This article like the rest of this issue of the Review of African Political Economy is openly accessible without the need to subscribe or register. For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers path-breaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive. Please consider subscribing or donating today. This short essay begins by revisiting John Saul's landmark article in the first issue of the Review of African Political Economy in , which was, inevitably, very much of its historical moment.
He illustrates his argument with special reference to the current moment of globalisation and neoliberalism. Given the intrinsic shortcoming of TANU's brand of populism, as articulated dominated? Degeneration was marked by the turn to commandism noted, and by the failure to develop any adequate cadre policy and practice necessary to deal with great variations in local socioeconomic conditions and the preoccupations of different peasantries and of peasant strata or classes?
By contrast, the character of FRELIMO as a revolutionary party was not just a matter of ideological radicalism and organisational coherence but, more importantly, of its practices in creating and governing liberated areas in the course of its guerrilla struggle.
Saul , 49 6. African peasantries were also highly varied by region and mode of colonial incorporation. Saul , 46, my emphasis. It also contributes to the fragmentation of classes of labour in various ways, two of which are of special salience for the present discussion. First, social differences of a typically hierarchical, oppressive and exclusionary nature — of which gender is the most ubiquitous and which often also include ethnicity and religion — fragment classes of labour.
Second, relative success or failure in labour markets and salaried employment is typically key to the viability reproduction of petty commodity production in farming and hence class differentiation in the countryside. This has long been the case in many farming zones in Africa. Stating these theses so schematically at least has the virtue of highlighting two of their most contentious aspects. One is the view of Africa as characterised by capitalist social relations, in contrast with the position that:.
