Have the social classes of yesterday vanished from Africanist issues or are African societies made up of new classes? A French anthropologist’s perspective Translated title: Les classes sociales d'hier ont-elles disparues des problématiques africanistes ou la réalité africaine est-elle formée de nouvelles classes ? Le point de vue d'un anthropologue français

ABSTRACT

The concept of social class and how it relates to the African context was theorised in France during the 1960s and 1970s in Africanist sociology and anthropology. The author summarises the major contributions of these works as well as providing his own analysis. He concludes that the variety of empirical data and the abrupt shifts in societal evolution of the continent over the past century have unfortunately dictated a speculative and quasi-experimental use of the concept of class in much of the literature. He also comments on the interventions on class that were published in ROAPE and its blog, Roape.net, in recent years.

RÉSUMÉ

Le concept de classe sociale et les possibilités de son application ont été introduits dans la sociologie et l'anthropologie françaises au cours des années 1960–70. L'auteur présente les contributions les plus importantes de ces travaux et offre ses propre réflexions sur cette question. Il conclut que la variété des données empiriques et les changements brutaux qu'ont manifestées les évolutions sociétales du continent africain au cours du XXe siècle ont malheureusement débouché sur une utilisation spéculative et quasi-expérimentale du concept de classe. Enfin il intervient dans les discussions qui se sont déroulées sur ce thème ces dernières années dans ROAPE et sur son blog ROAPE-net.

Main article text

In January 2016 I received an invitation, which sadly I could not accept, to participate in a panel discussion at the third ‘Young researchers in African Studies’ conference, held that month in Paris. The title of the discussion was ‘Social class, knowledge production and African societies’, but the discussion was in fact postponed until June 2016, when it was due to conclude the seminar ‘Anthropology, Marxism and politics’ at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Due to my continued unavailability I drafted a brief note to be read out. Given that the following text is based upon that note, it does not reflect any discussions at the seminar. I have not, however, received any written report of the proceedings. Note also that the text was aimed initially at young French researchers largely unfamiliar with the theoretical, or indeed empirical, history of African Studies in the second half of the 20th century.

As a regular reader of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE), I read with great interest Henning Melber’s piece on the African middle classes (Melber 2017), having already encountered similar works in the French-language literature (see Jacquemot 2012; Darbon and Toulabor 2014). I have therefore included analysis both from the article by Joël Noret (2017) (whom I met and corresponded with), and from Pnina Werbner’s article (2018) on relations between class and culture. Other contributions in ROAPE on the nature of current African capitalism (Ouma 2017; Chitonge 2018) saw me partially reworking my note for the journal’s anglophone readers, who I hope will understand my retrospective views despite the different frames of reference stemming from our particular traditions.¹

A personal perspective forged over half a century

Although heavily influenced for a quarter of a century (1960–1985) by Marxist or Marxisant thought, the key French-language Africanist literature remains unknown to the vast majority of anglophone researchers.² I collaborated in the 1970s with D. Seddon to better this knowledge. See our introduction (Copans and Seddon 1978) to his anthology (Seddon 1978). As a critical, indeed self-critical, researcher, I was a prominent exponent of this Marxist anthropology, and I suspect that this paper may at times appear esoteric to any economists or political scientists among its readers.³ I should also mention that, while highly visible in French-language Latin American studies (see, for example, Pierre Salama, Bruno Lautier, Jaime Marquès-Pereira), the Marxist tradition symbolised by ROAPE has never enjoyed a particularly strong presence in French-language African Studies.

The virtual disappearance of Marxist theorisation throughout French social sciences during the past quarter of a century explains why references to the concept of social class have become extremely rare. However, as noted also by Noret, since the early 2000s the sociology of French society has reinstated the concept of class, if not necessarily the Marxist conceptual framework of means of production or class struggle. This reinstatement seems to be a response to the economic crisis caused by the reshaping of production (e.g. outsourcing, deindustrialisation, and high levels of unemployment). Without space to discuss the ROAPE articles in depth, I would, however, endorse Noret’s proposal for a multi-dimensional class analysis. The latter cites Chapter 2 of Conversations with Bourdieu by M. Burawoy and K. Von Holdt (2012).⁴

In his discussion of Bourdieu’s analysis of class relations, Noret is less detached and less sceptical than the British sociologist. Some of Bourdieu’s conceptualisations are not appropriate here, given he fails to address two crucial dimensions; the first is linked to the empirical gathering of data and the second is the theoretical synthesis of class relations. Bourdieu’s concept of field is plural but also, in a sense, unilateral: it exhibits no totalisation dynamic. In contrast, one needs the societal concepts of social formation, and especially mode of production, in order to capture relations that are both multi-dimensional and articulated under the twin determinants of economic exploitation and social and political domination. The second dimension concerns the relations of production, the (famous) purely economic determination of last resort. The former is the social relations of productive life and the social relations of the reproduction of the conditions of that life and those of everyday social life. These explain why developing the labour force concept embodying analysis of all types of labour (waged, unwaged, family, servile, informal etc.) embedded in elementary anthropological relations is vital, yet utterly disregarded by Bourdieu.

While it is possible to understand the appeal and value of expanding the productive bases (often overly crude and dogmatic) of classical Marxist analysis, the underestimation of this broad aspect (production, labour) in the making of every society leaves no articulation point for analysis of the consciousness, ideologies and symbolic or cultural superstructures which animate class consciousness and class struggle. In practice, these superstructures possess no homogeneity, their fragmentation and complexity clearly linked to an infinite variety of productive and reproductive forms, as evinced in contemporary African societies.

Peter Gutkind invited me in 1976 to contribute to a collective work on African working-class history (Gutkind, Cohen, and Copans 1978), which led to me becoming the French specialist on this for a quarter of a century. Following my debating one of his papers published in Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines (Gutkind 1975; Copans 1975), Gutkind translated and published a previous paper of mine in an anthology he produced with P. Waterman (Copans 1977a; Gutkind and Waterman 1977), he helped me to integrate in his scientific and activist networks (notably R. Boyd, R. Cohen, R. Munck, P. Waterman, E. Webster and others). The 1980 Montreal conference played an important role in this collective thrust (Copans 1987b), as did the literature discussed by Pnina Werbner and my subsequent collaboration with many researchers cited in her bibliography. The French came late to this area, partly due to the translation of E. P. Thompson’s masterpiece only appearing in French in 1988, but also to the strong Eurocentric Marxist views in the French sociology of labour. Regrettably, Werbner overlooks one of the most significant researchers of the 1970s, the South African sociologist Eddie Webster; the latter invited me to the 1985 congress of South African sociologists (then all more formally Marxist than I was!). I translated Paul Lubeck (also neglected by Werbner!), Robin Cohen, Paschal Mihyo and Belinda Bozzoli for the journal Politique Africaine. Despite my open disagreement with his writings, which are far from Marxist class analysis, I subsequently reviewed Mahmoud Mamdani’s Citizen and subject (Mamdani 1996; Copans 1998) and translated it into French (Citoyen et sujet, Mamdani 2004).

Published under the pseudonym Jean Floret, my first article (Floret 1964) was a critical review of two works on the class nature or otherwise of African societies: Sociologie de la nouvelle Afrique by J. Ziegler (1964), a radical Swiss sociologist, and Les classes sociales en Afrique noire by R. Barbé, a member of the French Communist party (Barbé 1964). I note in passing that this article appeared in Sous le drapeau du socialisme, the monthly journal of the Alliance Marxiste Révolutionnaire, one of the tendencies of the Fourth (Trotskyist) International!⁵ This preoccupation with the concept of class would follow me – episodically, I admit – to the present day and this particular paper. The various social milieus I have studied over the past 50 years include a Muslim peasantry of a Muslim brotherhood, the Muridiya, producing a cash-crop (groundnuts) in Senegal (Copans 1972b, 1988d [1980], 2000; see also the works of the late D. Cruise O’Brien who conducted fieldwork on this brotherhood in the same period); African, and later Senegalese, industrial workers (Agier, Copans, and Morice 1987; Copans 1987a); social groups within state bureaucracies (Copans 2001); the domestic entrepreneurs of Kenya (Copans 1995b) and Senegal. These were all first captured empirically, either by synthesising the available literature on the relevant social class or category or by conducting my own field surveys. On occasion, as the circumstances or demands of my research dictated, I also focused on the idea or concept of class, and more precisely on the African working classes, necessary to develop a concept inspired by Marxism to capture a group that is in statistical terms symbolic of African social settings.

Latterly I have set these classes in their societal context, using such concepts as mode of production, social formation, or more simply society and, of course, class struggle. The peasants of Senegal’s Mouride brotherhood, industrial workers, public servants or domestic entrepreneurs were never reduced to an isolated, often meaningless, conglomeration of statistics. Use of the term class explicitly involves a recourse to ideas of relations, struggle, global society and even of a state-managed society. It is also a particularly complex exercise, as homogenous, comparable empirical data are never available for every social group in a given nation-state at a precise moment in its history (for a global societal approach, see Copans 1991a, 1992). Latterly, this reflective dynamic led me to examine all the competing forms of labour and employment alongside the salariat, whether more or less pre-capitalist in origin, or specific to the peripheral capitalisms of the African continent. After observing the highly destructive effects of the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s, I drew attention to a classic involution of the salariat (private and public), a phenomenon already then becoming apparent in the most highly developed capitalist formations of the centre (Copans 1997, 2010).

Social class is a classic concept in sociology, but not simply in Marxist sociology

The concept of social class relates to a social/societal entity, in particular to the nature of the link that articulates the classes, sets them in a hierarchy and opposes them one to another, as in a mode of production or a social formation (see Gurvitch 1966). A preferred field of observation, however, is the dynamic of their relations, described as class struggle by Marxisants, including some who view that struggle as the prime instrument of class identification and class construction. Although by definition related to the study of capitalist society (bourgeoisie and proletariat), social classes are also prone to divide and even multiply as intermediate classes emerge (for example, the middle classes).

These interpretations were strongly promulgated within Marxism during the second half of the twentieth century, leading to their ideological and political use, particularly within Third World independence or communist movements (as in China, Vietnam or Latin America). However, the weak capital base of European colonisation in part explains the over-ideologisation of these interpretations when applied to the societies of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the difficulty of capturing them empirically through sociological or statistical research.⁶

In the past quarter of a century contemporary sociology has featured strong challenges to the need for an a priori framework, whether national or global, to explain social evolution, including questioning the relevance of the idea of society (Touraine 1981; Dubet and Martuccelli 1998). The emergence of sociologies based increasingly on the social actor viewed as a lone individual with plural identifications (Boudon 1979; Martuccelli and de Singly 2009), or on concepts relativising the determinism of these types of classification (Bourdieu 1979), has produced a valorisation of alternative approaches that have marginalised the use of the class concept in analysing societies, developed, underdeveloped or even emerging.

Social class in 20th-century African societies (1950–1970)

In the inter-war period, French social sciences made only sporadic use of the concept of class in analysing colonial African societies, due partly to the dominant ethnological conceptualisation of these societies, and partly to the industrial and urban fragility of the French colonial regime. Not until after the Second World War did social classes first appear in studies of towns and political mobilisation (Balandier 1965; Mercier 1954, 1965) or development (Dumont 1962; Delbard 1966; Copans 1966). In contrast, communist and Marxist researchers or militants (Suret-Canale 1958; Barbé 1964) showed no such hesitation, given the concept also served to mobilise nationalist or revolutionary African intellectuals and militants (see especially the writings of independence leaders in Ghana, Guinea, Mali, the Portuguese colonies and East Africa in general). However, the highly ideological nature of these texts, all of them militant to some degree, undermined their use of the concepts of class and class struggle due to lack of coherent analysis and empirical understanding of the complex nature of social relations. Meanwhile sociology was in a sense ambushed by particularising hypotheses, the working class forming the empirical social class par excellence, while the other classes, especially the commercial bourgeoisie, small traders, compradors [local agents] and peasantry, are less fully conceptualised (Lloyd 1966; Amin 1967, 1969). A class-based description of all of society would result from the generalisation of this approach. In the francophone world, the most significant and controversial intervention came from Mahjemout Diop, the communist leader of the African Independence Party, in two works on Mali and on Senegal (Diop 1971, 1972; for my reviews, see Copans 1972a, 1973).

It was in social anthropology that Marxism took root in the late 1960s, with multiple modes of production allowing societies that arose from pre-capitalist modes of production predating capitalist colonisation to be described as class based (Pouillon 1976; Seddon 1978): slaves, elders and juniors, caste groups and women thus all became classes (Meillassoux 1975; Rey 1973). Research in political anthropology – historical (Terray 1974) or contemporary (Bayart 1979: as an adherent of historical sociology, the latter draws particular inspiration from M. Weber and A. Gramsci) – allowed the anthropological construction of the idea of the state, with all its implied phenomena of domination, hegemony and exploitation, plus their related classes. This was undoubtedly the domain where the Marxist imagination developed to its fullest extent, thereby fuelling debate but also to an endless stream of violent polemics between … Marxists! (See especially the reviews of Meillassoux’s Femmes, greniers et capitaux by M. Godelier, P. Bonte, S. Amin, or again C. Coquery-Vidrovitch.)

Societal de-structuration and structural adjustment; social classes confront the nation-state and ethnicity (1980–1990)

The combination of common sociological empirical classification of social groups with the crude statistical data of the type collected by the Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE)⁷ gave the impression for over a quarter of century that, when combined with a macro-economic theory like Marxism, African capitalist modernisation had indeed produced social classes of some kind.

These imaginary edifices were destroyed by the structural adjustments of the 1980s, although critiques based around core sociological and anthropological principles attempted to identify totalising social organisations within ‘nation-states’ and so-called ethnicities (Copans 1978a, 1981). During the 1980s, I became involved in several such initiatives, which culminated in an accidental paradox. By compiling a transnational synthesis of all available studies, it was possible to sketch an ‘African’ societal entity inspired by our Western conceptions of national societies. Yet the aggregation of categories coming from distinct national and even transnational contexts produced a kind of imaginary society, as the pluri-national and transcontinental geopolitical origins ended only with the description of imaginary societies, as the social classes and categories so listed had no real relationship of contiguity or conflict. The emerging domestic bourgeoisie of Kenya might be placed alongside the agricultural labourers or small farmers of Côte d’Ivoire, while miners were concentrated in Zaïre (now Democratic Republic of Congo) or Zimbabwe, and public servants flourished in Senegal or Ghana. Inversely, the bourgeoisie of Côte d’Ivoire might confront Zimbabwean agricultural labourers, while Ghanaian dockworkers associated with Nigerian business people and entrepreneurs.⁸

Inspired by the expression ‘the state of the whole people’, a Soviet coinage minted during the Khrushchev era in the 1960s, I suggested the idea of a statist society, placing inverted commas around the term ‘society’ or ‘statist’ as appropriate (Copans 2003, also 1988e)! In fact, the 1990s saw the dissolution of the African state and its subjection by anglophone political scientists to every possible qualifier. Yet its roles as employer-entrepreneur-arbitrator and patron of clienteles had placed it undeniably at the heart of that sociological machine for class formation initially posited by G. Balandier in 1965 (Copans 1988c). The social classes had been de facto ‘contained’ and ‘grouped’ by the state, and the dislocation of this totality in the 1980s, through external and later internal dynamics, abruptly revealed a major problem. Either the absence of a state was leading to the disappearance of the social classes (which seemed absurd to say the least), or the configuration linking the classes stemmed from dialectics and articulations that were local or regional, temporary and reversible in character, and unstable in totalising, societal or national terms. Moreover, transcontinental migration had already contributed to this fluidity in South Africa in the late 19th century, and in West Africa in the 20th century.

Consequently, domestic enterprises and public services as broadly defined (including actors in the development sector or public companies) were subject to multiple empirical surveys seeking to document the categories profiting from international aid and privatisations (see, for example, Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2007). Paradoxically, just when the societies and classes linked to the state and to business were finally coming under scrutiny, the organisational autonomy of these superstructures was so suddenly and fundamentally transformed that they were left permanently weakened (Ellis and Fauré 1995; Fauré and Labazée 2000; Roubaud 2001; Copans 1995a, 1996, 2001).

Globalisation and the renewed role of capitalism in class determination (1990–2015)

From the same period – the 1990s – onwards, research trends in development studies acquired a triple focus: a) describing and characterising the grassroots actors serving also as intermediaries between those placing orders for goods and services, those providing aid and the populations benefiting from either: brokers, agents of non-governmental organisations (national and international) and public servants can be constructed (in sociological terms) as the social bases of the state, as well as their relationships with the upper ranks, mainly expatriate, of international organisations; b) defining the place of non-national actors, and more generally of the expatriate society that since colonial times has been most active in the condensing (mainly symbolic: income and lifestyle) of social modernisation (Goerg and Raison-Jourde 2012); and c) studying the role played in this unprecedented crystallisation of social classes by two groups of networks: those of the new forms of international public action, and those of entrepreneurs and investors (Western or emerging in origin) (Cabanes, Copans, and Selim 1995; Wagner 2007).

In the 2010s, following this, sub-Saharan Africa was viewed by ‘experts’ as the new El Dorado for private investment (Severino and Ray 2010; Severino and Hajdenberg 2016; for a critical view, Solignac-Lecomte 2013). The private sector, to all intents and purposes completely cosmopolitan, is becoming a new sociological machinery; new types of proletariat are appearing, especially agricultural; the new technology sector, with its extremely highly qualified and highly educated socio-professional categories, is making unprecedented social demands; while yet more new socio-professional categories are being created by rapid increases in privatised education, public health campaigns (HIV, Ebola) and even tourism.

Lastly migrations, intra- and extra-African, are temporarily expanding the ‘societal’ field of African classes, at the peak of the hierarchy, with senior posts (public and private) in international organisations and multinational enterprises, and in its uttermost depths, with the new proletariat of undocumented migrants, who through their transfers currently form one of the major financial resources of so-called gross popular income.

Within this kaleidoscope of demographic and economic change, research attention is turning – as yet, alas, with no corresponding theoretical analysis – to a new, very Western, topic: the middle class or middle stratum (Bosc 2008; Goux and Maurin 2012). This old warhorse of Western sociology has long been recognised in the so-called emerging nations (Brazil, India, South Korea). The development of a consumer society, in enclaves if not yet en masse, overlapping non-national social fields (from above and below), is exhibited in high-performance cars, the regular use of duty-free shops, a greater recourse to new communication and information technologies, the existence of urban gated communities for nationals, and an increasing preference for expensive private services in education, health, housing and security. This universe is no longer confined to the dominant upper levels of society and is experiencing significant demographic expansion. Yet it is highly likely that these new middle classes, in origin more private than public, are no more permanent than the legions of government servants who appeared at African independence over 50 years ago (Hilgers 2013).

Some recent anglophone debates and reflections: comments from abroad

The French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA), based in Nairobi, convened a seminar in Paris in May 2019 on the theme ‘African workers: trajectories, activities and identities’. Invited to present my past experience and personal views on this subject, I reviewed recent literature in a haphazard way. Following my readings in French literature, I first concluded that recent British and (North) American handbooks and readers failed to deal adequately with the new forms of what was called the international division of labour (Fardon et al. 2012; Carrier and Gewertz 2013) in differentiating between, but also bringing together, Northern and Southern working contexts in new ways. The radical, or romantic (?) Blood and fire: toward a global anthropology of labor, edited by S. Kasmir and A. Carbonella (2014), seemed to address both the necessary comparison between various new forms of work and exploitation as well as the problematics of the disappearance, transformation and remaking of working classes, both in developed Western countries and in peripheral, underdeveloped ones. As the editors put it in their introduction, ‘The current moment of capitalist restructuring is producing a range of new social relations’ (Ibid., 4). Their central concepts seem to be ones of dispossession and difference, the simultaneous making of new forms of salaried work and the partial replacement of the older, classical forms of such labour by an unstable, disposable mass of people.

The Africanist anthropologist Ferguson had described this overall evolution in his collection of papers Global shadows (2006), demonstrating that the overall presence of capitalism (in Africa) did not mean that all the different forms of ‘modern’ labour are de facto direct relations between capital and labour. Hence, his views reinforced my interpretation of Marx’s distinction between real and formal submission of labour to capital. As Ferguson and Li put it in the abstract of their working paper ‘Beyond the “proper job”: political-economic analysis after the century of labouring man’:

The prevalence and persistence of ‘informal’, ‘precarious’, and ‘non-standard’ employment in so many sites around the world […] requires a profound analytical decentering of waged and salaried employment as a presumed norm or telos, and a consequent reorientation of our empirical research protocols. (Ferguson and Li 2018)

Going back to the colonial land alienation and dispossession, these authors try to redefine the new forms of social membership making their way through the brutal mobilities of actual labour exploitation. Like Kasmir and Carbonella, Ferguson and Li end by putting forward the major question for both radical activists and engaged social scientists: ‘What forms of politics emerge after “the century of labouring man”?’ (Ferguson and Li 2018, 16).

Even historians are rereading the social histories of the making of yesterday’s working classes. Thus Callebert (2018) has studied the Zulu dockworkers of Durban (South Africa) during the first half of the 20th century and criticises both neo-Marxist and liberal historical traditions of the 1970s–1990s for having reduced in scope the living situations of wage labourers: ‘Affirming class or race over culture, gender or everyday struggles often resulted in a metanarrative of modernization’ (Ibid., 8). This leads him to the same conclusions as his anthropological colleagues dealing with contemporary forms of employment of more than half a century later: ‘Many workers (i.e., all people who work rather than those engaged in wage or commodified labour) in Africa and the Global South thus remain invisible or are seen only as reproductive cheap wage labor’ (Ibid., 17). Such analysis obliges us to rewrite working-class history to enable it to be considered in a more contextualised social and cultural setting.

A brief transition before reviewing the ROAPE discussions: Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla, reviewing the limitations of the concept of rate of unemployment (2013), explains that this rate is meaningless when applied to underdeveloped countries because the great heterogeneity of labour and employment is reflected directly in the so-called unemployment social category. He further suggests that if no decent and salaried mode of remuneration can be foreseen in the near and the far future in these countries, other solutions than the quest for full employment must be envisioned. The poverty standards of informal labour mean that public policies and international aid should tackle such income levels as a path towards decent labour conditions whether salaried or non-salaried. These insights confirm that the working class as such (in underdeveloped countries) is made up of a collection of various forms of labouring people that cannot initially be categorised separately. An anthropological conception of social and labour relationships must therefore come first, especially in countries where the social statistics (if they exist!) used by ‘classical’ sociologists and economists are not reviewed critically by researchers of a Marxist disposition.⁹

Jörg Wiegratz of ROAPE has asked me to extend my readings to the debates published on Roape.net, in the blog section ‘Capitalism in Africa’.¹⁰ His own comments (Wiegratz 2018, with the help of Nataliya Mykhalchenko) review the disappearance of the notion, the concept or even the ordinary definition of ‘capitalism’ from the titles of the annual conferences in the last 15 years in European and international African Studies associations, as well the tables of contents of important academic journals. Only a tiny number of cases include words such as capitalism, capitalist society, classes, working class and the like. But is this to say that all the paradigms of African, and Third World (or Southern) studies have put an end to a Marxist or para-Marxist conceptualisation and reference?

It seems that two debates are mingled together and thereby obscure the issues. The first thread is that of the transformation in understanding of the makings of working classes today but also yesterday in African societies. Some contributors to the blog collection, like H. Chitonge, K. Meagher and S. Ouma, mention this analysis as a necessary departure from traditional and schematic perspectives. In an earlier collective article, K. Meagher, L. Mann and M. Bolt (2016) suggest a more mixed approach in witness to the disruption of the so-called traditional class identities; many ‘workers’ are separated from their agricultural backgrounds and have not made it into salaried work Nonetheless they are exploited by local and global capitalist relationships. Informality does not mean exclusion; on the contrary, this proliferation of precarious and unstable positions through seasonal, subcontracting, indebtedness and other forms of employment are the exact proof of efficient capitalist dynamics. The traditional conception of the salaried class does not allow for such a reconceptualisation of capitalist social and working conditions. Although N. Bernards (2018) propounds a dynamic view of ‘African labour in global capitalism’, his expression ‘irregular labour’ is misleading because the global context is the precise opposite: irregular forms, though apparently on the margins of capitalist makings, are central and dominant (to which he agrees), and therefore cannot be labelled as irregular. There is more at stake here than worrying over appropriate terms for realities.

The second thread is the regular debate between economists (and political economists) and social scientists. The critical commentators relevant to Wiegratz’s request are an anthropologist, Peter Lockwood, and a political scientist, Ann Pitcher. They both see that much field research today deals with social and cultural realities that are definitively embedded and determined in capitalist formations, but that its empirical capturing and comprehension cannot be reduced to so-called capitalistic relationships. I may add that the differences between Western types of capitalism are quite large, and that the study of contemporary African states and societies shows an even bigger set of variations. Pitcher explains this apparent shift of interest as a choice of vocabulary: ‘big’ words, written as it were with overemphatic capital letters, do not seem the proper way to explain specific historical evolutions. Lockwood’s comments are to the point, particularly his mention of Claude Meillassoux, the most active (and most read in English) French Marxist anthropologist of the 1960s to 1980s. I was a close friend of Claude, but after many disagreements he refused to talk to me for almost a decade in the 1990s and, unfortunately, he died only several weeks after we decided to collaborate again. The fundamental reason for this rupture came from a footnote comment in my 1990 book, La longue marche de la modernité africaine. (I presented the major thrust of this book at the ROAPE conference held at Warwick University in 1989: see Copans 1991c.)

My comments were in the vein I had written on for many years, namely that French and African francophone radicals and Marxists were without sound social analysis when dealing with African revolutionary matters. In the 1970s I had thus strongly criticised the Senegalese communist leader Majhemout Diop for his class analysis of Mali and Senegal (1971, 1972; Copans 1972a, 1973). Official statistics numbered 8000 salaried workers at the most in Malian society of the sixties. How could such a group become an avant-garde when it was viewed by the local people as a kind of aristocratic or civil-servant kind of working class? I wrote in my 1990 book (Copans 1990) that no revolutionary programme could be produced by listing programmatic analysis and proposals inspired for example by Meillassoux’s famous Maidens, meals and money (1975). This best-selling anthropology book (over 25,000 copies were sold in the second half of the seventies!) was extremely abstract, being read only by PhD scholars. I added that despite his personal American experience (Meillassoux studied for an MBA in the USA in the fifties), his capitalist model was far more French (including a colonial experience and an important public sector) than American, which was then – and still is – the standard private and multinational model. P. Lockwood is of course not at all aware of this personal anecdote but I must add that from an anthropologist’s, Marxist and, I must add, French point of view, his comment above seems to the point.

The classes are in a state of permanent renewal, yet their theorisation remains unclear and opportunist … or still very dogmatic

In summary, the following four issues merit consideration:

1. Should we compile a systematic empirical and statistical survey of the social groups and categories described and recorded in the literature, finally identifying social classes after a subsequent phase of totalisation and reflection? An inventory of this kind, however, is clearly meaningless at the level of a single nation-state or society. The available social science literature is not at all homogenous and no comprehensive picture at one moment in time (the 1970s, the 2000s, today) can be drawn of all the existing social, ‘ethnic’, or professional groups in such a setting. Particular conflicts or groups are analysed by various researchers, but overall syntheses are still sketchy and too general. The serious weaknesses of the administrative and demographic statistics currently prohibit any individual attempt at quantitative research.

2. Conversely, should we try to capture as precisely as possible the articulations and relations between classes, before outlining a global, totalising class configuration? This would require a differentiation between the various historical dynamics in force, whether produced by the immediate aftermath of independence in the 1960s, the adjustments of the 1980s, or the variable effects of globalisation in the 1990s. In any event a socio-political analysis of all forms of conflict, peaceful or violent, is another necessary methodological preliminary.

3. Here, we must turn to the concepts and theoretical frameworks of the social sciences, required both to decide on a mode of approach – 1) or 2) – or a combination of both, and in particular to select the field of the dynamic and constructivist determinations of the societal entities. Should we adhere to the trends dominant in the early 21st century, emphasising individualism (sociology) or identity and ethnicity (anthropology)? Or should we try to remain Marxist and stay true to the preconditions of these approaches in terms of class modernisation or class struggle? In other words, do we require the societal field to designate, identify and indeed describe the classes or embryonic classes, or is it sufficient to construct thematic fields that neither correlate to the old disciplinary subdivisions (economy, politics, kinship, ideology, religion) nor allow any global sociological aggregation, whether on a regional, national, pluri-national or transcontinental scale? Naturally, I refrain here from discussing the comparative effectiveness of these theoretical borrowings or elaborations, although I continue to believe that a Marxisant reflexivity remains the most pertinent.

4. Such a vision of methodological issues and tools implies further reflexivity on the day-to-day impact of so-called methodological nationalism (Beck 2014) and, more generally, on the perverse effects of the traditional division of studies by culture or continent (here African Studies). In addition, we must transcend from the start the constraints imposed by geopolitical and linguistic zones: West Africa or East Africa; francophone or anglophone Africa; or, on a continental scale, Africa versus Latin America or South-East Asia (see Lederman 2008). This approach also demands collective and ‘democratic’ research, independent of any ideological or teleological goals, since all societies would be, or would be in the process of becoming, class societies.

If, in my study of the African working classes, my reflection evolved from the 1980s to the 2000s, it is because I worked initially in a highly collaborative environment for reflection and research, and within a comparative framework on a continental scale, subsequently narrowing my comparative gaze to the Third World and so-called Southern nations, before finally transferring my attention to developed Western societies (especially France). The heterogeneous singularity of fluctuations in African proletarianisation appeared at that time to be a form of normality, also visible in India or Brazil, and from the early 21st century in the nations of the globalised centre. In the long term, the precariat (Standing 2014) has eclipsed the salariat, and processes of a continuous recomposition of class-based social identities, sometimes rapid (a single generation at most), have triumphed over the dynamics of a supposed long-term stabilisation in the class hierarchy (Copans 1997, 2010, 2014). The recurrent doubts experienced by the researcher undoubtedly serve to relativise what might be termed a conceptual sedentarity (an abstract recourse to the same concept of class regardless of time or place). Yet they do not demand that Marxist theories, colloquially speaking, must be automatically discarded with the bathwater of history, on grounds of globalised hypermodernity and continuous modernisation. If history is remodelling the classes, then social scientists must rise to the challenge of systematically constructing but also reconstructing the objects of their reflection and research.

Notes

1

In fact, I have been an on and off contributor myself: I published a book review in the third issue of ROAPE (summer 1975) and additionally over 1970–1980. I published two papers later, in 1985 and 1991. The title of the 1975 issue was ‘Classes in Africa’.

2

I use the term ‘Marxisant’ to indicate that, like ideological or political Marxism, academic Marxism is divided into several analytical traditions, none of which has the right or authority to proclaim itself the only permissible form. In any case, my own experience of the French version of Soviet and international Stalinism, militant and intellectual, in the 1960s prevented me from adopting this approach to thought and revolutionary action. I must add that I also encountered some of these bad habits among the different Trotskyist and Maoist traditions I frequented at the time. I understand that a rather different atmosphere obtained within British Marxism and ‘Communism’.

3

I refer in particular to the following half-dozen texts (Copans 1974, 1977b, 1979a, 1982, 1986, 1988a), some of which also appeared in English or in an English translation (Copans 1978b, 1979b, 1985, 1988b). This last text is a paper presented at a conference, held in Edinburgh in 1987, to which I had been invited by the late Chris Allen. For Marxism in eastern and southern African countries, see Copans 1991b.

4

Karl Von Holdt is a former trade union official and editor-in-chief of the renowned South African Labour Bulletin. He succeeded Eddie Webster in industrial sociology at the head of the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. A French editor published this book last year, in 2019, but excluded Von Holdt as a co-author and removed all his sub-chapters, with no explanation. The activist and southern thrust of the triple conversation disappears completely and the book appears to be an ordinary theoretical reading of P. Bourdieu by a world-famous sociologist. This kind of depoliticisation is quite representative of some of the new tendencies of French sociology that are more dominated by ‘non-left’ researchers and publishers.

5

I should note that such behaviour was not uncommon at that time. C. Meillassoux used a twin pseudonym in a booklet self-published in 1966 under the auspices of another Trotskyist tendency (Munzer and Laplace 1966).

6

See the two 1965 issues of the journal Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie), which published the proceedings of the 1965 meeting of the International Association of Francophone Sociologists (Association Internationale des Sociologues de Langue Française, AISLF), held in Quebec, on social classes worldwide; especially Agblemagnon (1965), Balandier (1965) and Mercier (1965).

7

INSEE is the official French statistical board which collects and uses, among others, social statistics concerning socio-professional category and income. During the 1960s a separate department, INSEE-Coopération, was set up for countries within the French sphere of influence, particularly the former African colonies.

8

Each category relates to one or more well-known monographs, mention of which is precluded here by lack of space. The best global–local study I know of is that of a French Marxist anthropologist and sociologist of Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), Martin Verlet. His study (2005) covers all the different forms of workforce from that of children, women and men in the domestic, informal and salaried sectors of a popular neighbourhood of Accra. This is a remarkable study. M. Verlet was one of the rare French social scientist specialists on Ghana.

9

I should mention the exemplary critical use of the Marxist concept of class by two young researchers who each completed a doctorate under my supervision. See David Mahut, who has published his thesis dealing with the members of the lower-middle classes of Bamako resident in Paris, which attempts to articulate a dual analysis of social class both in Mali and in France (Mahut 2017); and Abdoulaye Somparé, author of a thesis on Guinea’s working-class mining towns (Somparé 2006) that also forms the basis of an outstanding article (Somparé 2015).

10

See the ROAPE blog ‘Capitalism in Africa’ on Roape.net: in mid 2019, one could read 21 comments, and more since then. About half deal more or less with the topic of the nature of the working class vs the working classes. Let me mention those of N. Bernards, D. Bin, T. di Muzio, J. Smith, H. Chitonge, E. Macamo, K. Meagher and S. Ouma.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Elsa Paris, doctoral student from Paris Diderot, who invited me to participate in the sessions in Paris that led to this paper and agreed to read it out.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Jean Copans has been Assistant and Associate Professor of Sociology-Anthropology at EHESS (1970–90), Professor at Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens (1990–2000) and then at Université Paris Descartes (formerly Paris V, 2000–2008). He taught for one year at The Johns Hopkins University (1975–1976) and another year at Université Laval in Quebec (1977). He has directed the Centre for Research, Exchange and Scholarly Documentation (CREDU) in Nairobi, Kenya (1985–89) and travelled for academic exchanges or research in 15 other African countries including Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa. His fieldwork has been carried out in Senegal over 40 years (1967–2006). He has been on the editorial board of several journals (including Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, Politique Africaine and Revue Tiers Monde); has been a contributing editor to ROAPE from January 1981 until March 2008, when he joined the Review's International Advisory Board; and has directed three series of books between 1974 and 2005 at François Maspero, Le Sycomore and Karthala publishing houses. He is the author or editor of 20 books and a great many papers.

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