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Crises and Socialism in Tanzania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Joel Samoff
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A striking commentary on Tanzania: two respected scholars, having studied the same country, having relied largely on the same data, reach opposing conclusions. There is not only disagreement here, but confusion on the nature of change in Tanzania. There is also misunderstanding of the processes of change in the Third World more generally. The first task in the analysis of the recent Tanzanian experience, therefore, is to free ourselves of encumbrances. To make sense of what has happened we must first sort through some of the major confusions and distractions that unfortunately permeate the literature.

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The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 1981 , pp. 279 - 306
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

page 279 note 1 Lofchie, Michael F., ‘Agrarian Crisis and Economic Liberalisation in Tanzania’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), XVI, 3, 09 1978, p. 451CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 279 note 2 Green, Reginald Herbold, Toward Socialism and Self Reliance: Tanzania's striving for sustained transition projected (Uppsala, 1977), p. 24Google Scholar.

page 279 note 3 I work here with the Tanzanian view: in the capitalist world system, the former colonial states can halt their transformation into peripheral capitalist states by initiating a process of change – to be accomplished without either a violent revolution or the emergence of a powerful bourgeoisie – that will lead towards public ownership of the means of production and the absence of exploitation. This view is, of course, rejected by many students of socialism. See, for example, Mandel, Ernest, ‘On the Nature of the Soviet State’ in New Left Review (London), 108, 03–04, 1978, pp. 23–45Google Scholar, who argues that much of Africa is moving towards a class society, and that the transition to socialism is necessarily a post-capitalist process.

page 280 note 1 Green, op. cit. pp. 10–11.

page 280 note 2 Lofchie, loc. cit. p. 456. Others insist on this choice between distribution and growth. See, for example, Matango, Reuben R., ‘The Role of Agencies for Rural Development in Tanzania: a case study of the Lushoto Integrated Development Project’, in Coulson, Andrew (ed.), African Socialism in Practice: the Tanzanian experience (Nottingham, 1979), p. 172Google Scholar; and Barkan, Joel D., ‘Comparing Politics and Public Policy in Kenya and Tanzania’, in Barkan, (ed.), Politics and Public Policy in Kenya and Tanzania (NewYork, 1979), pp. 19 and 34Google Scholar.

page 281 note 1 See Arrighi, Giovanni and Saul, John S., ‘Socialism and Economic Development in Tropical Africa’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies, VI, 2, 08 1968, pp. 141–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Arrighi, and Saul, , Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (New York, 1973), pp. 11–43Google Scholar; and Amin, Samir, ‘Accumulation and Development: a theoretical model’, in Review of African Political Economy (London), 1, 08–11 1974, pp. 9–26Google Scholar.

page 281 note 2 See Clark, W. Edmund, Socialist Development and Public Investment in Tanzania, 1964–73 (Toronto, 1978), pp. 6–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 281 note 3 Cf. Hill, Frances, ‘Interdependence and De-Participation: the politics of the transnational class’, African Studies Association Annual Meeting, Boston, 1976Google Scholar.

page 282 note 1 Coulson, op. cit., Pratt, Cranford, The Critical Phase in Tanzania, 1945–68: Nyerere and the emergence of a socialist strategy (Cambridge, 1976)Google Scholar, and many of the other authors cited here, include discussions of the definition of socialism in Tanzania.

page 282 note 2 As I review these confusions it will be clear that few studies suffer from all of them, apart perhaps from the recent, and widely cited, analysis of Tanzania by Lofchie, loc. cit. which follows his ‘Agrarian Socialism in the Third World: the Tanzanian case’, in Comparative Politics (New York), 8, 3, 04 1976, pp. 479–99Google Scholar. For a review of some of the recent literature on Tanzania, see Samoff, Joel, ‘Beyond Tanzaphobia: the progress of ujamaa’, in ASA Review of Books (Boston), 5, 1979, pp. 163–9Google Scholar. For more general discussions, see Thomas, Clive Y., Dependence and Transformation: the economics of the transition to socialism (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Petras, James, Critical Perspectives on Imperialism and Social Class in the Third World (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; and the papers in Palmberg, Mai (ed), Problems of Socialist Orientation in Africa (Uppsala, 1978)Google Scholar.

page 283 note 1 The dependency literature has been much more successful as a critique of what was written previously than as a source of alternative theoretical and conceptual departures. For an effort to situate that literature and the issues raised, see Samoff, Joel, ‘Class, Class Conflict, and the State: on the political economy of Africa’, in Political Science Quarterly (New York), forthcomingGoogle Scholar.

page 283 note 2 See M. L. ole Parkipuny, ‘Some Crucial Aspects of the Maasai Predicament’, in Coulson (ed.), op. cit. p. 148.

page 284 note 1 These first three propositions are stressed by Lionel Cliffe, ‘A Non-Revolutionary Transition to Socialism?’, in Palmberg (ed), op. cit. p. 38.

page 284 note 2 There are obvious problems – though frequently ignored in the literature on Africa – in talking about the experiences of ‘Tanzania’. To the extent that ‘Tanzania’ acts, or is acted upon, it is only some (very rarely all) of the people who are involved, and so we need to be more specific. Yet, the expansion of the world capitalist system led to the identification of nation-states as major actors, and thus the global arrangement made the territorially defined entity labelled ‘Tanzania’ an arena for conflict and a locus for action. It is in this sense that ‘Tanzania’ is used here. The global system thus affected what Tanzanians did, or could do, in part by shaping their field of action.

page 285 note 1 There is an important literature concerned with crises, particularly those recurrently engendered by the contradictory motions of capitalism. See, among others, Habermas, Jurgen, Legitimation Crisis (Boston, 1975)Google Scholar; Edwards, Richard C., Reich, Michael, and Weisskopf, Thomas E. (eds.), The Capitalist System (Englewood Cliffs, 1978Google Scholar edn.), esp. ch. 12; Union for Radical Political Economics (ed), U.S. Capitalism in Crisis (New York, 1978); and Aglietta, Michel, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: the US experience (London, 1979)Google Scholar.

I am more concerned with disruptions to a prevailing flow, and responses to those disruptions – that is, with a focus on crises as part of a methodological strategy – than with the nature of the contradictions that make crises endemic to capitalism.

page 285 note 2 See especially Coulson, A. C., ‘A Simplified Political Economy of Tanzania’, Social Science Conference of the East African Universities, Dar es Salaam, 1973Google Scholar; and Iliffe, John, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A peasantry that was incorporated into a world capitalist system, and whose production decisions were conditioned by a capitalist mode of production, did not immediately become a class of rural capitalists, as Hydén, Göran stresses in Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: underdevelopment and an uncaptured peasantry (Berkeley, 1980)Google Scholar.

page 285 note 3 See Samoff, Joel, ‘Underdevelopment and its Grass Roots in Africa’, in Canadian Journal of African Studies (Ottawa), 14, 1, 1980, pp. 5–36Google Scholar.

page 286 note 1 There is terminological confusion here, since the leaders of anti-colonial movements in Africa have often been described as ‘middle class’. Many were ‘middle’ only because colonial rule prevented them from being ‘upper’, and in fact they belonged to the uppermost stratum of Africans. That makes class a relatively static description of stratification, rather than a dynamic construct for investigating the sources of change in society. As class is used here, it is defined by both rôle the production and opposition to another class in a specific historical situation.

page 286 note 2 I prefer the common sense use of the term ‘class’ at different levels of analysis to the logically more accurate, but generally more opaque, use of ‘segment’, ‘fraction’, and ‘sub-class’. Thus, in my usage here, class can refer (at the global level) to workers and owners, and (at the state level) to industrial and commercial capitalists, or to rural landowners and urban workers. For a recent contribution to the analysis of the post-colonial state, focusing particularly on the nature of the ruling class in Africa (transnational capital versus indigenous bourgeoisie), see Leys, Cohn, ‘Capital Accumulation, Class Formation, and Dependency – the Significance of the Kenyan Case’, in The Socialist Register, 1978 (London, 1978), pp. 241–66Google Scholar, and the references cited there. See also Parson, Jack, ‘Toward a Theory of the Peripheral State? Observations from Africa’, Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, 1980Google Scholar.

page 286 note 3 See Shivji, Issa G., Class Struggles in Tanzania (New York, 1976)Google Scholar.

page 287 note 1 See Clive Y. Thomas, ‘Class Struggle, Social Development and the Theory of the Non-Capitalist Path’, in Palmberg (ed), op. cit. pp. 17–37.

page 287 note 2 See Claude Ake, ‘Ideology and Objective Conditions’, in Barkan (ed), op. cit. pp. 123–4, and ‘The Congruence of Political Economies and Ideologies in Africa’, in Gutkind, Peter C. W. and Wallerstein, Immanuel (eds.), The Political Economy if Contemporary Africa (Beverly Hills, 1976), pp. 198–211Google Scholar.

page 287 note 3 See Cliffe, loc. cit. pp. 38–43.

page 288 note 1 For an overview of these foreign relations crises, and their internal impact, see Nnoli, Okwudiba, Self Reliance and Foreign Policy in Tanzania (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

page 288 note 2 I follow here Arrighi's distinction between a crisis of accumulation (a constant or falling rate of exploitation leads to a falling rate of profit as production becomes more capital intensive and thus a disincentive to make further investments) and a crisis of realisation (a rising rate of exploitation leads to a restricted base of consumption and thus an inability to sell what is produced, or to sell it at high enough prices to generate profit). Arrighi, Giovanni, ‘Towards a Theory of Capitalist Crisis’, in New Left Review (London), III, 09–10 1978, pp. 3–24Google Scholar.

page 289 note 1 For the dynamic potential of Tanzania's labour movement, and the intervention of the Government to control workers, see Bienefeld, M. A., ‘Trade Unions, the Labour Process, and the Tanzanian State’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies, 17, 4, 12 1979, pp. 553–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 289 note 2 Clark, op. cit. p. 43.

page 289 note 3 See Nyerere, Julius K., Essays on Socialism (Dar es Salaam, 1968)Google Scholar.

page 290 note 1 For an overview, see Samoff, Joel, ‘The Bureaucracy and the Bourgeoisie: decentralisation and class structures in Tanzania’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History (Cambridge), 21, 1, 01 1979, pp. 30–62Google Scholar, and the references cited there.

page 290 note 2 See Shivji, op. cit. and Samoff, ‘The Bureaucracy and the Bourgeoisie’, pp. 47–51, and ‘Class, Class Conflict, and the State’. An analysis of the same period that assigns far less importance to the Asian commercial bourgeoisie is offered by Miti, Katabaro, ‘Socialism or Nationalism: the debate about the Arusha Declaration era in Tanzania’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1980Google Scholar.

page 290 note 3 Nyerere, op. cit. pp. 38–43.

page 291 note 1 Clark, op. cit. p. 50.

page 291 note 2 Green, op. cit. pp. 24–5.

page 291 note 3 Ibid. p. 25.

page 291 note 4 Green, Towards Socialism and Self Reliance, a sequel to his ‘Tanzanian Political Economy Goals, Strategies, and Results. 1967–74: notes toward an interim assessment’, in Mwansasu, Bismarck U. and Pratt, Cranford (eds.), Towards Socialism in Tanzania (Toronto, 1979), pp. 19–45Google Scholar.

page 291 note 5 Clark, op. cit. pp. 62–5.

page 291 note 6 Nyerere, Julius K., ‘The Arusha Declaration Ten Years After’, reprinted in Coulson (ed.), p. 51Google Scholar. K. A. Malima argues that the ratio between the highest and lowest-paid salaries in 1962 was 33–40:1, and was reduced, after taxes, to 9:1 by 1975; ‘The Economy of Tanzania’, Department of Economics, University of Dar es Salaam, July 1979, p. 4. Kassim Guruli argues that the range in terms of effective consumption was reduced from 60:1 at independence to about 13:1 in the mid-1970s; ‘Development and Distribution in Tanzania’, in Loehr, W. and Powelson, J. P. (eds.), Economic Development, Poverty, and Income Distribution (Boulder, 1977), p. 74Google Scholar.

page 292 note 1 Sunday News (Dar es Salaam), 31 12 1978, p. 1Google Scholar.

page 292 note 2 Green, op. cit. p. 33.

page 292 note 3 See Samoff, , ‘The Bureaucracy and the Bourgeoisie’, pp. 36–45Google Scholar.

page 292 note 4 See Bienefeld, loc. cit. pp. 583–4; Mapolu, Henry, ‘The Organisation and Participation of Workers in Tanzania’, in The African Review (Dar es Salaam), 2, 3, 1972, pp. 382–415Google Scholar, and Mapolu, (ed.), Workers and Management (Dar es Salaam, 1976)Google Scholar; Mwapachu, Juma Volter, ‘Industrial Labour Protest in Tanzania: an analysis of influential variables’, in The African Review, 3, 3, 1973, pp. 383–402Google Scholar; and Mihyo, Paschal, ‘The Struggle for Workers' Control in Tanzania’, in Review of African Political Economy (London), 4, 11 1975, pp. 62–84Google Scholar.

page 293 note 1 Green, op. cit. p. 41.

page 293 note 2 See, among others, Lofchie, loc. cit. and the comments on this article by Raikes, Philip, ‘Agrarian Crises and Economic Liberalisation in Tanzania: a comment’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies, 17, 2, 06 1979, pp. 309–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and John Briggs, ‘Villagisation and the 1974 6 Economic Crisis in Tanzania’, in ibid. 17, 4, 1979, pp. 695–702.

page 293 note 3 Barkan, loc. cit. pp. 18–19, seems to support this interpretation, and cites the decline in food production to back his view that raising production and achieving equal distribution are incompatible, at least in the present situation.

page 293 note 4 Hydén, op. cit. stresses that the ability of peasants to withdraw from the market economy provides them with a vehicle for objecting to public policy, and in fact functions to impede or retard the improvement of the productive forces that any development strategy requires.

page 294 note 1 Lofchie, loc. cit. p. 458. There are striking parallels between the lamentations about deteriorating living standards and middle-class demoralisation in Tanzania, and the reports by U.S. journalists about Havana in the early 1960s.

page 294 note 2 It is important to note here that strategies designed to increase agricultural production tend to trade that for security of output. A shift from cassava to maize, for example, increases food production in times of adequate rainfall, but reduces output during drought. Similarly, irrigating fields can vastly improve output when water is available, but the more heavily water-dependent seed strains are not very successful when water is short. Hybrid seeds may be vastly more productive, but are also more vulnerable to particular crop blights, especially if high prices have reduced the availability of pesticides and fungicides. One of the major lessons we should learn from the drought in the Sahel is that agricultural improvement in a situation of dependence and externally-oriented development may make African economies so vulnerable to cyclical climatic variations that the advances are nullified, and that the human condition is worsened rather than ameliorated. For an analysis of a maize-improvement scheme based on hybrid seeds and expensive foreign imports, see Tandon, Yash, ‘The Food Question in East Africa: a partial case study of Tanzania’, in Africa Quarterly (New Delhi), XVII, 4, 04 1978, pp. 5–45Google Scholar.

page 294 note 3 For the report on the experience of one area, see Mwapachu, Juma Volter, ‘Operation Planned Villages in Rural Tanzania: a revolutionary strategy for development’, in The African Review, 6, 1, 1976, pp. 1–16Google Scholar, reprinted in Coulson (ed.), op. cit. pp. 114–27.

page 295 note 1 For Nyerere's comment, see ‘The Arusha Declaration Ten Years After’, p. 68. On policy-making, see Göran Hydén, ‘“We Must Run While Others Walk”: policy-making for socialist development in the Tanzania-type of polities’, Dar es Salaam, 1975, excerpted in Kim, Kwan S. et al. (eds.), Papers on the Political Economy of Tanzania (Nairobi, 1979), pp. 5–13Google Scholar; Samoff, , ‘The Bureaucracy and the Bourgeoisie’, p. 45Google Scholar; and Green, Reginald H., ‘Relevance, Efficiency, Romanticism and Confusion in Tanzanian Planning and Management’, in The African Review, 5, 2, 1975, pp. 209–34Google Scholar.

page 296 note 1 Sources: Ministry of Finance and Planning, Economic Surveys (Dar es Salaam), and Minister for Finance, Annual Budget Speeches, Dar es Salaam, 1971–1980Google Scholar.

page 296 note 2 Sources: Ibid. While almost all wheat is purchased by the Government, most maize is consumed locally, with usually not more than half sold through official agencies. The Government only purchases small and variable proportions of other crops.

page 297 note 1 Sources: Bank of Tanzania, Economic and Operations Report (Dar es Salaam), 06 1977Google Scholar, and John Briggs, loc. cit. p. 696.

page 297 note 2 Sources: Ministry of Agriculture, Annual Reports (Dar es Salaam), 1974–1979Google Scholar.

page 298 note 1 Due, Jean M., Costs, Returns and Repayment Experience of Ujamaa Villages in Tanzania, 1973–1976 (Washington, D.C., 1980), pp. 9, 46, and 56Google Scholar.

page 299 note 1 Lofchie, loc. cit. pp. 468–75, and Raikes, loc. cit.

page 299 note 2 Hydén, op. cit. pp. 120–1, argues that the declines were in the areas of large-scale grain farms, and attributes that to the takeover of capitalist enterprises rather than to mass villagisation. At the same time, he argues, production in areas of small-scale peasant agriculture has increased. McHenry, Dean E. Jr, reaches a similar conclusion in ‘Peasant Participation in Communal Farming’, in African Studies Review (East Lansing), XX, 3, 12 1977, pp. 43–63Google Scholar; see also his Tanzania's Ujamaa Villages: the implementation of a rural development strategy (Berkeley, 1979), p. 221Google Scholar, where he attributes the need to import food to a combination of drought and villagisation policy.

page 299 note 3 Briggs, loc. cit. and Raikes, loc. cit. stress this distinction. McHenry, op. cit. reviews the long history of villagisation efforts.

page 300 note 1 Lofchie, loc. cit. p. 473.

page 301 note 1 Due, op. cit. pp. 57 and 66.

page 301 note 2 Clark, op. cit. p. 58.

page 301 note 3 In addition to the works already cited, see Fortmann, Louise P., Peasants, Officials and Participation in Rural Tanzania: experience with villagisation and decentralisation (Ithaca, 1980)Google Scholar; McHenry, Dean E. Jr, ‘The Struggle for Rural Socialism in Tanzania’, in Rosberg, Carl G. and Callaghy, Thomas M. (eds.), Socialism in Sub-Saharan Africa: a new assessment (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 37–60Google Scholar; Mueller, Susanne D., ‘Landing the Middle Peasantry: Narodism in Tanzania’, Boston University, African Studies Center, Working Paper No. 20, 1979Google Scholar; Raikes, Philip, ‘Rural Differentiation and Class-Formation in Tanzania’, in Journal of Peasant Studies (London), 4, 2, 01 1977, pp. 285–325Google Scholar; and von Freyhold, Michaela, ‘The Post Colonial State and its Tanzanian Version’, in Review of African Political Economy, 8, 1977, pp. 75–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Ujamaa Villages in Tanzania: analysis of a social experiment (New York, 1979)Google Scholar.

page 302 note 1 For an elaboration of this point on the ideology and legitimation of a bureaucratic governing class, see Samoff, , ‘The Bureaucracy and the Bourgeoisie’, pp. 45–57Google Scholar.

page 302 note 2 On the entrenchment of rural élites, see Samoff, Joel, ‘Education in Tanzania: class formation and reproduction’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies, XVII, 1, 03 1979, pp. 47–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 302 note 3 McHenry, op. cit. p. 222. See also James De Vries and Louise P. Fortmann, ‘LargeScale-Villagization: Operation Sogeza in Iringa Region’, in Coulson (ed.), op. cit. pp. 128–35.

page 302 note 4 See, among others, von Freyhold, op. cit. esp. ch. 2 and postscript.

page 303 note 1 Admission to the University of Dar es Salaam since 1974 has required evidence of successful work and party activity. The spreading construction of private secondary schools, which permitted affluent Tanzanians to evade the egalitarian admissions policies for post-primary-education – see Samoff, ‘Education in Tanzania’ – has apparently been halted, according to the Sunday News, 25 1978. None the less, access to education is likely to be a major focus of class conflict in the near future – see Green, op. cit. pp. 35–6.

page 303 note 2 For the development of this point, see Samoff, , ‘The Bureaucracy and the Bourgeoisie’, pp. 47–57Google Scholar, and ‘Class, Class Conflict, and the State’.

page 305 note 1 See Bienefeld, loc. cit.

page 306 note 1 Thomas, loc. cit. pp. 21–2.