Abstract
Working out the issues involved in the relationship between the struggle for control of the state apparatus and its uses for class formation remains a critical task for a theory of African politics and political economy. No one doubts the importance of political struggle for the acquisition of wealth everywhere in post-colonial Africa. The expansion of the state apparatus provides the fundamental opportunity both to maintain political control and to achieve remarkable wealth amidst great and growing poverty. Furthermore, the growth of authoritarianism is directly related to an economic struggle to keep rival groups from enjoying these few available opportunities to become rich. These observations are now commonplace, but the relationship between class and state that they presume poses serious conceptual difficulties.
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Notes
Talcott Parsons (ed.), The Theory of Social and Economic Organization ( Glencoe: Free Press, 1964 ) p. 429.
David Abernethy, ‘Bureaucratic Growth and Economic Stagnation in Sub-Saharan Africa’, paper delivered to the American Political Science Association meetings (September 1984): 7–9.
Nelson Kasfir, ‘Dilemmas of Decentralization’, in Philip Mawhood (ed.) Local Government in the Third World ( Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1983 ) pp. 37–43.
Colin Leys, ‘African Economic Development in Theory and Practice’, Daedalus III (Spring 1982): 105–6.
Henry Bernstein, ‘Sociology of Underdevelopment vs. Sociology of Development?’, in David Lehmann (ed.), Development Theory (London: Frank Cass, 1979) pp. 93–4; and Leys, ’African Economic Development’, p. 104.
Colin Leys, Politics in Britain ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983 ) p. 15.
Randall Collins, ‘A Comparative Approach to Political Sociology’, in Reinhard Bendix (ed.), State and Society ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968 ) pp. 50–3.
‘The Unsteady State: Uganda, Obote and General Amin’, in John Saul, The State and Revolution in Eastern Africa ( London: Heinemann, 1979 ) p. 360.
Altered somewhat from the definition of class used by David G. Becker and Richard L. Sklar, ‘Why Postimperialism?’, in D. G. Becker, Jeff Frieden, Sayre Schatz and R. L. Sklar (eds), Postimperialism: International Capitalism and Development in the Late Twentieth Century ( Boulder, Co.: Lynne Rienner, 1987 ).
This point is elaborated in a helpful discussion about a notion of class that is useful for interpreting African political economies in Michael Schatzberg, Politics and Class in Zaire ( New York: Africana Publishing, 1980 ).
Peter Flynn, ‘Class, Clientelism, and Coercion’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 12 (1974): 148–52.
Guenther Roth, ‘Personal Rulership, Patrimonialism and Empire-Building’, World Politics 20 (January 1968): 196. Labeling contemporary use ‘neo-patrimonialism’ may help to avoid implying that these leaders depend on tradition and that the analysis falls within the modernization paradigm.
Nelson Kasfir, ‘State, Magendo, and Class Formation in Uganda’, in N. Kasfir (ed.), State and Class in Africa ( London: Frank Cass, 1984 ) p. 100.
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© 1987 Zaki Ergas
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Kasfir, N. (1987). Class, Political Domination and the African state. In: Ergas, Z. (eds) The African State in Transition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18886-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18886-4_3
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