nigeria would be to develop strong administrative institutions, whose functioning is reconciled with the instrumental conception of administration, either in the tradition of European Western liberal democracies or in that of states committed to Marxist democratic theory. He suggests development of administrative institutions based on the concept of a career civil service and characterized by permanence, impartiality, meritocracy, and professionalism (1986: 184). But how and at what price to the society is such a developmental task to be brought about, and what should be the role and form of the bureaucracy? These questions will be returned to later, but first I wish to look at the cause of and interplay between the mutual suspicion between democracy and bureaucracy.

The Interplay of Democracy and Bureaucracy The BBC television programme "Yes, Minister" is more than a humorous portrayal of what happens in Whitehall. It is equally as applicable to Ribadu Road, Lagos, to the White House, Washington, D.C., to Kusamigaseki, Tokyo, or to any other seat of government. It effectively demonstrates the presumed (and at times real) powers enjoyed by civil servants and shows how such powers are wielded against their so-called masters. It also vividly portrays how decisions are made and the amount of influence civil servants are able to exercize in policymaking and over their political "bosses." Even if bureaucrats are only half as powerful as they are portrayed, given the exaggerations of such a satire, one can easily imagine the gravity and complexity of the basic problem of "how ... political leaders and the public persuade, cajole, or force administrative agencies to do their bidding" (Peters 1983). How can they be controlled and be made responsible or accountable for doing what Bernard Rosen (1982: 4) summarized as the following? • Make laws work as intended with minimum of waste and delay • Exercize lawful and sensible administrative discretion • Recommend new policies and propose changes in existing policies and programmes as needed and • Enhance citizen confidence in administrative institutions of government

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Conventionally administrators enjoy powers of permanency, expertise, and the ,custodianship of information. Other sources of bureaucratic power consist of political support (recruited from all parts of a country though not necessarily in numerical proportion), weak political leadership (as portrayed in "Yes, Minister" and as often expressed in the memoirs of former politicians), bureaucratic policy (especially departmental views, comradeship, and esprit de corps), and, more recently, rationalist techniques of budgeting and computerization. The result is that the alleged powers of bureaucrats provide a relatively easy target for all. The critical spectrum includes populists, Marxists, pluralists, and the public-choice libertarianism of Thatcher and Reagan. In assessing the power of the Nigerian bureaucracy, Williams and Turner (1979: 163), in particular, saw Gowon's administration as an example of "bureaucratic rule [having] both discredited and overreached itself." Kaufman (1981: 2) examined the "irony and contradictions" of accusations against bureaucracy and stressed that the fears of those who regard bureaucracy as being out of hand should not be taken literally. The epidemic spread of this fear is "nothing more than a convergence of rhetoric masking a divergence of substance, and a desire to change controls rather than a belief that no controls exist." On a similar tone, after examining the negative characteristics of industrial policy machinery in Britain, Wilks (1984) concluded that ministers and civil servants are not irresponsible, unthinking, or obstructionist; they are often genuinely uncertain and frustrated, grasping for the familiar and manageable, which, in practice, tends to be the test of survival in the free market (i.e., viability). Though many of the criticisms against bureaucracy are tendentious, some, however, are well founded. Dimock and Dimock (1966: 373) argued that "every delegation of power to an agent must be accompanied by a corresponding degree of accountability." Accountability and administrative responsibility are central issues in politics in Africa today. Though it is mythical to think in terms of a dichotomy between administration and politics, there is no logical proof of the bureaucracy's political neutrality-hence the public's condemnation of it as corrupt and self-seeking. As offshoots of imperialism, bureaucrats do not, however, occupy an enviable position. Most politicians regard them as "agents of imperialism" or, more recently, as agents of neocolonialism on behalf of the multinational enterprises. Rondinelli (1987) rightly identified the problem. According to him, in circumstances when organizations must respond to strong demands for control, only clearly defensible actions are taken within the organization, even when more innovative, creative, and risky approaches ~y be needed. He observed that, like other bureaucracies, the Agency for International Development (AID) attempted to defend itself from criticism by instituting stronger

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control over the funding, procurement, contracting, and management of projects, with the result that only 345 of the projects begun after 1973 had been completed by 1981. Although AID had about $11,000 million in funds pinpointed for projects between 1973 and 1981, the cost of the 345 completed projects totalled less than $1,000 million (Rondinelli 1987: 149). By contrast, however, Rondinelli (1987: 152-153) noted that the trademark of the Inter-American Foundation (IAF) is experimentation, and it is thus able to follow up its sponsored projects with supervision and technical assistance in a low-key but effective way. Inherent in the approach of the two U.S. agencies, and lessons for Africa on what makes a difference, is the invaluable role of trust in bureaucratic performance. In response to criticism, African bureaucrats (like their counterparts in the AID) are now overcautious to the point of paralysis, and, to paraphrase Adedeji (1981: 198), the civil service is unsure of itself and certainly unwilling to take risks and to stick its neck out in the decision-making process. Besides, as in Western liberal democracies, administrators often face contradictions when it becomes necessary and expedient to interfere with the workings of the free market. This situation, Wilks (1984) explained, is rooted in the philosophical, practical, and political nature of the bureaucracy-philosophical because intervention conflicts with its entangled faith in liberal democracy; practical because it is technically ill-equipped for intervention; and political because civil servants can operate most easily in situations of consensus. Where consensus does not exist, the bureaucracy's role may become one of trying to create it. This role may explain the influence of the bureaucracy in nations such as The Netherlands, France, Japan, and the Scandinavian countries, which, unlike African states, are each "divided, but not ... against itself" (Sealey 1987: 697). The corollary is that while bad government can be disposed of through ballot (or bullet), civil servants are not subjected to electoral judgements. Hence, in Africa, bureaucracy often faces onslaughts in the form of public condemnation, purges, retrenchment, and arbitrary dismissals, all in an effort to keep them under control. In developed countries an increase in the democratic election of political representatives has generally occurred alongside an expansion in the power of elitist and unrepresentative bureaucracies, with an overall implication of growing tensions between bureaucracy and (representative) democracy. In Third World countries, especially in Africa, however, studies by Rondinelli (1987), Adamolekun (1986), Joseph (1987), Goldman and Wilson (1984), and Diamond et al. (1988) reveal a sudden rise of bureaucratic-military alliances to the exclusion of democratically elected political leadership. In a few cases, a one-party presidential oligarchy or outright dictatorship has emerged. Either way the consequences are

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the same for democracy-a tendency towards political elites (civil and military) using bureaucracy "to increase their domination or even to construct a repressive state" (Held and Pollitt 1986: 165). Alternatively, bureaucracy often slips beyond the control of the elected political (or self-imposed military) elite, using its technical expertise and exploiting the inevitable ambiguity of the rules demarcating "political" from "administrative" in order to pursue its own interests (Held and Pollitt 1986: 165). It may even become an alternative to the government of the day (Williams and Turner 1979: 132-72). Etzioni-Halevy (1983) argued that bureaucrats may be more progressive, conservative, and authoritarian than their political leaders. According to Burnheim (1985: 52) and empirically borne out by Rondinelli's comparison of the performances of the AID and the IAF, however, the paradox, or dilemma, of the bureaucracy-democracy relationship resides in the fact that "to be effective, bureaucracy must enjoy a certain degree of autonomy, of discretion, yet for the polity to qualify as 'democratic' (even from an elitist perspective), officialdom must be subject to political control." Bureaucracy seems to be indispensable "at least where there are permanent functions to be carried out and controlled" (Held and Pollitt 1986: 165). Hence the intractable question, What is to be done about bureaucracy? Held and Pollitt (1986: 178-185) noted that, broadly, there are three categories of proposals for dealing with bureaucracy: • Sweep it away • Strengthen the "countervailing powers" within- the political system, so that bureaucracy is better supervized or controlled and • Change the character of bureaucracies by internal reforms By offering an, as yet, unacceptable and unrealistic anarchic alternative, the first option is both underdeveloped and illusory. It is rooted in Lenin's ideal of the withering away of the bureaucracy as an automatic arm of the capitalist state and, as such, appears rather utopian. The second option is equally fraught with operational problems: inequalities in the electoral process; distortions in the legislative process; a diffusion of executive authority; weakness or nonexistence of judicial/administrative institutions like ombudsmen (or women) and administrative courts, or even of political institutions such as political parties, trade unions, student organizations, and consumer associations; as well as a lack of a free and powerful press to "countervail" the powers of the bureaucracy. Hence, only the third option, the normative approach, can generate various alternatives, including some modicum of "representative bureaucracy." The main objective of this option is to reorganize or reform

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the bureaucracy to complement the popular election of politicians and universal suffrage by ensuring that it is drawn from all groups of society. Implicit in this option is an awareness of the inadequacy of hierarchical models of control (the political leadership being weak or incompetent). But are the civil servants that powerful and out of control in Africa? The experiences of France, Japan, and Barbados, as developmental states, give one the impression that technical competence and public confidence is a sine qua non for the performance of the bureaucrats, especially in providing the type of leadership expected of (or rather arrogated to) bureaucrats in newly independent states in general, and in Africa in particular. Any assessment of the civil service's policymaking role that ignores these factors is therefore likely to be narrow, superficial, and misleading. It cannot be denied that the organizational, legislative, judicial, and normative instruments of achieving administrative control, responsibility, and accountability in Africa are weak andfor repressive. Arbitrary measures stifle bureaucracy and portray it as coercive, dictatorial, or going along with what Joseph (1987: 8) described as "prebendal politics." An all-powerful bureaucracy, however, underrates what several authors in Chahal's book (1986) rightly described as constraints on "the limits of power" in Africa.

Outlook for Democracy and Bureaucracy in Africa In this chapter, I not only draw attention to the limits of power but also call for a more positive attitude to bureaucracy that will enable scholars to make an objective assessment of the power and influence of civil servants on policymaking in Africa. Three issues may be identified for further development by writers on African government and policymaking: the tendency to overrate the bureaucracy's contributions to policymaking in Africa; the assumption that civil servants form an allpowerful, self-seeking, monolithic group; and the misconceived view of the capability of a bureaucracy as part of a weak nation-state. For instance, a case study of policymaking and implementation in the educational and industrial sectors of Nigeria suggests that policymaking is bold and dogmatic, dominated by expansive gestures, simplified by political initiatives, and characterized by directionless dissensus. Given this pattern, civil servants are no more than firemen and pawns. As firemen they are required to manage and put out the "fire" often generated by the persistent conflicts between governors and the governed. And as pawns in the game of chess they are often put in front and used to shield and protect the politicians (civil and military) while the politicians blame whatever goes wrong on the faceless bureaucrats who are prevented from making public

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statements. In other words, to view African governments as strictly "bureaucratic rules" or "administocracies" is to deny the "existence of powerful centrifugal forces" (Potholm 1970: 12) of ethnicity, religion, dual regionalism (imbalance in political and economic development), and the nonmonolithic nature of African bureaucracies. In Nigeria, for instance, specialist-generalist relations create disunity among civil servants and hence weaken the civil service. In that professionalization cuts across ethnic, sex, class, and geographical boundaries, it presents another dimension in the already complex problem of bureaucracy. The conffict between the professionals and the generalist administrators is sufficiently tense to affect the policymaking process in Nigeria. It both poses an organizational problem for the coordination of fragmented departmental hierarchies and creates economic waste when, in an attempt to circumvent the problem, semiautonomous agencies are created to handle specialized jobs. To perceive of such a bureaucracy as the government is to overlook the fact that African nations (if they are qualified to be called so) are weak states and their bureaucracies are no exception. Above all it is to overrate the "technical capabilities" (Potholm 1970: 11-26) of the civil services to cope with the implicit demands placed on them. In Nigeria, in particular, the trauma of creating three regional governments in 1954 and then increasing them to twenty-one states in 1987 was not only disruptive but overstretched the technical capabilities of the civil service. Not atypically, one of the most educationally advanced states in Nigeria (Ogun) has no chartered accountant in the civil service. It has not been able to recruit a qualified engineer or architect since it was created in 1976, while most of the experienced serving officers in these categories have either retired or been sacked. Although some parts of southern Nigeria and southern Ghana had a few qualified professionals and administrators at the time of independence, in many African states the situation was hardly any better than that of the Congo (Zaire), which became independent with "only three university graduates" (Selassie 1974: 192). Tordoff (1984: 3) noted that, like Zambia, "mainland Tanzania faced independence with barely 100 graduates and a totally inadequate number of secondary-schoolleavers; but both states were better off than Angola and Mozambique, though less so than Zimbabwe." Similarly, most of the former French colonies in Africa have not recovered from the shock of the sudden withdrawal by France between 1958 and 1962. It is not surprising, therefore, that the most successful states in Africa since independence have been Kenya and the Ivory Coast, which continued to lean on and to enjoy the support of Britain and France respectively. Political leaders and writers have always been scrupulous about checking the powers of the few (in the Nigerian federal civil service

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never exceeding thirty-one) permanent-secretaries (now director-generals) and about the role of the generalist administrators (in the Nigerian central government less than 1,500). They overlook the importance of over 95 percent of the bureaucracy. Babangida, Rawlings, or Moi may control these few so-called "super" permanent-secretaries or directorgenerals, but water, mail, electricity, and waste disposal will remain in the hands of the underpaid (often on daily wages) and alienated junior civil servants. Although African leaders may be cajoled into accepting the negative world view of an overpaid and overestablished civil service (through a desperate need to satisfy the International Monetary Fund's conditionalities), they may be reminded that the British head of service earns more than the prime minister, while permanent-secretaries earn as much as a general, admiral, and air marshal and more than twice the salary of a member of parliament. Despite the level of professionalism and computerization, the number of public employees per 1,000 population in Japan is 45, in the United Kingdom 110, in France 83, in the United States 83, and in the Federal Republic of Germany 76 compared to about 15 in Nigeria. Japan and France are able to retain the best and brightest members of their societies in the civil service through competitive pay with other sectors and the prestige of being in the service of the state. Environmental pollution, an increasing crime rate, and scandalous capitalist exploitation (such as misappropriation of relief funds) are evidence of the ever-increasing need for government control and regulation of privatized corporations and services. Naive assumptions about the weakness of pressure groups, the ineffectiveness of hierarchical political control over the civil service, the existence (or nonexistence) of factional and disorganized political parties, the ineffectiveness of opposition, or that the paucity of elections necessarily imply the hegemony of bureaucracies in Africa, are among the most important misconceptions about African bureaucracy. Joseph (1987) rightly noted that "the abiding desire for the democratic political system is frustrated by the deepening of ethnic, linguistic and regional identities." These forces impinge on the political system and on the· politicians as much as they do on the bureaucrats in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa. They will continue to determine the relationship between democracy and bureaucracy in Africa, irrespective of whether or not public choice is pushed to the extent of prisoners choosing where to serve their jail terms from a number of privatized prisons!

Conclusion Rondinelli (1987: 104) suggested that, in politically fragmented countries, decentralization would allow the various political, religious, ethnic,

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or tribal groups greater representation in development decision making and thereby increase their "stake in maintaining political stability." Inherent in this suggestion is the politicization of the civil service, which Adamolekun (1986) observed was catastrophic for Nigeria and made many Nigerians sceptical of Babangida's recent civil-service reforms. Finally, while the current debate can be regarded as a good turning point to a universal rather than ethnocentric treatment of democracybureaucracy relations, they are, in Charles Lindblom's (1959, 1979) classic phrase, "still muddling, not yet through." To be through is to face the reality that democracy flourishes when there is consensus on how to play the game of politics. The task for Africanists and Africans is how to change a situation in which, as Rondinelli (1987: 146) put it, "the only certainty is that there will be a large degree of uncertainty surrounding the most effective way of promoting economic and social change in developing countries." To destroy bureaucracy in order to enthrone democracy is certainly not only unrealistic but also undemocratic!

5 Democracy and the Agrarian Question in Africa: Reflections on the Politics of States and the Representation of Peasants' and Women's Interests Pepe Roberts and Gavin Williams

Peasants and Democracy: European Perspectives Barrington Moore, Jr., in his study The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World

(1966), regarded peasants as inimical both to modernity and to democracy. The making of the modern world required the liquidation of the peasants (and of the lords) as a class in favour of more thoroughly capitalist (or socialist) and bureaucratic institutions. According to Moore, the critical period in the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society was the period when commercial agriculture developed. Democratic governments emerged when the peasantry was largely displaced by a class of capitalist farmers, as in England. Where peasants continued to dominate the countryside during this period, as in France and Russia, they played an important part in the revolutions that overthrew the ancien regime. In Moore's view, Russian industrialization required the destruction of the independent peasantry and its transformation into collective, or state, farm workers. Moore attributed the precariousness of parliamentary government in France after 1789 to the survival of a landowning peasantry. In the case of Prussia, however, the Prussian Junkers were the main barrier to democratic government. Moore followed the argument of Gerschenkron's classic study Bread and Gavin Williams's contribution to this chapter draws on work funded by a generous Personal Research Grant G 0024 2043 from the Economic and Social Research Council.

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Democracy in Germany (1966). After the legal abolition of serfdom, Prussian landowners east of the Elbe became capitalist farmers. For their labour supply they depended on agricultural labourers with small allotments of their own and on migrants, mainly Polish. They formed an alliance with rich Prussian peasant farmers (the Grossbauern) and, after the "marriage of iron and rye" of 1878, also formed an alliance with industrialists in defence of militaristic and authoritarian values and to protect the undemocratic Prussian franchise, their privileged position in the local and central state, and the high tariffs on imported grains. Moore's arguments and distinctions may be subjected to a variety of criticisms. Moore looked back at the history of the world from the perspective of 1939-1949 and identified the origins of the differences of political institutions among the contending powers. Despite their evident distinctions, aspects of the development of capitalist agriculture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England had more in common with the Prussian experience than with the family farming of the northern United States-let alone with postrevolutionary rural France, which, if anything, compares rather better with Russia than with England or the United States. A literate class of small farmers and their commercial and political institutions made an important contribution to the development of parliamentary and democratic government in Scandinavia and New Zealand, for example. There is no direct correlation between the importance of the peasantry, or even the political weight of rural classes, and the weakness of democratic institutions. Moore did, however, reflect a common assumption that modern society and democratic politics have urban, indeed bourgeois, origins. And he was right to pose questions about the relations of the rural social structure and between town and countryside with the emergence of particular styles of politics and forms of state. Lenin and the "Democratic'' Revolution Moore's important comparison between the development of commercial agriculture after the emancipation of the serfs in Prussia in 1815 and Russia in 1861 extended the distinction that Lenin (1962, XIII) made in 1907 between the "Prussian" and "American" paths to capitalism in his Agrarian Programme of Russian Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907 and the "Preface" to The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1962, Ilia). The issue facing Lenin, and other Russian Marxists, in the period of rural and urban revolutionary activity of 1902-1907 was not whether Russia was developing along capitalist lines or whether the forthcoming revolution would be a "democratic" one; those things

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they "knew." The question was what forms this revolution should take and how social democratic (i.e., Marxist) parties should respond to them. In The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin (1962, III) had established, at least to his own satisfaction, the basic Marxist proposition that capitalism was developing in the Russian countryside both through the "transitional" forms of labour service and labour tenancy and through the differentiation of the peasantry. Lenin identified the Tsarist government's Stolypin reforms as the Russian equivalent of the "Prussian path." The destruction· of the obshchina ("commune") and thus of communal land allocation was intended to give a class of rich peasants (kulaks, analogous to the Prussian Grossbauern) free access to land and landowners and rich peasants free access to labour-power. This situation would make it possible for capitalism to develop without the encumbrances of serfdom and would create a reactionary political alliance of landlords turned capitalist farmers and rich peasants. The alternative "American" path would nationalize the land, thus abolishing the landlord economy and giving peasants free access to land (analogous in its consequences to the Homestead Act of 1862). The first sought to complete the "'clearing of estates' for capitalism by the landlords," the second "stands for 'clearing of estates' for capitalism by the peasantry" (Lenin 1962, XIII: 277).

In Lenin's view, the peasant road to capitalism was economically and politically more progressive than the landlord's alternative. The "Junker" path implied "the utmost preservation of bondage and serfdom (remodelled on bourgeois lines), the least rapid development of the productive forces and the retarded development of capitalism. . . . " The "American" path would make possible "the most rapid development of the productive forces and the best possible (under commodity) production conditions of existence for the mass of the peasantry" (Lenin 1962, XIII: 243-244). The peasant road was integral to Lenin's redefinition of the class character of the "democratic" revolution as against the orthodox Marxist coupling of a "bourgeois democratic" revolution. The "democratic" revolution was, first and foremost, a revolution against feudalism and the autocracy, in which the natural allies for the working class would be, not the bourgeoisie, but the peasantry, together with the oppressed nationalities. Hence Lenin's concern in 1903 in What Is to Be Done? (1971, I) that revolutionary social democrats should go beyond the limited "trade union" concerns of the working class and act as "tribunes of the people," speaking for all oppressed classes and nationalities. Lenin showed little regard for parliamentary forms and the "bourgeois" issues of individual rights and political liberties though, in his 1917 exegesis of Marx's writing on the Paris Commune in The State and

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Revolution (Lenin 1971, Ill), he did focus on the need for democratic

accountability. But for Lenin, the question of democracy was primarily a class matter: Which class or alliance of classes held power? Which class did a party "represent"? The achievement of socialism depended on the seizure and control of central state power by the party of the proletariat, to which the results of democratic elections and the liberties of workers, trade unions, and socialist parties, as well as of peasants and the bourgeoisie, had to be subordinated. In 1917, on the eve of the October revolution, Lenin had changed his conception of the revolution to one that could no longer be kept "within the limits of capitalism"; in this context he argued in his Preface to the 1917 edition of the Agrarian Programme that "nationalization of the land is ... also a step towards socialism" (Lenin 1962, Xllla). The proletariat should demand, not the abolition of the landlords' estates, but "the nationalization of farm implements in the landlords' estates and also the conversion of those estates into model farms. . . ." History followed neither the "Prussian" nor the "American" path. The implementation of the Stolypin reforms only proceeded by compromising their policies; they did not open the way to the dispossession and proletarianization of the peasants. The nationalization of land by decree and the appropriation of land by the peasantry in 1917 strengthened the obshchina and did not create a basis for socialist management of large estates..Even after 1921, the peasantry did not differentiate rapidly, if at all, into rural capitalists and agricultural workers. The Bolsheviks saw the independent existence of the obshchina and the peasant household and the peasants' concern to maintain their access to land as barriers to the construction of socialism in the countryside (Shanin 1972). Soviet socialism was built on the liquidation of the peasantry as a class; its achievements pose intractable problems for Soviet agriculture, Soviet society, and the Soviet state today.

Moore, Lenin, and the African Experience Of what relevance are the questions raised by Moore's and Lenin's views concerning a different continent to the question of peasants and democracy in contemporary Mrica? Both Moore and Lenin placed the "agrarian question" at the centre of their arguments. Central to the nature of any industrializing society are the dominant relations of production in agriculture: large-scale capitalist farms, family or peasant farms, collective or state farms. Neither Moore nor Lenin addressed gender relations of production or reproduction in any of these forms of farm enterprise; they merely presupposed the patriarchal household and

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failed to consider gender relations as an aspect of the distinctive agrarian histories of Europe. African countries, like European ones, have been shaped by their contrasting agrarian histories. The different forms of agricultural production that have emerged are central to the debate on agricultural policies in different countries in all the regions of Africa. The forms, and the policies that promoted them, have been and continue to be important to the prospects, or lack of them, for democracy. Specifically, should we follow Lenin's preference in 1907 for the redistribution of land and the expansion of commercial production from a smallholder base to the transformation of large-scale farms along capitalist lines? Or should we take his view of 1917 that large-scale farms should ideally remain intact and be run on model socialist lines? On what forms of gender relations are these scenarios predicated? What are the implications for the agrarian debate as posed by Lenin and Moore of the experiences from those countries in Africa that have attempted to follow variations on these models? Lenin also raised the central question of forms of land tenurecommunal allocation, individual ownership, or nationalization. He rightly recognized that different forms of land tenure are compatible with a variety of production relations and, we would add, gender relations. In Lenin's view communal tenure in Russia did not prevent the development of capitalism and nationalization of land could have provided the ideal conditions for capitalism (Lenin 1962, XIII). Both Moore and Lenin situated the question of democracy in the context of the social structure. They posed the problems, raised by Marx's notorious comments in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1969), of the capacity of peasants to act politically on more than a local basis. Can they "represent themselves," or "must they be represented"whether by a dictatorial leader or a socialist party? As Marx put it, "their representative must at the same time appear as their master ... " (Marx 1969: 479). The questions of democracy and the capacity of peasants to pursue their class interests raise similar questions, expressed in the same way, about the capacities of women, and especially rural women, to "represent themselves" and about which forms of land tenure enable women to pursue gender interests. (For the concept of gender interests, see Molyneux 1985.) The Agrarian Question in Africa

During the colonial period in Africa, sharp differences developed between countries and areas where white settlers expropriated large areas of land and controlled a predominant share of agricultural pro-

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duction, such as those areas where agriculture was largely in the hands of peasant smallholders and those areas that came to depend on earnings from migrant workers in other places or countries. Each of these forms of agricultural production depended on, and had implications for, specific gender relations of production and reproduction. These different forms of rural society were combined to varying degrees in different countries.

Agrarian Capitalism and Democracy Settler agriculture, that is, farming as practiced by European settlers, laid the foundations for the successful development of large-scale capitalist agriculture in South Africa (as in Kenya and Zimbabwe). Accumulation depended historically on combinations of various forms of labour coercion and appropriation of surplus labour: slavery; indenture; rent, share, and labour tenancy; contract, casual, and resident wage labour. Women entered specific sections of the labour market as migrant or estate workers or were essential as "family labour" in men's tenancy or share-cropping contracts (Wolff 1974: 126-128; Bradford 1987: 41; Keegan 1987: 74-86). Settler farmers depended on the state to secure their title to land, to allow and enforce their control over productive and domestic labour, female and male, and to provide them with