The State and agricultural labour: Zanzibar after slavery
Date
1981-06
Authors
Cooper, Frederick
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Abstract
The march of capitalism into Africa is often made to
appear inexorable. Indeed, some scholars have defined the
possibility of a failure, a missed possibility of domination,
out of existence: the survival of pre-capitalist
modes of production are simply a way by which the costs
of labor or cash crops are subsidized by subsistence cultivation.
But how is one to tell whether the cultivator's
access to the soil represents a dangerous automony, a
tenacious resistance to becoming subject to industrial
work rhythms and control over all aspects of a working
life, or else constitutes a perfectly functional part
of a superexploitative system?The conditions of rural and urban workers in South
Africa is likely to suggest itself in answer to that
question. But the best of research in South African
labor history has focused on the specific processes by
which labor was controlled and has not neglected the
persistence of resistance — in individual and daily
behaviour in farms and factories as much as in collective
action.2 A look beyond South Africa emphasizes how elusive
similar objectives could be, and how essential it is to
ask just what kind of transformations capital and the state
sought, how they tried to effect them, and what they were
unable to do.3
Much of the literature on the "articulation" of modes
of production stresses structural juxtapositions, not
processes. And that gets away from the most basic if most
difficult aspects of Marx's treatment of capitalism,
that it was based on two quite particular and quite well
masked forms of coercion: primitive accumulation— the
permanent alienation of workers from the means of productionand
the labor process itself- the daily struggle to make
workers work. Primitive accumulation is not the mere amassing
of resources, nor is it legal title to land: it is the effective exclusion
of acess to the means of production of an entire class. And to say that
means to ask how they were kept away. The labor process itself entails
distinct mechanisms—from supervision on the shop floor to the educational
system—to control the pace and intensity of labor, which in turn foster
distinct patterns of resistance. Our task is not to arrive at a rigid and
pristine definition of capitalism, but to look at accumulation and the
labor process as the specific and complex phenomena they are. They embody
the action of people and institutions, and the consequences of such actions
not being complete need to be taken seriously.
This study of Zanzibar looks at an attempt that penetrated to the heart
of the labor process, an effort to make slave labor into wage labor. It
involved non-white landowners and non-white workers in a British colony, but
the division between landowners and workers was no less fundamental for the
racial complexity of Zanzibar. British officials were clear that they wanted
to make slaves into an agricultural proletariat, but they ended up with a complex
system of labor migration, shaped as much by the ex-slaves as by the state
or the ex-slaveowners. I have discussed the evidence and details of this
process at length elsewhere; my aim here to to discuss some basic issues that
it raises in terms that might suggest comparative perspectives.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented June, 1981
Keywords
Zanibar. History