On political economies & their critiques
David Ricardo identified as ‘the principal problem in Political Economy’:
…to determine the laws which regulate the distribution of the produce of the earth — all that is derived from its surface by the united application of labour, machinery and capital — among the three great classes of the community; namely, the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital necessary for its cultivation, and the labourers by whose industry it is cultivated (1973:49)
Karl Marx, following Friedrich Engels, gave Capital the subtitle A Critique Of Political Economy (1967; 1973a). Marx began his reflections: ‘Political economy starts with what needs to be explained, alien labour.’ For Marx, ‘Capital is not a thing but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things’ relation’ (1973b:271; 1973a:932). It is not the K of neo-classical production functions. Surplus, in Marx, always refers to a relation: it is always an adjective — ‘surplus-labour’, ‘surplus-value’ — and never a noun, ‘the surplus’.
In Capital, volume one, Marx sets out the relations that constitute capitalism production. Marx builds on Feuerbachís account of the alienation of Man in religion to resolve the mystery, which Ricardo could not solve: if labour is the source of value, and labour is paid at its value, how do the capitalists come out with a profit? Labour produces the surplus value, which is appropriated by the capitalists and landowners in the forms of profits and rents. As Man makes God in his own image and subordinates himself to the product of his own imagination, so workers produce Capital, to which they are subordinated and on which they depend for their livelihoods.
Subsequent political economy has tended to pass by the relational character of class, civil society, or state. These are all, in Emile Durkheim's words, ‘social facts’, going beyond their individual manifestations and imposing external constraints (1982:59). But, as Philip Abrams has insisted, they are not to be treated as things (1988:58). They refer to systems of relations, which necessarily involve ideas and processes. Max Weber (1991:82) and Antonio Gramsci (1971:12–13 and passim) realised that the exercise of domination (Herrschaft), or hegemony (egemonia), extended beyond the pursuit of class interests through the instrument of the state.
Neo-classical (marginalist) economics provided an analytic framework for explaining relative prices. It provided an analytic framework for explaining relative prices and for identifying conceptually the conditions for the most efficient combinations of fungible capital and homogenous labour to maximise the value of output. Lionel Robbins reduced economic science to its parsimonious limits: the study of ‘human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’(1952:16; I owe the contrast between Ricardo and Robbins's conceptions of their disciplines to Weeks, 1973).
The subtitle of Harold Lasswell's study, Politics: Who gets what, when, how, contrasts neatly with Robbins's impersonal account of the study of economics (1952). Albert Hirschmann (1970) shows in Exit, Voice and Loyalty that people have more choices than just to enter and exit from markets or to decide to vote in an election for one or another candidate, or neither. C. Wright Mills drew out the inseparability of political and economic institutions and insisted on the necessary collusion between the respective alliances of power elites, which dominated Nazi Germany and post-war USA (1956, 1963).
The new political economy extends Robbins's conception of economics as the study of choices among alternative uses to incorporate all the social sciences. Market behaviour becomes a template for explaining voters' choices or the preferences of public officials. Marxist and new political economies both tend to reduce politics and policies to the play of economic interests in the utilitarian manner. Policy choices provide the clue to their own origins and can in turn be explained by the naming of classes or interests. The critical political economy, which the Review was founded to promote, took it for granted that politics, economics and society could neither be separated from nor reduced to one another.
On the Review of African Political Economy
When we founded ROAPE in 1974, we sought to understand Africa in order to change it. We created a forum, which provided both space and encouragement to critical studies of Africa through the perspectives of political economy and we hoped to inform debates among African intellectuals and political activists. We did not set out a specific intellectual agenda, let alone a political programme. Nor did we prescribe the meaning of ‘political economy’. The ‘new political economy’ has now become fashionable in policy-oriented circles distant from our own and we should reflect on our own intellectual relationship to its analyses and prescriptions.
In conversation, Chris Allen once described our practice of political economy as the study of Africa without any economics and little reference to politics. Our focus tended to be on the global issues raised by Andrew Gunder Frank's theory of underdevelopment (1967) and on the possibilities of realising socialist development in Africa. Politics and state policies initially were to be explained by identifying the interests of classes, or fractions of the capitalist class: agrarian, bureaucratic, or commercial; international, comprador, or national. National class alliances and state policies tended to be explained by the ways in which they did or did not fit in to the strategies of capitalist imperialism. Marxists preceded rational choice theorists in their tendencies to reductionism.
The Review was committed to continuing national liberation struggles against imperial governments in Sahara, Eritrea, Zimbabwe, the Portuguese colonies, and Namibia, and to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and gave space to them and to others in its regular Briefings. These movements claimed the radical credentials born of periods of extended, armed struggle and declared their commitments to socialism or even Marxist-Leninism. With the benefit of hindsight, the leaders appear to share the concerns of modernising nationalists in other countries. Had we inquired more critically into the ways they prosecuted their military and political struggles and looked behind their declared objectives before they came to power, we might have been better placed to understand their subsequent policies and institutions.
We grounded consideration of theoretical issues in empirical studies, published documents, and created space for political debates. We were slow to place gender relations at the centre of our agenda. We lacked enough ethnographic studies and attention to the longue duree of historical changes to appreciate fully the complexities of social relations and the intractability of changing the legacies of policies and institutions which tended to perpetuate themselves, often behind the backs of policy-makers.
The Review did not stand still. Over the last twenty-five years, the editors have addressed some of the original lacunae, sustained a wide-ranging coverage of all the regions of the continent, and taken up the critical questions arising from the generalisation of structural adjustment policies across Africa, the significant if partial gains for democratic politics, and the impact on the continent of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
From the outset, the editors were divided on theoretical issues and their political implications. Authors questioned the orthodoxies of the left and the right, though not without provoking some bitter political arguments among the editors. At a workshop in Sheffield, at which the founding of the journal was broached, east Africanists tended to see merit in Giovanni Arrighi and John Saul's theory of the ‘labour aristocracy’ (1973); west Africanists, notably those who had studied west African workers at first hand, such as Adrian Peace (1976) were sceptical. These differences cut across the intellectual divides between left and right, as was illustrated by the debates over the real wages of Nigerian workers in the period before and after independence (Cohen, 1974:1890–215, for discussion and full references). Rival opinions may have reflected differences in the timing of independence and of the rise and fall of workers' real wages, and the mechanisms by which they came about in different countries.
Contributions to ROAPE by Andrew Coulson, Philip Raikes and Henry Bernstein were among the first to question the viability of Tanzania's policies of ujamaa socialism and villagization from the left, to emphasise their colonial antecedents, and to identify the stateís concern to extend its sway over the countryside (1975, 1977; 1975; 1977, 1980). Paul Kennedy, Nicola Swainson and Bjorn Beckman challenged the dismissal of the capacities of African capitalists for autonomous class action and productive investment by African capitalists (1977; 1977; 1980, 1981, 1982). Chris Allen and Morris Szeftel raised key questions about the significance of the transitions to multi-party politics and laid out frameworks for how to understand spoils politics in Africa and how not to do so (1995; 1998).
The themes that ROAPE pursued from the outset continue to be relevant to understanding policy debates in Africa. Arrighi and Saul's theory of the ‘labour aristocracy’, stated in different language, is at the centre of Robert Bates's inclusion of the working class in ‘the development coalition’ (1981:121) and of the World Bank's arguments against trade unions and state interventions in labour markets. Bates selectively constructs the historical evidence to argue that this coalition of manufacturing, mining, trade union and bureaucratic interests promoted the nationalisation of agricultural marketing, the taxation of peasants and a policy of supplying food cheaply to the cities at the expense of the interests of rural people and the urban unemployed.
Bates' work complemented Berg's Report on Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa for the World Bank, which exposed the faults of the interventionist marketing and pricing policies of African governments and laid out a policy manifesto for the 1980s (World Bank, 1981). The Berg Report obscured the World Bank's contributions to funding state spending, enhancing debts, and promoting expensive and ineffective rural development projects, which provided profits for consultants and contractors but did little for agricultural production or rural people.
Authors debated in ROAPE the necessity or otherwise, and the consequences of, structural adjustment policies and new forms of globalisation. The limitations of ‘import substitution’ as a strategy for growth, continued dependence on primary exports, profligate state spending, widespread peculation, rising oil prices, easy access to commercial loan finance, all left governments unable to repay their debts and confronted by high real interest rates and stagnant or declining export revenues. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as receivers of bankrupt governments, now had the leverage to require governments to liberalise foreign exchange, foreign trade and internal markets and to sell off state assets (Williams, 1994; Bracking, 1999). Ironically, just when analysts abandoned theories of dependency, economies and governments in Africa and in Latin America found themselves more dependent on external markets and subordinated to the requirements of international agencies than ever before.
The costs of structural adjustment, like the costs of the economic policies that preceded them, fell particularly on the wage and salary earners. Initiatives to reduce foreign debts and protect the poor have not enabled governments to shift their budgets from debt servicing to spending on health or education. Left-wing critics of the international financial agencies tend to be bereft of alternatives to structural adjustment other than the statist policies, which had encouraged the demand for imported manufacturing and agricultural products and lavishly rewarded those with access to foreign currency or imported goods at official exchange rates or controlled prices.
US and other corporations draw up the rules of world trade agreements to suit their interests; they continue to protect their own markets and to subsidise grain exports, undermining the capacity of African countries to produce grains in which they have a comparative advantage. Critics of the World Trade Organization divide into those who wish to make the rules governing international trade free and fair, and those who wish to opt out of global markets as far as possible (OXFAM, 2002a, |OXFAM, |2002b; Shiva, 2002; Williams, 2002). Radical opponents of globalisation appear to be reverting to the demands for economic autarchy, which were implied in earlier theories of underdevelopment.
On how not to study Africa
Africa and Africans are widely interpreted as working according to different rules from the rest of humankind. The continent is presented as increasingly marginal to the international economy, characterised by failed states, tribal conflicts, and a culture of corruption, and in need of external succour through aid and development.
Exceptionalist explanations of the histories of Africa since independence take different forms. Cultural explanations focus on negative images. Many African governments are very corrupt and suffer from tribalism. African culture encourages and legitimates tribalism and corruption. The circularity of the argument is evident.
Afrocentrism privileges its understandings of the continent and its people, rooted in the experiences of Africans or people of African origin, over the Eurocentric perspectives, from which Africanists construct Africa as the ‘other’ to the European experience. Afrocentric perspectives may recognise the wide diversity of the societies of Africa and its diasporas; they, too, tend to construct for Africa a distinctive culture, premised on the communal values of ujamaa or ubuntu which nationalist politicians refashioned to their own purposes.
A radical view interprets Africa and Africans as victims of past imperial exploitation and present economic dependence. Africans were subject to — and also active participants in — the trans-Atlantic, Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slave trades. Colonial powers marked out the territorial boundaries within which colonial states and their successors claimed to exercise a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. International financial institutions impose economic policies and rules of governance. Firms compete for contracts and resources by paying commission to African beneficiaries and their international agents. Multinational firms, international financial agencies, African governments, businessmen, and arms dealers share responsibility for economic crimes, the burdens of debt, and political violence. To focus only on the imperial side of this axis is patronising and absolves Africans from complicity.
These different perspectives assume uncritically the uniformity of diverse African societies, and their complex histories, beliefs and institutions, and their differences from any others. If we define Africa as exceptional, we deny our capacity to make more than a marginal contribution to the study of other continents.
Generalising social sciences make the opposite claim. They dissolve any regional specificities into comparative propositions. The new political economy constructs theorems from axiomatic assumptions and applies them across historical, cultural and institutional contexts. ‘Rationality’ refers to the choice of means to realise a given end; it is not clear what could be a ‘rational end’. Without some criterion for defining ends as rational and delimiting the values, resources and institutional arrangements that shape peopleís diverse choices, we cannot escape what Joan Robinson called the ‘impregnable circularity’ of the concept of utility: ‘utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to but commodities shows that they have utility’ (1964:48). The new political economy thus falls back on counting money, or votes as a proxy for utility. The rationality of choice is defined by its institutional context. So the ‘new institutionalism’ comes back round to where the old institutionalism left off and ‘historical institutionalism’ recognises their historical origins and continuing legacies.
Rational choice theory has drawn attention to the problems of collective action, in which free riders leave it to others to achieve common goals and each appropriates common resources at the cost of all. It identifies the difficulties that principals have in getting their agents to carry out their instructions. These assumptions may explain some significant phenomena, such as the elaboration of patron-client relations or the difficulties encountered by the international financial agencies in imposing ever more complex conditions on reluctant governments. Public choice theory points to the ways in which the interests of officials or politicians in securing re-election or extending the scale or scope of their domains take precedence over considerations of public interest. Students of African, or any other, politics had generally worked all this out for themselves without needing an overarching theory to which to pin their explanations.
A society founded on self-interested utility-maximising behaviour is no society at all. What may be most interesting about rational choice models, like statistical and other models, is not what they can explain with their parsimonious or limiting assumptions but what they cannot explain: why people bother to vote at all, even in ‘safe’ electoral constituencies; how rural people manage access to common resources; why as Anne Whitehead (1994) observes, mothers have different commitments to meeting the needs of members of their families than fathers.
To explain interventionist economic strategies, Bates combined the pursuit of economic interests by political means with the dominant doctrines of post-war development economists and the concerns of state officials to extend their effective control of rural people. Explanations in terms of interests cannot stand on their own but must be contextualised with reference to ideas and institutions: to all the social relations of production.
Scholars and international agencies have sought to make empirical generalisations across N cases to identify the correlates of democracy or the relations between structural adjustment and economic growth. The measures used are often of questionable provenance, dependent on subjective judgements, or presented to conform to the requirements of policy makers. As the contrasting experiences of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire since independence show, the attributes of any country will vary according to the date when they are measured and the period over which changes are observed. The answers depend on what questions you ask, what counter-factuals are assumed, and when you ask them. The comparative study of politics cannot escape the difficulties of comparing like with unlike, which become more and not less intractable the greater the number of cases being considered.
Culturalist, rationalist and causal explanations are logically closed. Comparisons across societies are not grounded in overarching homologies, which specify identical processes at work through different instances. They work through analogies, which are always partial and raise interesting questions precisely where they break down. The point of models of any kind is not to sweep up a range of cases into a generalising basket but to enable us to make better sense of particulars by thinking more clearly about the logics of the processes which shaping them.
Historical explanations should be open-ended, always allowing for complexity and contingency. They can recognise contingency and agency and appreciate and make sense of the achievements of people who find ways to make a living and to make intellectual sense of their lives, often under very difficult circumstances.
On the importance of studying Africa
In the historical and social sciences, with the revealing exception of social anthropology, the study of Africa has always been marginalised to the exotic fringes of the disciplines. Studies of Africa have pioneered analytic approaches to the historical and social sciences. The study of Africa extends our understanding of nationalisms and decolonisation; of economic development strategies, international agencies and their limitations; of ethnicities and nationalisms; and of electoral politics and political transitions; of free and unfree labour; of agrarian capitalisms and peasantries.
African nationalists collaborated in the uneasy process of decolonisation through which they realised their ambitions to inherit the colonial state. Colonial development planning provided the template and institutions for the policies of independent governments and the international ‘development community’. Since independence, ministries of colonial affairs have been transmuted into ministries for development aid and colonial relationships have been multilateralised through the Lomé.
Conventions and the subordination of governments to the fiscal authority and policies of the international financial agencies. International non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their national counterparts extended the work of the missions, and inherited their necessary but uneasy need to work with governments.
African economies show the limits of import-substitution strategies of economic growth and the inherent problems of escaping dependence on primary exports. They also demonstrate the difficulties of imposing liberal economic reforms and managing political transitions from without. Critical studies, from different analytical vantage points, have revealed how private and official interests, the concern to extend the reach of state authority, policy discourses, and the perpetuation of institutional continuities have prevented projects and policies from achieving their goals.
The rise of nationalisms, of communal conflicts and even civil wars in Europe led to the revival of studies of ethnicities and nationalisms in Europe. These themes were long familiar from studies, firstly by anthropologists and sociologists, and then by historians and political scientists, writing on Africa. Colonial governors may have invented tribes. African elites were actively involved in forming new community and pan-ethnic identities, which responded to the needs of people to make sense of their different experiences and to pursue their political and economic interests. African subjects demanded their own chiefs, with the status and authority to operate effectively within the colonial political arena. Nationalist leaders had to imagine the new ‘nations’ in whose name they claimed the right to political authority.
The opening of elections to competition among parties and presidential candidates in the 1990s produced a variety of party configurations, including dominant-party, three-party and fragmented systems. Nigeria provides case studies of both parliamentary and presidential systems of government, and their limiting conditions. The politics of Niger between 1992 and the military coup d'etat of 1996 reveals the classic problems of cohabitation between President, Prime Minister and legislature in the absence of a presidential parliamentary majority. Senegal offers an example of a managed transition from one-party rule to multi-party representation.
We can examine South Africa as a transfer of power from a white minority government to majority rule. It was also a classic ‘elite pact’, in which the apartheid regime could not address the sustained economic crisis, which began in 1981, without negotiating a transition to a democratically elected government. The economic situation, the problems of dealing with it, and the possibilities of a democratic solution were all shaped by changes in international circumstances, to which developments in South Africa itself were often marginal. Africa provides rich materials for a properly comparative study of politics in its historical and international context.
Studies of migrant labour in Africa revised classic liberal and marxist conceptions of ‘capitalism’ as a system of ‘free labour’. The South African mining industry, like that in Southern Rhodesia, had to find labour that was ‘both plentiful and cheap’. They evaded the laws of supply and demand by drawing far and wide for their labour, taking advantage of legal compulsion and controlling workers lives by the compound system. Migrant labour was reproduced in the countryside, and provided the means to sustain rural livelihoods and institutions. Studies of Africa showed that unfree forms of labour are not a relic of feudalism but always have been, and continue to be, integral to capitalism, in Europe and the USA as much as in Africa. The histories of Africa reveal most starkly how, from its origins, capitalism has always recruited and controlled labour on a global scale.
Similarly, studies of the complex forms of rent, share and labour tenancy in Kenya and South Africa identified social relations of a distinctly non-capitalist kind at the centre of settler agriculture and showed up the falsity of evolutionary models of the development of capitalist agriculture. These studies can inform and complement the work of historians on the emergence within capitalism of sharecropping systems in the south of the USA, of Italy and of Spain, and in the agrarian relations of the Andean latifundios.
Studies of the forms and limits of differentiation among African peasant producers provide additional evidence and alternative interpretations to those set out in the debates between V.I. Lenin and the agrarian marxists and A.V. Chayanov and the neo-Populists in pre- and post-revolutionary Russia (1961; 1996). Feminist scholars undermined the terms in which these and other debates are conducted. They placed gender relations at the centre of interpretations of dowry and bridewealth; rules of inheritance; access to and control over labour, land and income; sexual mores; and priorities in allocating resources within households and wider kinship networks.
Studies of African agricultural practices in different ecological environments have questioned the commonsense equation of more people with more erosion or desertification, less land, less food, and more communal conflicts. They have exposed the misconceptions of evolutionary models of land tenure and brought a historical perspective to the varied and complex determinants of population growth, forms of land use, land tenure, food availability and vulnerability to epidemic and endemic disease. We must now enhance our understanding of Africa's gravest problems by further extending dialogues between historians, social scientists and natural scientists.
The exemplary strength of African studies is that the task of making sense of the world has called on its practitioners to be open to and to draw on a variety of analytic perspectives from different disciplinary traditions. For example we need to combine different approaches to interpreting the layered forms of gender relations. We fetter our explanations by confining them to the tramlines of a priori theories and can best advance them by adopting a methodological pluralism. There is no theoretical high road to knowledge.
On the scope for democratic citizenship
Democratic elections enable people to choose who will represent their views, interests and concerns in legislatures and other public arenas. They also enable people to decide collectively who will govern them. These may take place through the same mechanism, casting a ballot, but are not the same thing. If the purpose of democracy is simply to represent groups, interests, preferences or views, it can only rest on the atomistic foundation of individuals or groups, each pursuing and negotiating over their interests or preferences. These may coincide or overlap but provide no reason, other than force majeure, for people to accept decisions that go against their interests.
The realisation of the aims of representative democracy requires that its forms are grounded in the shared institutions of a common citizenship, which in turns raises the question of who are to be recognised as citizens and on what terms. If the state is, as Weber says, ‘a compulsory association which organises domination’, it cannot make any contractual claim on our consent to its commands (1998:82–83). The democratic justification for accepting its authority can only arise out of our common obligation to our fellow citizens to accept the rules that enable us to live together in society.
Evolutionary models enable us to bring order and significance to social facts but at the expense of begging questions about the complex ways in which they may be recombined or decomposed. The literature on democratisation frames it as a series of stages, which can be identified so that institutional arrangements can be put in place to consolidate democracy or ward off the dangers of reversal. The politics of democracy is not like a game of snakes and ladders, in which eventual progress, with occasional assistance towards the final end, is interrupted by long slides backwards to the start. T.H. Marshall identified the evolution of three forms of citizenship: civic, political and social (1992). He also recognised that they each defined one another and that their achievement could not be taken for granted.
Democracy is not a state of being; citizenship is not an end state. Both are Ideas, whose essential conditions and relations to one another are a matter for ‘permanent dialogue’ (Todorova, 2002). They also refer to complex and often contradictory processes of becoming. As Laurence Whitehead has shown, transitions from authoritarian to democratic government are shaped by the dramatic interplay of words, intentions, coincidences and outcomes, which often emerge from behind the backs of the dramatis personae (2002). The metaphor of the play can only be taken so far: this play lacks an author to fix the text for the actors and it must go on without reaching a dramatic resolution.
Citizenship and democracy have historically been limited to specific classes, status groups and races and defined by gender. Claims to recognition of full citizenship and to engage in defining and exercising the rights of citizens were contested and resisted at every stage. This is evident from the continuing, varied and never completed struggles for the rights of women. As McFadden argues, women and men are only ever becoming citizens (2003). How men and women, or people of different races, or classes become citizens, and what this means in practice, depends on their relations with one another, with the markets in which they participate, and the states that rule them.
Only in 1965 did the movements of Afro-Americans to achieve their civil, political and social rights finally enable the United States to meet the minimal conditions for the democratic citizenship. The rights guaranteed by the US Constitution and recognised in international law do not today extend to its sovereign base area, to the countries it occupies, to citizens of other countries or of the USA itself. The British government subjects foreigners to, and does not protect its citizens from, arbitrary and indefinite imprisonment. As these examples show, democratic citizenship must a continuing battle to spell out its claims and conditions, to hold those in power accountable for their actions, to protect the liberties of citizens, to secure their effective political representation and to give people a say over decisions which affect their lives and the rules by which they are governed.
Politics, says Weber, ‘is a strong and slow boring of hard boards’ (1998:128). So is the struggle to create and sustain the conditions for democratic politics. Certain of these enable democratic decisions by limiting their scope. They create a framework of broadly accepted constitutional conventions and reciprocal respects for the rights of citizens. These need to be embedded in everyday political practice if they are not to be employed selectively by those in or out of power. The problems are how to reach agreement on the rules in the first place and to persuade people of the importance of adhering to them, even when it is against their interests (Williams, 2004a).
On the need to understand the world, not to change it
Current arrangements to enumerate the value of research create incentives to fit intellectual work to the dominant trends within ‘the discipline’ and its methodological protocols. Space is allowed within the funding regime for ‘inter-disciplinary’ research but that is not the same thing as defining our research methods by the intellectual problems that we have set ourselves. We are less able then before to define our own problems, whether they are of a practical or theoretical nature. Public institutions fund research that accords with the priorities of the potential ‘users’ of our work and makes it difficult to question their motives and actions.
Debates about the merits of different policies have tend to take as given the goal of ‘development’. Policy debates are framed by the idea of development. The issues are still how to balance the competing claims of growth, equity and efficiency and how to realise these goals. Socialism is justified as a fairer and more effective means of realising the goals of development.
Development is an ideological project, which is manifest in numerous practices. As Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton have shown (1976), the dual conception of development as a process and as a telos derives most particularly from August Comte (1875–76). Comte aimed firstly, to apply the methods of the natural sciences to the empirical study of society and history, and represent their findings in mathematical form; secondly, to apply the knowledge of experts to promote human progress and devise a proper order of society: to understand the world in order to change i! The state and its agents act as the ‘trustees’ of development. The combination of immanent process with an historical telos, under the trusteeship of the party to direct the state was central to the politics of Leninism. Comte, Lenin and the World Bank all inherited Saint-Simon's vision of turning ‘the government of men into the administration of things' (1975; cf. Nove, 1983:32–33).
Development extended to Africa a social democratic conception of the responsibility of the state to promote the public interest. It promoted state centralisation, supported by the transfer of external funds, and an unsustainable expansion of government activities. The failures of the state to realise its promised goals led to the imposition of liberal economic strategies and to a counter-discourse of ‘participation’, and ‘empowerment’, elaborated most particularly by NGOs as trustees for an alternative development.
Radical intellectuals share with development agencies, policy institutes and nongovernmental organisations an orientation to realising future plans. They start from the wrong end by postulating a desired state of affairs and then working back to the present. This assumes a degree of control over the social landscape that is likely to be lacking. It depends on the ability to get beneficiaries to act in accordance with the policies devised for them by their betters, which is unrealistic and sits uneasily with any commitments to ‘participation’ or ‘empowerment’. Policy interventions are but one of many processes at work. These operate across a multiplicity of periods and spaces, and produce unanticipated responses and divergent and unforeseen chains of consequences. The one thing we can reasonably predict is that things will not turn out as we expect.
Policy-making is primarily a discursive activity. It is engaged in for its own sake, with little immediate regard for the world beyond. It is framed by its own rules and shaped by its characteristic metaphors. Its language is drafted with an eye to current fashions among locally and internationally powerful institutions. Its standardised forms are ill equipped to manage diverse and complex situations. Implicit assumptions, everyday practices, and institutional interests are more likely to shape the ways in which policies are implemented than are the declared intentions of policy-makers. New governments confront the same problems of establishing their authority and carrying out their routine activities as their predecessors did with, at best, much the same organisational equipment. Not surprisingly, they do many of the same things.
A better approach is to study ‘really existing’ policies: the historical processes in which policy makers, private interests, and public officials interact to produce outcomes that are often at variance with the intentions of any of them. This will not produce a coherent and planned programme of action directed towards achieving clearly defined goals. The empirical study and of past and contemporary policies, their implementation and outcomes might allow those who are responsible for making and implementing policies to make better judgements as to which courses of action to follow (Williams, 2004b).
Where do our own responsibilities lie? Max Weber spelt out the dilemma. We cannot have it both ways, as policy makers, developmentalists and marxist intellectuals, like we who founded of the Review of African Political Economy, have all wanted to do. We must choose which of the warring gods we wish to serve. Those who would engage with the daimon of politics and policy cannot expect to be judged by the validity of their ultimate ends but should be prepared to accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions (1991:125–127). The Faustian demand is awesome, since we cannot know in advance what these outcomes might be. For those who wish to follow the calling of science, our duty is to act consistently in accordance with the demands of intellectual integrity (1991:152–156) — a path which in these times demands as much moral courage and personal commitment as the political alternatives.