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The Rôle and Position of Petty Producers in a West African City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Paul Kennedy
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Extract

In the last few years there has been a growing interest in that very considerable and hitherto mostly unrecorded part of the economic life of the Third World which flourishes outside the state and foreign-owned medium and large-scale concerns. This great mass of non-enumerated enterprises and activities is a major source of employment and production. For the purpose of this article, it will be argued that many of those undertaking research in this sector can be regarded as belonging to one or other of two fairly distinct schools of thought formed by (1) a number of officials from the International Labour Organisation, the World Bank, and other international and government agencies, as well as some purely academic writers,1 and (2) the majority of social scientists attached to the British Sociological Association Development Group, some of whom operate to a greater or lesser extent within a Marxian or neo-Marxian perspective.2 For purposes of abbreviation only, these will be referred to as the ‘I.L.O.’ and the ‘Radical’ groups.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , December 1981 , pp. 565 - 594
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

page 565 note 1 See, especially, the following: International Labour Office, Employment, Incomes and Equality: a strategy for increasing productive employment in Kenya (Geneva, 1972)Google Scholar; Hart, Keith, ‘Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), XI, 1, 03 1973, pp. 61–89.Google Scholar For the discussion concerning the relative usefulness of these terms and of the Marxian position, see Moser, Caroline, ‘Informal Sector or Petty Commodity Production: dualism or dependence in urban development?’, in World Development (Oxford), 6, 9–10, 1978, pp. 1041–64.Google Scholar

page 565 note 2 Papers presented to the British Sociological Association Development Group include the following: Gerry, Chris, ‘Petty Production and Capitalist Production in Dakar: the crisis of the self-employed’, 1976Google Scholar; Kahn, Joel, ‘Mercantilism and Neo-Colonialism: petty commodity production and the social formation’, 1976Google Scholar; Scott, Alison M., ‘Who are the Self-Employed?’, 1976Google Scholar; Bryant, John, ‘The Petty Commodity Sectorin Urban Ghana’, 1976Google Scholar; Middleton, Alan, ‘Small-Scale Production and Capitalist Enterprises: heterogeneity and subordination in Quito, Ecuador’, 1978Google Scholar; and Birbeck, Chris, ‘Women, Crime and Prostitution in Cali, Columbia’, 1979.Google Scholar Contributions by some of these and other writers can also be found in Bromley, Ray and Gerry, Chris (eds.), Casual Work and Poverty in Third World Cities (London, 1979).Google Scholar See also Chris Birkbeck, ‘Self Employed Proletarians in an Informal Factory: the case of Cali's garbage dump’, and Bromley, Ray, ‘Organization, Regulation and Exploitation in the so-called Urban Informal Sector: street traders in Cali, Columbia’, in World Development, 6, 9–10, 1978, pp. 1161–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 566 note 1 Again, see the useful discussion in Moser's article, loc.cit.

page 566 note 2 Banaji, Jairus, ‘Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History’, in Capital and Class (London), 3, 1977, pp. 1–44,Google Scholar and Bernstein, Henry, ‘Notes on Capital and Peasantry’, in Review of African Political Economy (London), 10, 1977, pp. 60–73.Google Scholar

page 567 note 1 This has been disputed by Leys, Colin, Underdevelopment in Kenya: the political economy of neo-colonialism, 1964–1971 (London, 1975),Google Scholar and by Weeks, John, ‘Imbalance between the Centre and Periphery and the “Employment Crisis” in Kenya’, in Oxaal, Ivar, Barnett, Tony, and Booth, David (eds), Beyond the Sociology of Development: economy and society in Latin America and Africa (London and Boston, 1975), pp. 86–104.Google Scholar

page 567 note 2 For Marxists, the labour process consists of the various social and technical arrangements whereby workers and the means of production are organised in the pursuit of ‘use values’. Under capitalism this operates in conjunction with a set of social relations of production that permit not only the extraction of the products of surplus labour time by a class of owners and/or managers/administrators, but also the accumulation or self-expansion of capital on an unprecedented scale. See Taylor, John G., From Modernization to Modes of Production (London, 1979),CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a useful account.

page 567 note 3 See Gerry, op.cit. and LeBrun, Olivier and Gerry, Chris, ‘Petty Producers and Capitalism’, in Review of African Political Economy, 3, 05–10 1975, pp. 20–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 568 note 1 Bromley and Gerry, op. cit. p. 7.

page 570 note 1 At the time of the survey in 1977, the ‘official’ rate of exchange was about ¢2.45 for one pound sterling – as it had been for a number of years – although the real rate of exchange on the black market was then somewhere between ¢6–¢10 to a pound.

page 570 note 2 These average amounts of starting capital are swollen by three or four exceptional cases where ‘considerable’ sums had been raised through bank loans, gratuities, and capital pooling, and if these are excluded the average amount of starting capital available was ¢892–¢1,120 in the case of those with one or more employees, and ¢251 where only a proprietor and possibly a partner were involved.

page 571 note 1 LeBrun and Gerry, loc.cit., Scott, op.cit., and Middleton, Alan, ‘Poverty, Production and Power: the case of petty manufacturing in Ecuador’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Sussex, Brighton, 1979.Google Scholar

page 571 note 2 Middleton, op.cit.

page 571 note 3 Of course, it should be stressed that this practice varies from industry to industry; tailoring and seamstressing, where ‘made-to-order’ goods are very important, were not included in the study.

page 573 note 1 Middleton, op.cit. also found that large-scale commercial concerns were relatively unimportant as a source of market outlets for his sample in Quito.

page 573 note 2 Bromley and Gerry (eds.), op.cit.

page 575 note 1 LeBrun and Gerry, loc. cit.

page 577 note 1 Ibid. and Gerry, op. cit.

page 577 note 2 Scott, op. cit.

page 580 note 1 The ‘special’ factors include (i) the misuse of foreign exchange, particularly during the Acheampong régime; (ii) the increased volume of made-in-Ghana consumer goods which have been exported to nearby countries without, apparently, earning a corresponding inflow of foreign exchange sufficient to replace the raw materials and equipment used in their production; and (iii) the legacy of economic problems left from the Nkrumah years. For a revealing analysis of the latter, see Killick, Tony, Development Economics in Action: a study of economic policies in Ghana (London, 1978), passim.Google Scholar

page 584 note 1 Of course, any attempt to provide an appraisal of the contributions that petty producers may make to the local Ghanaian economy, either in addition to or in place of their rôle with respect to foreign capital as sources of unearned profits, will, of necessity, be rather crude and in part impressionistic. There is no precise way in which these different elements can be separated Out, since the detailed records of accounts and so on are not generally available where petty producers are concerned.

page 584 note 2 See, for example, Hart, loc.cit. and I.L.O., Employment, Incomes and Equality; also the comments on the latter made by Leys, op.cit. and Moser, loc.cit.

page 584 note 3 For a detailed analysis of the different kinds of contracts and arrangements under which the paid workers were employed, see Kennedy, Paul, ‘Workers and Employers in the Sphere of Petty Commodity Production in Accra, Ghana: towards proletarianization?’, in Labinjoh, Justin (ed), Themes in Modernization and Development (London, forthcoming).Google Scholar

page 585 note 1 See, for example, Peil, Margaret, ‘The Apprenticeship System in Accra’, in Africa (London), 40, 1970, pp. 137–50Google Scholar; and King, Kenneth, The African Artisan: education and the informal sector in Kenya (London, 1977).Google Scholar

page 586 note 1 There is also the difficult and controversial question of the unpaid labour which apprentices might be said to provide for their masters. Again, this is discussed more fully in Kennedy, loc.cit.

page 588 note 1 For example, LeBrun and Gerry, loc.cit. and Gerry, op.cit.

page 588 note 2 The economy of Tarkwa in Western Ghana, studied for example by Bryant, op.cit., is heavily dependent upon a few large corporations employing many workers. Here, it might be expected that petty producers would be largely preoccupied with supplying the needs of modern-sector employees. See also Bryant, John, ‘Southern Ghanaians in the Commodity Economy: a study of economic relations in a West African town’, Ph.D. thesis, Sussex University, Brighton, 1979.Google Scholar

page 588 note 3 Tailors, seamstresses, and shoemakers/repairers seem much more likely to be engaged in catering for the everyday ‘utility’ requirements of the less well-off than certain other kinds of small enterprises – although even here the situation may not be clear cut.

page 590 note 1 Roberts, Bryan, Cities of Peasants (London, 1978),Google Scholar especially ch. 7, where Vilmar E. Faria and Francisco de Oliveira's work are discussed.

page 590 note 2 Of course, the question of whether, and to what extent, petty production really is so much more prominent and persistent in the economies of the Third World today than at a comparable stage in the development of the West, as most writers in this field seem to assume, deserves much more careful consideration than it has so far received.

page 592 note 1 Bromley and Gerry, op.cit.

page 592 note 2 Bernstein, loc.cit. and Banaji, loc.cit.

page 594 note 1 See the seminal and lucid study by Warren, Bill, Imperialism: pioneer of capitalism (London, 1980).Google Scholar