Predatory Rule: State and Civil Society in Africa 9781685856076

Citation preview

PREDATORY RULE

PREDATORY RULE STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN AFRICA

ROBERT PATTON JR.

LYNNE RIENNER PUBLISHERS

•

BOULDER & LONDON

Published in the United States of America by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 1992 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-55587-344-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Vll

1

1

Introduction: Drawing the Map

2

State, Sites, and Hegemony

19

3

The Contradictions of Presidential Monarchism in Africa

41

Civil Society, Emancipation, and the Persistence of Hierarchies

73

4 5

Civil Society and Democratic Uncertainties

103

6

Economic Crisis and Adjustment: The Impact on the State and Civil Society in Africa

119

Conclusion

141

Bibliography Index About the Book and Author

147 159 165

7

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is an analysis of predatory rule in Africa. It seeks to explain how processes of class formation and disarticulation affect the dialectical interaction characterizing state/civil society relations and how this impact simultaneously undermines and fosters democratic forms of governance on the continent. The book is firmly grounded in the conviction that class represents the most powerful conceptual tool with which to decipher the complexities of any social order. Parts of earlier versions of the argument presented in this book went into three articles I wrote: "Bringing the Ruling Class Back In: Class, State, and Hegemony in Africa," Comparative Politics, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1988):253-264; "The State of African Studies and Studies of the African State: The Theoretical Softness of the 'Soft State,"' Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol. XXIV, Nos. 3-4 (1989):170-187; and "Liberal Democracy in Africa," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 105, No. 3 (Fall 1990):455-473. I have revised their substance and prose in order to integrate them into this volume. The financial assistance of the Carter Woodson Institute for AfroAmerican and African Studies, two summer grants from the University of Virginia, and a Sesquicentennial Fellowship from the university's Center for Advanced Studies greatly facilitated the writing of this book. I want to extend my profound thanks and affection to "Ia famille Barry," who welcomed me again into their home in Dakar during the summer of 1990. I can only hope that Boubacar, Aita, and Souado will allow me to reciprocate on this side of the Atlantic without delay. Momar Coumba Diop, Mamadou Diouf, Babacar Fall, Babacar Kante, and Amadou Booker Sadji contributed greatly in making my visit both pleasant and productive. To all of them my sincere friendship. vii

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is to my wife, Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton, that I owe the deepest intellectual debt. In the midst of writing her doctoral dissertation, she made the time to offer her painstaking, meticulous, sensitive, and intelligent reading of the text. With love and affection, she provided insightful criticisms that always challenged and sharpened my ideas. She transformed my nebulous prose into a more intelligjble text and inspired me throughout. This book, to which she contributed on every level, is dedicated to her. Needless to say, I take full responsibility for its shortcomings. Finally, my thanks to my dear Vanessa, my young daughter, whose smile and love have sustained me in good and bad times. R.F.

PREDATORY RULE

1 INTRODUCTION: DRAWING THE MAP

Current understandings of African politics tend to posit a simple dichotomy between state and civil society. They portray a "soft" and decaying authoritarian state stuck in a deadly struggle against an emerging and democratic civil society. 1 The two realms are conceived of as distinct, unconnected, and antagonistic spheres of institutional and social activities. In this book, I seek to move beyond this conventional bifurcated picture of African political systems, offering an alternative conceptual map that presents the African social order as a structured totality of dialectically interdependent and hierarchically organized sites and ensembles. The map is a mere configuration, a heuristic construct as it were, not an attempt at a grand theory of African politics. In an effort to clarify its contours, I have incorporated into the map what constitutes in my view the dialectical unity of the diverse mechanisms of governance operating throughout the continent. The framework is thus selective; the examples from which it derives its sustenance are meant to specify the predominance of certain key processes and their social and political consequences. Such a method may be open to charges of "unfalsifiability" by practitioners of the logic of rational positivism; I believe, however, that it can generate useful knowledge. Knowledge is never neutral, nor fully "scientific," it always originates from a particular theoretical "entry point. ,.z The overall organization of knowledge is thus structured by a specific entrypoint that generates a conceptual selection or rejection of evidence, facts, and processes from the multiplicity of observable objects of analysis. The entrypoint of my map is class, with the help of which I make huge comparisons by drawing a picture of big structures and large processes. To this extent the map does not capture the specific richness of a unique, concrete historical experience, but it does seek to apprehend the funda1

2

PREDATORY RULE

mental commonalities of African regimes. The map constitutes what Charles Tilly has called "hesitant generalizations." Whatever may be their fault, such generalizations can be useful because "historically grounded huge comparisons of big structures and large processes help establish what must be explained, attach the possible explanations to their context in time and space, and sometimes actually improve our understanding of those structures and processes. "3 The conceptual map of African politics is dominated by three fundamental sites: ruling class formation, class disarticulation, and subordinate class resistance. On a general level, a site constitutes an organizational space within which social actors mobilize their resources to exercise political power or to protect themselves from the predatory reach of existing regimes. A site is therefore the prime arena within which groups or classes seek to create a cultural identity, articulate historical projects, and unify their disparate forces to defend their most fundamental political and material interests. THE TWO ENSEMBLES: STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY

The sites of ruling class formation, class disarticulation, and subordinate class resistance crosscut two main ensembles, the state and civil society, which are dialectically integrated. Although state and civil society are inextricably linked, they can and ought to be analytically and conceptually separated. The fact that the two entities collide in contradiction at certain historical moments can be explained only if we accept that they are to some extent independent. As William Shaw has remarked in a different context, "Hearts and brains may not exist apart from one another, but they are distinguishable and can be studied independently. Further, these two organs can be juxtaposed in the sense that the motion of one may conflict with the requirements of the other (a coronary attack 'contradicts' the brain's need for oxygen)." 4 Shaw's physiological metaphor illuminates well the reality that in Africa, state and civil society depend on each other for their very existence and cannot stand alone. But it is essential to distinguish them in order to understand African politics, because politics consists of the play of actors in each sphere for access to the resources of the other. We need preliminary definitions of state and civil society before we can explore their complex relationship. The state is the organ of public coercive force that organizes the political domination of the ruling class and disarticulates the unity of subordinate classes.5 While the state serves the interests of the ruling class, it claims to embody the general interest, expressing particular corporate

INTRODUCTION

3

concerns as if they represented universal ones. This is not to say that such representation is a total fraud; the state is firmly grounded in society and reflects necessarily society's class relationships. These relationships compel the ruling class into recognizing and sanctioning certain rights of the subaltern classes. The extent of this recognition is a function of the intensity of class struggles and thus of the relative power of the dominant and subordinate classes. The dominant classes always seek to maximize their supremacy, but they do not do so as they please. They operate within significant constraints. Drawing from Margaret Levi's Of Rule and Revenue, 6 but rejecting both her abandonment of the primacy of class and her emphasis on individual rulers, I contend that ruling classes are predatory. They try to establish a set of property rights that enhances their revenues, status, and wealth even if it has devastating effects on the rest of society. Their ultimate objective is to maximize their rent irrespective of the consequences on welfare and economic efficiency. This objective, however, is constrained by the ruling classes' relative bargaining power, transaction costs, and discount rates. Paraphrasing Levi and adapting her formulation to my class analysis, I define the ruling classes' relative bargaining power as the degree of control they exercise over coercive, economic, and political resources; in short, their hegemonic capacity. Transaction costs are the costs incurred by ruling classes in negotiating and implementing class compromises. The discount rate refers to the time horizon of ruling classes-that is, how much value future returns have in their present strategic calculations. The more the ruling class values the future relative to the present, the lower the discount rate. 7 In their efforts to maximize their supremacy, ruling classes will "devise and formalize structures that increase their bargaining power, reduce their transactions costs, and lower their discount rates. They will design institutions that they believe will be efficient in promoting their interests. "8 The most efficacious means to that end is to obtain the voluntary compliance of subaltern classes. But how can the predatory interests of the ruling class generate voluntary compliance? The answer is that they cannot. By integrating into their own framework certain popular demands, however, ruling classes can elicit a pact of consensual domination, which seals a form of quasivoluntary compliance. 9 The pact is consensual and voluntary because subaltern classes acquiesce in their subordination; but it embodies domination because subaltern classes who might want to revolt face, in Marx's words, the "dull compulsion of economic relations" and the coercive repression of the state. 10 Politics in any class society is neither benign nor harmonious, but constitutes a terrain of struggle, exploitation, and resistance. The forms of

4

PREDATORY RULE

struggle, the mechanisms of exploitation, and the types of resistance do not necessarily involve collective class action; they can be individualized and indirect or encompass other social categories such as ethnicity or gender. All of them, however, are principally shaped and organized by the process of class formation, from which social change derives its fundamental dynamic. To this extent, the analytical framework I find most useful in deciphering contemporary African social reality stands in stark contrast to the new dominant paradigm. This new paradigm, which has been termed "governance," portrays politics in the continent as an ensemble of "reciprocal practices" embedded in a moral economy of affection in which "there is no irreconcilable contradiction between 'individual' and 'collective'" interests. 11 It assumes that the essence of African politics is a common discourse of "togetherness and commitment to the common good." 12 "Political authority," governance maintains, can operate for the benefit of all by promoting common "societal values" that are sought by rulers and ruled, dominant and subordinate classes. 13 To impute to political authority a "general will" capable of ushering in a "common good" that transcends the purposes of antagonistic groups requires an idealism run wild. How can human beings truly share a community of interests when they are divided into classes of perpetrators and victims of exploitation? Governance imparts to politics a supreme benignity that conjures away the manifest realities of economic injustice, brutal repression, and social conflicts. None of this is to suggest that the realm of altruism, reciprocity, and compassion is utterly foreign to contemporary African politics, but rather to stress that in the prevailing environment of severe scarcity and gross material disparities this realm is besieged and indeed shrinking. What parades as the common good is at best a very fragile pact of consensual domination. Consensual domination requires the ruling class to develop nonviolent strategies of control that can draw the subaltern classes into accepting lopsided political and economic relations for pragmatic reasons. However unequal these relations may be, they entail certain norms of reciprocity based on exchanges offavor and resources. The ruling class must convince subaltern classes that such reciprocity represents a credible contract without which their already limited life-chances would be limited even more. If the ruling class fails to do so and is unable or unwilling to deliver promised resources, the pact of consensual domination will break down. As quasivoluntary compliance diminishes, coercion increases. Coercion in tum generates different forms of noncompliance, the least costly and most effective of which is the "exit" 14 of subordinate classes into social spaces that are relatively free from ruling class control. To minimize their losses and evade the predatory reach of the state, oppressed classes will seek refuge in civil society. Civil society is the private sphere of material, cultural, and political

INTRODUCTION

5

activities resisting the incursions of the state. 15 It is not, however, the exclusive space of subordinate classes. On the contrary, it is subject to constant "colonization" by the ruling class, which is always bent on maximizing its own supremacy. Moreover, the petite bourgeoisie (comprising the professional and commercial elements operating relatively autonomously from the reach of the state) has played, and continues to play, a fundamental role in the resurgence of civil society. 16 Members of the petite bourgeoisie have found a privileged niche in the rapidly growing sector of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and voluntary associations through which they are staking their claims for positions of influence and power. They have assumed leadership of the "multiparty" movement and organized themselves within civil society to bargain with the state about the rules of the processes of democratization and privatization. There is, then, no reason to believe that NGOs in Africa will escape the upper class bias that has traditionally characterized the politics of associationallife in liberal-pluralist societies. To participate actively and effectively in voluntary organizations requires relatively high levels of education, easy access to financial resources, and free time-all attributes of upper-class lifestyles. Moreover, voluntary organizations are most easily constituted when they comprise small groups of individuals who are conscious of their special interest and of their capacity to effect desired changes. NGOs cannot help but be biased in favor of the higher circles, for their scope tends to be restricted to businesspeople, rich farmers, and professionals. What Schattschneider wrote about associationallife in the United States defines well the emerging African reality: The vice of the groupist theory is that it conceals the most significant aspects of the system. The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent. Probably about 90 percent of the people cannot get into the pressure system. The notion that the pressure system is automatically representative of the whole community is a myth fostered by the universalizing tendency of modern group theories. Pressure politics is a selective process ill designed to serve diffuse interests. The s~stem is skewed, loaded, and unbalanced in favor of a fraction of a minority.1

In spite of such biases, associationallife in civil society has no predetermined destination: It is unchartered territory, constituting an arena of democratic and class struggles where old and new systems of discipline, cooperation, and production are consolidated, eroded, and reconstructed in new forms. Norberto Bobbio has emphasized: Civil society is the place where, especially in periods of institutional crisis, de facto powers are formed that aim at obtaining their own legitimacy even at the expense of legitimate power; where, in other words, the processes of

6

PREDATORY RULE

delegitimation and relegitimation take place. This forms the basis of the frequent assertion that the solution of a grave crisis threatening the survival of a political system must be sought first and foremost in civil society where it is possible to ftnd new sources of legitimation and therefore new sources of consensus. Finally, the sphere of civil society is generally taken to include the phenomenon of public opinion (understood as the public expression of agreement or dissent concerning institutions ).18

Civil society is, therefore, potentially a highly subversive space, a space where new structures and norms may take hold to challenge the existing state order. This is not to say that civil society is necessarily revolutionary; on the contrary, it may be the prime depository and disseminator of reactionary forms of knowledge and codes of conduct that confine subaltern classes either to old, unchanging behavior, or to ineffective, disorganized patterns of collective resistance. The development of civil society engenders also new forms of property rights embedded in the regulated framework of the market. The market imposes an invisible discipline of competition, survival, and profitability on all social relations. It privatizes power by taking over certain repressive functions that had hitherto been public and inventing new coercive mechanisms rooted in the ruthless logic of capitalist economic compulsion. The forms of domination, the nature of surplus extraction, and the patterns of resource allocation escape public accountability and are increasingly determined by the private domain. To this extent, civil society constitutes a relocation of coercive power from the public to the private arena and thus facilitates the emergence of the opaque dictatorship of the market. As Ellen Meiksins Wood has indicated, civil society "marks the creation of a completely new form of coercion, the marketthe market not simply as a sphere of opportunity, freedom, and choice but as a compulsion, a necessity, a social discipline, capable of subjecting all human activities and relationships to its requirements. " 19 The emancipation of civil society from the state is therefore problematic, for emancipation is a function of the subaltern classes' capacity to establish an alternative to capitalist culture, a counterhegemony to the existing system of domination. The relationship between state and civil society is always traversed not just by the struggles between classes but also by struggles about class structuring and class formation. 20 Such struggles express the complex concatenation of the sites of ruling class formation, class disarticulation, and subordinate class resistance that crosscut both the state and civil society. In other words, to apprehend the nature of class struggles in Africa it is necessary to reject the idea that capitalist development inevitably generates a simple dichotomy between bourgeoisie and proletariat, or a clean split between liberal and socialist

INTRODUCTION

7

ideologies. African capitalism is a peripheral and bastardized form of capitalism that has failed to create a "higher" mode of production capable of superseding the precolonial and colonial heritage. African capitalism embodies a number of contradictory yet coexistent material, cultural, and political practices, for it has not completely erased the effects of ancient customs and of old economic methods of production. In Africa, the traditions of the dead generations are still very much present in the world of the living; they have united with late-twentieth-century capitalism in a successive chain of processes that are conflicting in certain instances and mutually supportive in others. Therefore, within each of the three sites of ruling class formation, class disarticulation, and subordinate class resistance, the old mixes with the new. Capitalism and socialism, bourgeois ideology and populist consciousness are meshed with powerful remnants of the old order because ethnic allegiances, peasant lifestyles, ancient patriarchal relations, personal fidelity, and gerontocratic authority have resisted the passage of time. African political systems are above all a synchronic amalgamation of old and new phenomena. African history, like any other history, does not unfold in a linear movement of social transformations, each succeeding the other in a chain of clear-cut progressive ruptures. When closely analyzed, so-called historical ruptures are in fact dialectical processes that entail both the destruction and the reconstruction of old practices in new frameworks; they do not, in truth, constitute a total departure from the past. What Perry Anderson has emphasized in his masterful analysis of the Lineages ofthe Absolutist State is distinctively useful for understanding Africa's historical trajectory: To grasp the secret of the emergence of the capitalist mode of production in Europe, it is necessary to discard in the most radical way possible any conception of it as simply an evolutionary subsumption of a lower mode of production by a higher mode of production, the one generated automatically and entirely from within the other by an organic internal succession, and therewith effacing it.... [Concrete] social formations ... embody a number of coexistent and conflicting modes of production, of varying date.... For rather than presenting the form of a cumulative chronology, in which one phase succeeds and supersedes the next, to produce the successor that will surpass it in tum, the course towards capitalism reveals a remanence of the legacy of one mode of production within an epoch dominated by another, and a reactivation of its spell in the passage to a third. 21

In sum, social reality reflects more the synchronistic combination of ancient and modem, old and new than the diachronic sequence of pure historical ruptures. It is this synchronism that has shaped and molded the sites of ruling class formation, class disarticulation, and subordinate class resistance.

8

PREDATORY RULE

THE THREE SITES

The site of ruling class formation is the fortress of what William Domhoff has called in a different context the "higher circles." The higher circles in Africa exercise a virtual monopoly over state offices and institutions through which they appropriate a disproportionate amount of a nation's wealth and yearly income and dominate the policy-forming and decisionmaking process that structures relations of power and property. 22 To this extent the higher circles resemble what dissident Soviet Marxists have called a "statocracy," a class that rules by virtue of its control of the state rather than its private ownership of the means of production. Boris Kagarlitsky explains that in statocratic society "economic and political power are simply identical. The one cannot give rise to the other, for the one already is the other. Power exists here only as a complete political and economic power, and can exist in no other form." 23 Paradoxically, however, the statocracy's control of the state imposes limitations on its class project. Unlike the classical bourgeoisie, which extracts the surplus product through its private ownership of the means of production, the statocracy has to use the state to perform the same function. Property in statocratic society is thus connected to the vicissitudes of exercising state power. Kagarlitsky argues: The statocracy ... can control and partly appropriate the surplus product of labour precisely because it is not the formal owner thereof.... The propertyowner is the state, but the state is inseparable from the ruling class .... [The statocracy's] structure is the structure of the state apparatus and it has no "class structure" of its own .... One could call the statocracy "a class in itself' but never "a class for itself." Its interests cannot be directly expressed. Its position ... is not such that it can pursue its group and class interests to the end. 24

Thus, the higher circles control the strategic instruments of the state and govern but are so far only a ruling class in the making. The concept of higher circles is crucial for our general analytical purposes, because it indicates that while the "closure of classes is becoming accentuated," 25 ruling classes are still gelatinous and have yet to coalesce fully. The higher circles are in the process of unifying their disparate material, political, and ideological experiences into collectivized class interests. This process takes place within the site of ruling class formation, the space within which the higher circles become conscious of their existence as a class, constitute themselves as a ruling class, and develop institutions enabling them to act as a ruling class. To do the latter, however, is to deny the salience of class to the rest of the citizen body. The ruling class must therefore invoke alternative systems of solidarity and/or pose as the bearer ofthe universal and general interest.

INTRODUCTION

9

The site of class disarticulation is the arena structuring the silence of class and feeding the cacophony of ethnic, linguistic, and religious particularisms. It emasculates subordinate classes by situating them in an ostensibly classless field of activities and struggles; it disembodies them by transforming them into rather powerless individual citizens ligatured to the divisive solidarities of supraclass politics. Ruling classes seek to insert subordinate classes into the site of class disarticulation to compel them to form classless oppositions and to pursue classless strategies. The site of class disarticulation creates therefore a politics of classlessness that paradoxically reinforces the politics of class-a politics mired safely in the site of ruling class formation. The politics of classlessness is not, however, the inexorable determinant of the fate of subordinate classes. The site of class disarticulation cannot fully erase the realities of class exploitation, nor can it negate the shared experiences of common material deprivations. Inequalities, repression, and poverty are bound to generate the site of subordinate class resistance. This is the site where subordinate classes construct their own forms of mobilization and opposition and acquire in the process a sense of collectivized grievances and interests. While such forms are not necessarily expressed in class terms, they constitute the raw material of an incipient class consciousness. The site of subordinate class resistance represents therefore the space within which the subordinate class, discovering its situation and interests, begins its transformation from a "class in itself' into a "class for itself." Being a radical process of popular empowerment, this transformation is bound to confront the unmitigated opposition of the sites of ruling class formation and class disarticulation; it will, then, be inevitably hesitant, contradictory, and fragile. The three sites of our conceptual map of African politics embody, therefore, the organizational spaces within which groups and classes seek to elaborate their societal projects, expand their power, and defend their fundamental interests. Armies, bureaucracies, markets, schools, universities, parties, unions, and a myriad of other institutions structure and give meaning to these sites. Some institutions have exclusive location and cannot straddle sites lest their essential nature, their raison d'etre, be tom asunder and they tum into their opposite. However, most institutions are not unilocal. Transgressing boundaries, many of them can occupy, and perform contradictory functions in, two or three sites. The site of ruling class formation may in fact comprise organizations that act to unify the ruling class while simultaneously generating resistance among subordinate classes. Configurations of this potentially conflictive kind are multiple. Institutions usually have effects beyond their own spatial confines and are rarely free from the molding influence of the external environment. For

10

PREDATORY RULE

example, unions are rooted in the site of subordinate class resistance traversing civil society. Yet the intensity of their resistance, the salience of their working class consciousness, and the degree of their socialist commitment are all dependent upon the nature of their relationship with the sites of ruling class formation and class disarticulation. In general, the social forces of the site of ruling class formation entrenched in the state are always seeking to displace working-class organizations and movements from their site of subordinate class resistance in civil society to the site of class disarticulation in the state. Such displacement constitutes the very stuff of class struggles and expresses the given conjuncture of power. Some organizational mechanisms and institutions that are simultaneously located in our three sites acquire a substantial degree of strength and independence. Yet they cannot be apprehended autonomously, nor can they exist in isolation; they interact continuously with each other and across state and civil society in a subtle chain of cause and effect. Let us take as an example the armed forces of Uganda led by Idi Amin. Under his command they overthrew the government of Milton Obote in 1971 in an attempt to resolve the internecine struggles of the higher circles. They represented the coercive instrument of the state protecting the site of ruling class formation from possible disintegration. And yet the Ugandan army was drawn from the politics of civil society-its constituent members were not necessarily part of the higher circles and were themselves divided along ethnic lines. In fact, the army comprised not only a disproportionate share of the worst-off segments of the population but also competing ethnic blocs. It was inevitably exposed to the contradictory pulls of the sites of class disarticulation and subordinate class resistance. The military institution was thus subjected to the conflicting impact of both state and civil society and to the explosive collision of the three sites of class activities. Incapable of reconciling all of these forces and bent on establishing its own autonomy, the military under Amin's guidance emasculated state and civil society. In the process, Amin gradually emerged as an absolute personal ruler accountable to no one. The rise of Amin indicated that neither the site of ruling class formation nor the site of subordinate class resistance was powerful enough to prevent the devastating effects of the site of class disarticulation. Amin manipulated ethnic sentiments, religious allegiances, racist undercurrents, and regional rivalries to suppress challenges from above and from below. 26 This dialectical interaction between sites and ensembles is not indeterminate. Structured in aP organic totality, sites and ensembles are hierarchically ordered. Some are more important, efficacious, and determinant than others. As Melvin Rader has explained, a clear understanding of hierarchy requires a distinction of "what is most dominant in terms of effects from what is most determinant in terms of causes. " 27 It is my

INTRODUCTION

11

contention that in contemporary African politics the site of class disarticulation traversing the state and civil society is the most dominant in terms of effects, while the site of ruling class formation mired in the state is the most determinant in terms of causes. This is not to imply that the site of ruling class formation is the only efficacious organizational space. As spaces comprising an organic whole, the sites of class disarticulation and subordinate class resistance are in dialectical interaction with the site of ruling class formation. To single out the site of ruling class formation as the most determinant in terms of causes within the dialectical interaction is only to say that, at this particular historical juncture, its impact is the most decisive in transforming the relations structuring the two other sites. Specifically, in late-twentiethcentury African politics, the site of ruling class formation is a determinant precondition for the existence of the site of class disarticulation; but this determinant precondition is mediated by the site of class disarticulation, which in tum has dominant effects within the organic totality. As Michael Harrington observed: "[Organic] wholes, be they human bodies or human societies, can have determinant preconditions and dominant functions .... "28 For instance, all the organs of the human body cease to operate once the heart fails, but in normal life situations the brain and the stomach have dominant mental and digestive functions, respectively. To apply a famous passage from Marx's Grundrisse29 to African society: The site of ruling class formation predominates over both the site of class disarticulation and the site of subordinate class resistance, and its condition therefore determines the rank and influence of these two sites. It is the universal light with which the two other sites are tinged and by whose peculiarity they are modified. The site of ruling class formation is a special ether that determines the specific gravity of everything that appears in it. This book's analytical framework is rooted in an organic conception of dialectical processes. It privileges the changefulness and the motions of social reality. It emphasizes the antinomies, conflicts, and contradictions besetting political struggles, material appropriation, and cultural identities. It seeks to capture the flux of historical tendencies without imposing a predetermined trajectory. The historical and political significance of the three sites derives from their complex articulation and the potential displacement of their constituent elements in the organic whole. This organic whole comprises the dialectical relationship between state and civil society as structured by the combination of hierarchical and contradictory sites. IN DEFENSE OF DIALECTICS

Depicting history as a dialectical movement can create certain difficulties. The notion of different social factors retaining their autonomy while

12

PREDATORY RULE

nevertheless interacting with each other in such a way that one of them emerges as the "prime causal agency" can easily cause confusion. Such a picture is not readily consonant with the prevailing empiricism of positivist social sciences. This is why an exasperated Vilfredo Pareto likened Marx's dialectical words to bats, complaining that "one can see in them both birds and mice." 30 "The result," as Robert Heilbroner has pointed out, "is a disturbing choice": To use the language of discursive thought (that is, the language built on empirical generalizations and logic) is to use a language that rules out the very ambiguities, Januslike meanings, and metaphorical referents that are the raison d'etre for a dialectical view. Dialectics seek to tap levels of awareness that defy the syntaxes of common sense and logic. To present dialectics as a set of generalizations derived from empirical observation, or as an exercise in logic, is to betray the very purpose for which dialectics exists.... From this deep-seated and far-reaching difficulty, I do not believe there is an escape. The perspective of dialectics imparts insights and perceptions to Marxism, but these gifts are, by the nature of the psychic processes to which they owe their existence, resistant to examination by the conventional modes of rational thought.31

A dialectical approach is essential to the drawing of a useful conceptual map of African politics. And it is because of its dialectical character that our map can emphasize the "continuous, mutually conditioning interplay between unlike elements" to decipher what Vivienne Shue has called the "social intertexture that forms the stuff of political life. " 32 Such an intertextural approach "puts the analysis of process at the center of the research effort and traces the mutually conditioning interactions among elements in the polity that tend more commonly to be dichotomized into abstractions like 'state and society,' 'structure and culture."' 33 My conceptual map of Africa breaks with the conventional wisdom that establishes an unbridgeable chasm and an unmitigated opposition between state and civil society. It negates the notion that the state is "a balloon standing in mid-air"34 with no structural roots in civil society, as well as the vision of a triumphant and autonomous civil society overtaking a soft and decaying state.35 The prevailing paradigm forgets that there is a dialectical interaction between state and civil society, that state and civil society cannot exist apart from each other. The state is transformed by a changing civil society; civil society is transformed by a changing state. Thus, state and society form a fabric of tightly interwoven threads, even if they have their own independent patterns. The state penetrates civil society36 through its multiple economic interventions, its disciplinary regulations of private behavior, and its ideological interpellations. The state aspires to become totalitarian because ruling classes are predators bent on maximizing their supremacy;

INTRODUCTION

13

they seek therefore a complete appropriation of civil society. Civil society, in turn, penetrates the state37 through the erection of protective trenches against coercive abuse, material extraction, and political compliance. Civil society aspires to negate the state, and subaltern classes, who are the state's principal victims, are determined to minimize their losses by abolishing it. The contradiction between state and civil society is, however, not that simple. While ruling classes are predatory and have totalitarian ambitions, they aim also to reduce the reach of the state because they are entrenched in civil society and have vested interests in enlarging private property rights. Furthermore, the social expenditures that the growth of the state entails have reached such costly levels that they are no longer compatible with the economic objectives of the ruling classes: The privatization and rationalization of the economy require the systematic contracting out of services previously performed by the state. Thus, the totalitarian project of the ruling class has defmite limitations that stem from the ruling class's very pursuit of its own interests. Similarly, while subaltern classes are victims of the state and have antistatist objectives, they seek the growth of the state because it is the prime provider of resources and employment. Subordinate classes benefit from the state's welfare policies and have a stake in their maintenance and expansion. Thus, the antistatism of the subaltern classes has clear barriers, barriers that are rooted in the struggle of suppressed people to minimize their losses. We can conclude that the totalitarianism of the ruling class and the antistatism of subaltern classes are two projects that cannot fully materialize. The first is constrained by the private powers and mechanisms of resistance of civil society, the second is limited by the predatory reach and coercive force of the state. As Bobbio has remarked: [The] two processes ofthe state-making-society and society-making-state are contradictory, because the completion ofthe first would lead to a state without society-the totalitarian state-and the accomplishment of the second to society without the state-the extinction of the state .... These two processes are well represented by the two images of the participating citizen and the protected citizen, who are in conflict among themselves, sometimes in the same person: the citizen who through active participation always asks for greater protection from the state and through the request for protection strengthens the state which the citizen wants to control but which ends up becoming his or her master. Under this aspect society and state act as two necessary moments, separate but contiguous, distinct but interdependent, internal articulations of the social system as a whole. 38 THE IMPACT OF THE WORLD SYSTEM

The forms of state, the nature of civil society, the behavior of citizens and thus the very relationship between state and civil society are not

14

PREDATORY RULE

self-contained. The nation-state is no longer relatively isolated from the immediate consequences of distant happenings. Social, political, and economic linkages between and across long distances and communities have ligatured the world into a single "globalized" space. Globalization, as Anthony Giddens defines it, is the "intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa. This is a dialectical process because such local happenings may move in an obverse direction from the very distanciated relations that shape them." 39 Local and national transformations are thus decisively conditioned by the interacting linkages connecting the modern world system. This system is based on the hegemony of the capitalist mode of production, even if its contradictory and uneven development has generated a series of relatively powerful socialist, populist, and nationalist challenges.40 The capitalist world system has integrated processes of production and accumulation on a global scale. This in turn has contributed to what Robert Cox has defined as the internationalization of the state. Three fundamental phenomena characterize this process: First, there is a process of interstate consensus formation regarding the needs or requirements of the world economy that take place within a common ideological framework .... Second, participation in this consensus formation is hierarchically structured. Third, the internal structures of states are adjusted so that each can best transform the global consensus into national policy and practice, taking account of the specific kinds of obstacles likely to arise in countries occupying the different hierarchically arranged positions in the world economy. 41

The internationalization of the state calls for and effects an internationalization of civil society whereby capitalist ideology permeates on a global scale the modes of life of both ruling and subaltern classes.42 In the process, classes establish transnational alliances to promote their political and economic interests. These alliances, however, are not among equals. The world hierarchy of states has generated a concomitant hierararchy of classes. Not surprisingly, the formation of an interstate consensus is to a large degree the travail of those fmancial and military institutions dependent upon the ruling classes of advanced capitalist nations. As Cox explains: The top-level countries in effect jointly fix the parameters of the developmental options of late-industrializing countries. Third World elites do not participate with the same effective status as top-level elites in the formation of the consensus. The consensus does, however, gain ideological recruits and places ideologically conditioned agents in key positions within Third World countries. The networks through which international finance flows to these countries are staffed within these countries ... by people who have been socialized to the norms of the consensus and of its professional cadres. 43

INTRODUCTION

15

To this extent the internationalization of the African state "is externally determined and imposed, but it attracts internal allies and collaborators. ,,44 Thus, imperialism decisively shapes the relationship between state and civil society in Africa. This is not to say, however, that imperialism does as it pleases, nor that African ruling classes are its impotent creations. In spite of its immense power, imperialism is incapable of shaping, and often unwilling to shape, the total configuration of African polities. What it does shape, it often shapes indirectly. Imperialism may use African ruling classes, but these classes also use the imperial network for their own desired ends. The interests of both imperialism and African ruling classes frequently tend to coincide. When they do not, African ruling classes have displayed a degree of manipulative statecraft and self-conscious autonomy that has, in many instances, limited imperialist plans. Imperialism, however, has had a contradictory impact. By the late 1980s, its ideological emphasis on the universal virtues of the free market and liberal democracy permeated the civil societies of the world. In the process, civil society's politics of protest became globalized: The democratic promise transcended frontiers to become the main project of popular revolts. Imperialism had an appeal that went far beyond the narrow interests of ruling classes; it contained democratic interpellations that mobilized subaltern classes. Moreover, with the rise of glasnost and perestroika, dictatorships and one-party states came under severe pressures and lost whatever legitimacy they may have once had. The crystalization of the crisis of communism coincided with the ideological ascendancy of bourgeois democracy, to which it gave further impetus. Popular revolts expressed more the aspirations of Jeffersonian and Madisonian democracy than the revolutionary visions of Leninism and Maoism. Paradoxically, however, the virtues of liberal democracy were quite possibly at odds with the unreconstructed policies of laissez-faire that accompanied the triumph of civil society's politics of protest. Markets and democracy are not necessarily in harmony. Capitalism, particularly its bastardized African version, stands in direct opposition to equity, social justice, and democracy itself. 45 The expansion of the role of the market in Africa's social systems is more likely to serve the interests of existing ruling classes than empower subaltern strata. Vivienne Shoe's vision of China's future is probably the best that can be hoped for Africa: We certainly cannot assume that systemic "reforms," pursued primarily to attain economic efficiency and administrative rationalization, will necessarily bring with them enhanced political influence or democratic freedoms for the masses of rural people. What we may find ourselves witnessing over the next several decades, therefore, under the rubric of liberalization and reform of the excessively dictatorial state-socialist bureaucracy, may not in fact be the retreat of the state from stringent rule over the peasantry, but the rerooting

16

PREDATORY RULE

of a relegitimized and reinvigorated state power in new social groups, and the reorganization, restaffing, and reconsolidation of the state apparatus itself in new, more effective forms. 46 The scenario of a more rational-bureaucratic African state is contingent on imperialism's capacity to shift political power away from the dominant bloc to a new technocratic elite convinced of the magic of the market. Paradoxically, such a reallocation of power may have been assisted by the current explosion of civil society that has led to the emergence of a new class of leaders closely linked to international financial institutions. These leaders have used their positions in foreign and domestic NGOs to control the "national conferences" that have emasculated and in some instances overthrown old and incompetent dictators. Their newly found power is fragile because it rests on a transitional politics of euphoria that has consistently masked their attachment to the structural programs of economic adjustment (SAPs) espoused by the Bretton Woods institutions. Once the moment of euphoria passes, and once the grim realities of SAPs reassert themselves, the reallocation of power to the technocratic elite is likely to face insurmountable problems. This is so not only because the technocratic project has little domestic support, but also because imperialism may lack the resources and the will to enact it. While it is true that imperialism can always mobilize the resources necessary to force into compliance recalcitrant African states and ruling classes, it is frequently confounded by their evasive and defensive strategies. The history of the relationship between imperialism and Africa is as much the history of compromises and pacts as the history of repressive violence and reluctant cooperation. While imperialism has profoundly conditioned the states and civil societies of Africa, it has always been constrained by their trenches and defenses. It simply cannot obliterate them. 47 To this extent, the relationship between state and civil society constitutes the determinant stuff of African politics, even if it is decisively affected by the capitalist world system. The pages that follow seek to reveal the major patterns of the interweaving of state, civil society, and world system. They are an attempt at deciphering the social intertexture of modem Africa. NOTES

1. See Victor Azarya, "Reordering State-Society Relations"; Michael Bratton, "Beyond the State"; Thomas Callaghy, The State-Society Struggle; Naomi Chazan, "The New Politics of Participation in Tropical Africa"; Larry Diamond, "Introduction: Roots of Failure, Seeds of Hope"; Zaki Ergas, ed., The African State in Transition; Goran Hyden, No Shortcuts to Progress; Donald Rothchild and

INTRODUCTION

17

Naomi Chazan, eds., The Precarious Balance; Richard Sandbrook, The Politics of Africa's Economic Stagnation; Richard L. Sklar, "Democracy in Africa"; and Crawford Young and Thomas Turner, The Rise & Decline of the Zairian State. 2. The concept of "entry point" is derived from Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Knowledge and Class, pp. 25-30. Resnick and Wolff define entry point as "that particular concept a theory uses to enter into its formulation, its particular construction of the entities and relations that comprise the social totality" (p. 25). 3. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, p. 145. 4. William H. Shaw, Marx's Theory of History, p. 27. 5. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes. See also E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, "Democracy and the Ideology of Order in Kenya." Odhiambo argues convincingly that the essence of the state in Africa has been-since colonial times-predominantly coercive and extractive; this essence, he asserts, is captured by the Kiswahili word serikali: "(T]he state is simultaneously force, coercing reluctant tribesmen into the colonial framework; authority, promulgating and applying laws; and power, rewarding the obedient with offices and beneficence while punishing the errant and recalcitrant." 6. Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue. 7. Ibid., pp. 2, 32-33. 8. Ibid., p. 16. 9./bid.,pp.52-53. 10. Nicolas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and BryanS. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis. 11. Goran Hyden, "Reciprocity and Governance in Africa." In this article Hyden defmes governance as "the use of political authority to promote and enhance societal values-economic as well as non-economic-that are sought by individuals and groups.... In the absence of any marked cultural differentiation, social separation and political opposition between the ruling elites and the masses, reciprocity is the basis of political integration.... Reciprocity, then, is at the core of governance in Africa, and will be for the foreseeable future" (pp. 246-266). See also Goran Hyden and Michael Bratton, eds., Governance and Politics in Africa; Carter Center of Emory University, "African Governance in the 1990's"; and World Bank, From Crisis to Sustainable Growth, p. 60. 12. Ibid., p. 257. 13. Ibid., p. 246. See also Goran Hyden, "Governance and the Study of Politics." For a supportive yet critical assessment of governance, see Michael Bratton and Donald Rothchild, "The Institutional Bases of Governance in Africa." 14. Albert 0. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. 15. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci's definition of civil society emphasizes the hegemonic position of the ruling class in the "ensemble of organisms commonly called 'private"' (p.12). See also John Keane, Democracy and Civil Society, pp. 11-15. Keane defines civil society "as an aggregate of institutions whose members are engaged in a complex of non-state activities-economic and cultural production, household life and voluntary associations-and who in this way preserve and transform their identity by exercising all sorts of pressures or controls upon state institutions." Keane warns, however, against the dangers of both idealizing civil society and demonizing the state: "[W]ithout the protective, redistributive and conflict-mediating functions of the state, struggles to transform civil society will become ghettoized, divided and stagnant, or will spawn their own, new forms of inequality and unfreedom" (pp.

18

PREDATORY RULE

14-15). 16. I owe this insight to the valuable comments of an anonymous reader. 17. E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People, pp. 34-35. 18. Norberto Bobbio, Democracy and Dictatorship, p. 26. 19. Ellen Meiksins Wood, "The Uses and Abuses of'Civil Society."' Meiksins Wood correctly emphasizes that the growing "cult of civil society" that has crystalized as a result of the crisis and fall of really existing communism has tended to obscure the "coercions of capitalism." The concept of civil society, she asserts, "has become an all-purpose catchword for the left, embracing a wide range of emancipatory aspirations, as well-it must be said-as a whole set of excuses for political retreat. However constructive its uses in defending human liberties against state oppression, or in marking out a terrain of social practices, institutions and relations neglected by the 'old' Marxist left, 'civil society' is now in danger of becoming an alibi for capitalism" (p. 60). 20. Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, pp. 47-97. 21. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, pp. 420-421. 22. William G. Domhoff, The Higher Circles, p. 109. Throughout this book I will use the terms "ruling class" and "higher circles" interchangeably, but whenever "ruling class" is applied to the African context it will entail the notion of a ruling class in the process of becoming. 23. Boris Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed, p. 70. 24. Ibid., pp. 81-83. 25. Jan Vansina, "Mwasi's Trial," p. 59. 26. Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa, pp. 252-265; Mahmood Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda, pp. 228-317. 27. Melvin Rader, Marx's Interpretation of History, p. 77. 28. Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism, p. 69. 29. Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, pp. 40-41. 30. Bertell Ollman, Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, p. 3. 31. Robert Heilbroner, "The Dialectical Approach to Philosophy." 32. Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State, pp. 27-28. 33. Ibid., p. 4. 34. Goran Hyden, No Shortcuts to Progress, p. 19. 35. Bratton, "Beyond the State," pp. 407-430; Chazan, "The New Politics of Participation in Tropical Africa"; Diamond, "Roots of Failure, Seeds of Hope," pp. 1-32; and Hyden, No Shortcuts to Progress. 36. Bobbio, Democracy and Dictatorship, pp. 42-43. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, p. 64. 40. Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein, Antisystemic Movements. 41. Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order, p. 254. 42. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, pp. 136-152. 43. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order, pp. 260-261. 44. Ibid., p. 261. 45. C. B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory. 46. Shue, The Reach of the State, p. 152. 47. Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles, pp. 19-24; and Ronald Robinson, "Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism."

2 STATE, SITES, AND HEGEMONY

The vital role that the state plays in postcolonial Africa has generated a vast literature on the nature, scope, and function of state activities. Increasingly, the state is portrayed as an autonomous bureaucratic apparatus of domination endowed with its own material interests and political agenda. In this literature the state is no longer an agent of social classes and no longer reflects their relative power; the state is now above society and struggling against society itself. 1 Scholars such as Theda Skocpol and Eric Nordlinger go so far as to contend that the state is capable of frontally opposing the fundamental interests of the ruling class? According to this conceptualization, the state is not just relatively autonomous from ruling classes-it challenges their domination, threatens their supremacy, and transcends their structural power. In this chapter I contend that such a conceptualization is seriously flawed. While it is true that in exceptional situations the state may temporarily achieve a degree of autonomy from the ruling class, over the long term the state constitutes and is bound to constitute the ultimate organizer and defender of the long-term interests of the ruling class. 3 The state, in other words, is the means through which the ruling class seeks to cement its divisions and reconcile its divergent projects and policies. It is the arena where opposing factions of the ruling class negotiate their differences to reach the compromises necessary for effective governance. The existence of a ruling class implies necessarily the existence of a state whose role is to preserve and promote the social, political, and economic structures of the ruling class's dominance. This is not to say that the state can always successfully fulfill this role. It may be constrained by the ruling class itself and/or transnational agents, and/or it may be challenged by the subordinate classes. Indeed, in Africa

19

20

PREDATORY RULE

ruling classes have demonstrated an inordinate capacity to "mess up" and undermine their very rule. This is not surprising, however. African ruling classes are in the process of "becoming"; they lack hegemony and are likely to be fragmented and hesitant about their interests and aspirations. They are in fact "individualized." Members of these classes tend to be mercenaries, as their hold on positions of privilege and power is at the mercy of the capricious decisions of an ultimate leader. For example, in 1977 in Zaire, then-foreign minister Nguza Karl-I-Bond was sentenced to death for treason against the regime of President Mobutu. Two years later, however, Mobutu not only pardoned Karl-I-Bond but reappointed him to his former position. In Malawi, Aleke Banda, a competent cabinet member, was purged in 1973 for being rumored to be the most likely successor to President Kamazou Banda. After accepting Aleke Banda's apologies and plea for forgiveness, the president restored him to high political office in 1974, only to purge him again in 1980.4 The inherent instability of state offices increases the short-term benefits of opportunistic political maneuvers. The ability of African ruling classes to engage in coherent and sustained collective action is thus limited and uncertain. The extent to which the state can successfully protect the position of the ruling class-that is, the extent to which it is an effective state-is directly dependent on the degree of hegemony the ruling class itself has achieved. 5 Thus, to make sense of the state is to decipher the relations of class power, the processes of class formation, and the hegemonic propensity of the ruling class. Before "bringing the state back in," it is crucial to bring classes back in. I will pay special attention to the hegemonic projects of the ruling class and argue that ruling classes exist throughout Africa but have yet to become hegemonic. They dominate more by threatening and/or using direct violence than by providing moral, material, and intellectualleadership. Politics in Africa is not consensual but Hobbesian, and the rule of the ruling class is not democratic but dictatorial. The absence of hegemonic ruling classes thus explains African despotism. I suggest also that this absence of hegemony limits the relative autonomy of the African state. African ruling classes are ruling classes only insofar as they control the state and use it as a political and material apparatus to further their narrow corporate interests. In other words, the state in Africa is the prime instrument with which a class can hope to become a ruling class. To be absent from the state is to be condemned to a subordinate and inferior status; without strong connections to its sinecures, membership in the higher circles is virtually impossible. In Africa, class power is state power: The two are fused and inseparable. For example, in the mid-1970s President Mobutu used the authority of the state to enforce Zaire's process of indigenization, whereby a vast array of

STATE, SITES & HEGEMONY

21

private foreign enterprises were converted into "public goods" for the benefit of the ruling class. "Zairianization," as it has been called, revealed clearly the intimate linkage between state power and class power. As Crawford Young and Thomas Turner have convincingly indicated, it was through the trauma of Zairianization "that the class character of the state and the regime became fully manifest." 6 The state, therefore, is the decisive means of acquiring capital, power, and prestige. Control over the state is the sine qua non for the making of a ruling class. The state embodies a structure of dominance as it organizes the rule of the emerging ruling class and disarticulates the challenges and unity of subordinate classes. Its main functions are coercive and extractive as well as ideological and co-optive. It represses and disciplines the poor while pacifying them through the corrupting grafts of personalistic webs of dependence. The state is thus the prime location for the sites of ruling class formation and class disarticulation. SUBORDINATE CLASSES AND THE STATE

The site of subordinate class resistance seldom finds a niche in the structures of the state. As the early phase of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique's (FRELIMO) socialist rule indicates, this happens only in revolutionary or prerevolutionary situations, when subordinate classes totally or partially conquer the state and use it to smash the power of what had hitherto been the ruling class. In normal times the site of subordinate class resistance derives no support from the state, but this does not imply that peoples' movements of empowerment are unaffected by the political processes crystalizing in the site of ruling class formation. Brutal state violence, for instance, may in some cases generate massive protests from below instead of popular quiescence. In the fall of 1991, for instance, the guns of the military failed to silence the Togolese revolt against President Eyadema's corrupt and incompetent government. In fact, strategic elements of Togo's armed forces sided with the people and prevented the full reconsolidation of Eyadema's presidential powers. The ultimate outcome remains uncertain; but so far, instead of restoring order, repression has generated further popular resistance. In periods of normalcy, the African state is traversed primarily by the sites of ruling class formation and class disarticulation. Relations between these two sites tend to be harmonized by the repressive, extractive, ideological, and co-optive functions of the state. The stronger the site of ruling class formation, the stronger the site of class disarticulation; the two are thus mutually complementary. For example, as it crushes popular organizations, state violence-so characteristic of the prevailing authoritarianism of African politics-tends to consolidate both the site of ruling class formation and the site of class disarticulation.

22

PREDATORY RULE

Through its repressive apparatus, the state creates a regimented and regulated space of subordinate class obedience, where the immediate brutality of security forces and the silent violence of the law compel subordinate classes into political submission, material exaction, and psychological insecurity. It is also the space where individual agents pursue their own private aims by virtue of the authority vested in them by the state. In their analysis of prison sentences passed from 1969 to 1974 in the Lisala zone of Zaire, Young and Turner demonstrate the intensity of repression required to impose popular compliance: A large fraction of the offenses were directly related to enforcement of state authority, and about 25 percent dealt directly or indirectly with infractions of agricultural regulations. The total of 12,571 prison sentences is placed in perspective if we note that the zone's population is approximately 150,000; of these, about half are children. The great majority of the prison sentences were imposed on men, which means that the actual pool of potential regulationbreakers was roughly 37,500. We should also note that these figures take cognizance only of those infractions prosecuted through the local tribunals. In many instances agricultural officers, sanitary agents, or local officials will impose a fine on the spot, which will never appear in statistical records if they then choose not to tum the proceeds over to the local state treasury. 7

While it may be a decaying and disorganized structure of national development, the state has retained the repressive capacity to inflict sanctions and/or physical injury on the most remotely located members of subordinate classes. For African rulers, the disorganization of the state and its resulting bureaucratic incompetence is clearly of secondary significance to its continued ability to impose the insidious mechanisms through which subordinate classes remain subordinate.8 To these rulers it matters little that their coercive establishments are wasteful, corrupt, and undisciplined; what really matters is that such establishments cow peasants and workers into submission. Thus, far from being "soft," the African state is a hard structure of class dominance bent on continuous extractions from relatively powerless people. In their encounter with the state and its agents, subordinate classes are expected to show obedience, deference, and fear.9 Those are demands they can ill afford to ignore. It is true that in their villages and townships, subordinate classes enjoy a certain autonomy of action and choice; but it is the precarious autonomy of an isolated world that always faces dissolution upon contact with the corrosive acids of the state. Peter Geschiere has demonstrated how the peasants of Makaland in the Cameroon have experienced this dissolution: Ever since the colonial conquest after 1900 the social formation in Makaland has been determined by one essential characteristic: the distance between the

STATE, SITES & HEGEMONY

23

village communities and the new administrative centres. To the villagers, that distance is still an unmistakable fact of life. The village is their world, but if one of them has to go to the office of the sous-prefet in town he may still remark: "I am going to the white man's land." That is of course a kind of joke, but it does have a serious undertone: he is going to a different world, where entirely different forms of obedience and respect are demanded from the villagers. Another standard phrase of the Maka about their relations with the urban officials is: "We are like women, if someone comes from town to tell us what to do, we can only say yes." 10 The submissive "yes" of Maka villagers symbolizes the peasants' entrance into an alien world of arbitrary and subjective rule. It expresses the extent to which state power disciplines all members of the subordinate classes and structures their very existence once they exit the village community to act as individual citizens. State power leaves little room for challenges from below. Always menacing to popular institutions of opposition, it continuously polices them and, if need be, suppresses them ruthlessly. This is most evident in the relations between state and trade unions. With few exceptions, African states have banned or "decapitated" unions. Bill Freund explains that throughout the continent the trade union "was potentially a nest of rivals to the ruling party and party and state were anxious to ferret out any potentially dangerous leaders." 11 The taming of trade unions through their forced displacement from the site of subordinate class resistance in civil society to the site of class disarticulation crosscutting the state has facilitated the exploitation of cheap labor, as well as the extractive practices of the state and its agents. This has reinforced the site of ruling class formation, leaving the working class without meaningful organizations and enabling powerful parasitic "state entrepreneurs" to accumulate ever-larger economic surpluses. THE MILITARY AND THE SITE OF RULING CLASS FORMATION

In African politics, the repressive apparatus, particularly the military, has played a significant and constant role in the site of ruling class formation itself. The perpetrator of multiple coups d'etat, the military has sought with very limited success to rationalize and regulate the factionalized and disorganized governance of the civilian wing of the emerging ruling class. The military, however, does not operate in a social vacuum. It reflects the contradictions, allegiances, and weaknesses that permeate society, representing neither a neutral organism standing above politics nor a necessarily more efficient technocratic form of developmental governance. In reality, military interventions not only tend to intensify the coercive

24

PREDATORY RULE

disciplining of lower classes, but also embody the violent resolution of intra-ruling class rivalries, as they undermine the rule of certain factions of the civilian higher circles. The civilian/military fissure, however, should not be exaggerated; bonds of ethnicity, region, and naked material self-interest can link civilian and military members of the higher circles into a network of power blocs. These power blocs have as much to do with military coups as do the conflicts pitting governments against armies. Thomas Cox has shown in his analysis of military coups in Sierra Leone that "it is within this rather complex spectrum of civilian and military intercourse that the actual preconditions for intervention are established." 12 The intercourse Cox speaks of results in an intimate association between pivotal civilian politicians and army officers. Politicians, knowing their legitimacy is weak and in dire need of the protective shield of military power, seek the support of officers. Officers accept civilian favors because they are bent on maximizing their resources, status, and prestige. In addition, common allegiances of family, ethnicity, and education consolidate further civilian/military ties. Cox explains the depth of this relationship in Sierra Leone: On the most elementary level, a common ethnic and regional identity helped fashion an allegiance between army officers and civilian influentials once Mendes came to predominate in the upper echelons of both sectors. Oientpatron ties between army small boys and civilian big men-facilitated by the close physical proximity of army barracks and ministerial quarters in Freetown-also helped mediate civil-military interaction and eventually allowed for the development of a kind of symbiotic relationship between the two elites. The army officers needed identification with prominent civilians to raise the former's status in the wider community and, indirectly, to further their military careers. The politicians required the assurance that in the event they could no longer hold the public trust, the army, guns drawn, would remain at their sidesP

Military/civilian relations are therefore affairs of the higher circles; and while coups are often justified in the name of combating corruption and re-establishing trampled civic virtues, they rarely improve the lot of the common people. Thus, far from moving politics to the site of subordinate class resistance, most coups reinforce the internal defenses and trenches of the site of ruling class formation. It is true that such defenses and trenches can be rooted in the personal ambitions of aspiring African Bonapartes as well as in the organizational and corporate interests of military hierarchies. 14 Yet whatever may have been the motivations for military takeovers, their outcomes have consistently been marked by an overwhelming failure in promoting the interests of subordinate classes. Explaining the overthrow of Shehu Shagari, the elected president of

STATE, SITES &: HEGEMONY

25

the short-lived second Nigerian Republic, William Graf argues that the military officer caste is part of the ruling class because of its general outlook, life-chances, and affluence. Membership in the ruling class has created contradictions, however, insofar as the social detachment of military officers from the rank and file has generated "a permanent inter-class struggle in the military itself as well as the larger society of which it is a part." In an attempt to preserve their status and hegemony amidst a deteriorating economic climate of growing scarcity, the higher circles in Nigeria developed a constitutional framework guaranteeing a high degree of executive autonomy. But President Shagari's autonomy, as Graf points out, was secured only against pressure from "below," not against the claims of powerful inner-party forces, whose fmancial contributions and continuous active support had to be purchased by offices, contracts, patronage and special benefits. Thus the President was beholden to particularist interests and the civilian regime was, in a very real sense, incapable of "saving" itself in a situation of negative growth. For this reason, the officer class intervenes with the objective mandate of preserving the dominant socio-economic order with its class interests and elite hegemony. Subjectively, of course, the mandate is expressed in terms of morality, efficiency, redemption and the like.15

This subjective approach plays a crucial role in consolidating the ruling class's power. The ideological impact of the state has fundamental and sometimes contradictory implications for all three sites of class activity. In the site of ruling class formation, the state seeks to construct a code of conduct, and it sets the normative boundaries defining what is to be considered possible and permissible for the different sectors of the higher circles. In Kenya, for example, the strategy for development was explicitly revealed in the 1965 Sessional Paper No.10, "African Socialism in Kenya." Far from representing a socialist program, Paper No. 10 promoted the preservation of private property and the growth of an indigenous capitalism closely associated with foreign capital. Paper No. 10 was therefore an attempt by the state to organize the ideological unity of the higher circles into a common system of beliefs regulating their collective class interests. Hence, through the subjective role of the state in the site of ruling class formation, the higher circles begin to acquire the consciousness of a ruling class. In Africa, however, ruling classes are still in the process of consolidation; they have yet to mature fully. The higher circles are nonhegemonic/6 and this has compelled them to take direct charge of the state itself, to staff it, and consequently to obliterate the political space required for the effective exercise of statecraft. Paradoxically, because state power and

26

PREDATORY RULE

class power intertwine, the state has lacked the relative autonomy necessary to effect those reforms and concessions necessary for the preservation of the rule of the ruling class. With their eyes fixed on immediate and selfish interests and their hands in direct control of the levers of the state apparatus, the higher circles have been unable to take the long view and organize in an appropriately flexible way the conditions of their own continued dominance. Those staffing the main agencies of the state constitute the higher circles, and their status depends upon maintaining their capacity to monopolize powerful state offices. As a result, their independence in deciding how to serve the long-term interest of their own class is seriously inhibited. The nonhegemonic status of African ruling classes in tum deprives the state of the relative autonomy that makes reform possible, despotism unnecessary, and liberal democracy viable. African states are almost exclusively authoritarian structures of dominance; expressing the narrow corporate interests of ruling classes, they have failed to become integral. An integral state, on the other hand, is the state of a hegemonic ruling class and as such it is capable of expansion. 17 That is, it is capable of co-opting into its own institutions potential allies and even antagonistic elements. The integral state is relatively autonomous, able to extract certain sacrifices from the ruling class while making concessions to popular classes. It can emerge only when the ruling class has consolidated its rule to the point that its material, intellectual, and moral leadership is unquestioned, or at least consensually accepted, by subordinate classes. Hegemony seals the pact of consensual domination and makes the integral state possible. In Africa, where hegemony is at best embryonic, the ruling class itself cannot avoid the pains and vicissitudes of authoritarian, brutal, and arbitrary presidential monarchisms. For as I have pointed out above, it is to these monarchisms that the ruling class owes its status, wealth, and power; thus it tolerates and even nurtures them in spite of their violence and incompetence. In such regimes, the ruling class is too weak and fragmented to take into serious account the interests of those classes it seeks to dominate. Compliance is the result of coercion rather than consensus, and popular resistance is seldom frontal or revolutionary. Resistance takes the form of withdrawal from the public realm rather than confrontational assaults against the state. Albert Hirschman has convincingly argued that "exit"18 is the preferred means of voicing discontent because it does not necessarily provoke the immediate exercise of state repression. Moreover, subordinate classes can use the threat of exit to extract concessions from the state. Their potential exit can become their best voice. 19 For example, in his study of Bagisu peasants of Uganda, Stephen Bunker has shown that "through [their] symbolic manipulation of the

STATE, SITES & HEGEMONY

27

threat to exit, [they] gained and used voice to expand the local political arena and their autonomy within it. [The Bagisu's] effective use of voice created space within which they could form their own associations and organizations and use them to bring direct pressure on state policies." However, Bunker adds: Symbolic, political use of the peasants' exit option ... requires that local leaders focus and direct this threat in such a way that it becomes a bargaining lever rather than just a veto against the state. Once the threat of crop withdrawal is actually implemented, it cannot serve any effective political purpose. Rather, it directly reduces both state revenues and peasant cash income. Used symbolically, however, it can force the state to allow the peasants to keep a greater part of their surplus production and to conserve their own social forms. 20

The widely used exit option further demonstrates that African ruling classes are nonhegemonic: they are unable to penetrate certain popular political and economic spaces that exist independently of state authority. As administrators of state force, they may impose severe limitations on the level of voice, yet they are incapable of placing rigid restrictions on exit. For peasants and other subordinate groups, exit-or the threat to exit-becomes the most rational form of voice. And yet the disintegrative impact of exit upon their oppressors' stronghold may be more threatening to the existence of the state than the mere disruptions of voice. Lacking hegemony, African ruling classes can barely keep the state afloat between the Scylla of massive disengagement and the Charybdis of brutal repression. CLASS, HEGEMONY, AND THE STATE

The study of the state presupposes the analysis of classes, in particular the degree of hegemony the ruling class has attained. It is hegemony, or the lack of it, that determines the nature of the state and the scope of its autonomy. Instead of approaching politics from a state-centered model, I seek to reaffirm the primacy of class in the shaping of society and in the authoritative allocation of values. To do otherwise is to assume that the state can stand undisturbed above society and impose in an antagonistic manner its own policies and its own preferences on a recalcitrant ruling class. It is to assume that the ruling class can exist without ruling; it is to assume that the ruling class does not exist at all. In reality, the state is neither a balloon floating freely in midair nor an omnipotent, autonomous organism. It is grounded in class processes and practices, ligatured to the exercise of class domination. This is particularly so in Africa, where an intense and accelerated process of class

28

PREDATORY RULE

formation is taking place. While still fragile and weak, African ruling classes are clearly discernible. Their conspicuous lifestyles and lifechances distinguish them from the vast majority living in poverty. Irving Leonard Markovitz defines them as an "organizational bourgeoisie," "a combined ruling group consisting of the top political leaders and bureaucrats, the traditional rulers and their descendants, the leading members of the liberal professions, the rising business bourgeoisie, and the top members of the military and police forces." 21 Markovitz then argues that the members of the organizational bourgeoisie are "located at pivotal points of control in those overarching systems of political, social and economic power ... the nation-state and capitalism."22 They have integrated the private and public spheres into their own corporate domain for the advancement of their productive and political power. The absence of a hegemonic African bourgeoisie grounded in a solid and independent economic base and successfully engaged in the private accumulation of capital has transformed politics into a material struggle. In a context of great and increasing scarcity, state power is the foundation on which class power rests. Once an incipient ruling class takes over the state, it monopolizes the state for its exclusive material gains and uses it for the violent exclusion of potential rival groups. In this sense the powerholders inside the state constitute the dominant fraction of the African ruling class, but they are a dominant fraction in formation, in statu nascendi. Accordingly, they rule without having achieved hegemony. As Frederick Cooper has remarked: "[African ruling classes may] be better defined by their 'project' than by their current situation .... But it is not a project that has been altogether successful. " 23 The fragility of the ruling classes' project is directly related to the peripheral nature of African societies.24 The dependent, backward character of African capitalism has contributed to the material and hegemonic fragility of most African bourgeoisies, thereby leading to authoritarian political forms of governance. Such authoritarian forms mask the ruling classes' incapacity to transform their power into effective political, economic, and cultural policies. The African state has yet to develop the means with which to penetrate all the sectors of society. Authoritarianism coexists, therefore, with a definite lack of authority. The state's lack of authority does not prevent it, however, from performing its fundamental political function, because it has successfully organized the domination of the ruling class and disarticulated the unity of subordinate classes. Hence, hard rather than soft states are what constitute the very stuff of African polities.25 In fact, the emerging and contradictory processes of class formation have accentuated the repressive aspects of the state. Being in statu nascendi, African ruling classes have yet to impose their hegemony; they have yet to overcome their own "war

STATE, SITES&: HEGEMONY

29

of all against all"; and they have yet to civilize their exploitation. Paradoxically, the use of repressive state power to coordinate both the emerging rule of the ruling class and the subordination of the dominated classes is an inevitable stage in the long journey leading to the civilization of exploitation. It is my contention that African political systems are now in this stage of repression and are therefore characterized by hard rather than soft states. The hard state is not necessarily efficient. It may in fact constitute the prime site of corruption, nepotism, and incompetence. Those who control the state possess the means to enrich themselves, to dispense favor, and to build clienteles. More important, they acquire the power to coordinate societal behavior coercively. The scope and intensity of such power may vary, but with the exception of a few countries such as Tchad, Liberia, the Central African Republic, and Uganda, it is always of sufficient magnitude to maintain political order and impose the routine of obedience upon subordinate classes. The hard state constitutes an apparatus of repressive dominance, which silences speech and constrains individual behavior into insecure and pathological patterns of submission. Landeg White's personal experience in the villages of Malawi is instructive: "Political discussion is taboo in Dr. Banda's Malawi. To talk politics with Malawian friends is to be admitted to a special intimacy of trust. This was not something I could achieve in the villages .... Our first conversations were necessarily of the party's approval of my work. In the months which followed, anything bearing on current politics was immediately suspect. When a question caused silence and a chill, followed by protestations of loyalty to Dr. Banda ... , I knew I had trespassed on a topic to be avoided. " 26 While the typical African state imposes a psychosis of fear that disciplines speech into conformity, it can never obliterate the ingenuity and creative resources of subordinate classes. As I seek to establish in the next pages, there are spaces of resistance that always resist capitulation and silence. Moreover, the state is not an omnipotent Leviathan; it thrives on nepotism, factionalism, and conspiracies, even if these symptoms are all a function of its very repressive dominance. Brutal force, bureaucratic bumbling, and political corruption, far from indicating statelessness and softness, are symptoms of a hard state in search of hegemony. HEGEMONY: TOWARD A RECONCEPTUALIZATION

Before proceeding to any further analysis of African political systems, I wish to examine critically the concept of hegemony. The concept of hegemony was most decisively developed by Antonio Gramsci, who argued that the ruling class can rule with the consent of the subordinate

30

PREDATORY RULE

classes without resorting to force. Hegemony, in Gramsci's view, is the "consensual aspect of political control," 27 whereby subordinate classes come to accept their subordination as natural. Such acceptance of subordination is obtained from the moral, intellectual, and ideological leadership the ruling class derives from its control of the "decisive nucleus of economic activity." 28 The state also plays a crucial role in the process of establishing hegemonic leadership. As Gramsci puts it: "[The state is] the entire complex of political and theoretical activity by which the ruling classes not only justify and maintain their domination but also succeed in obtaining the active consent of the governed. "29 Thus, for Gramsci, in hegemonic situations the state confers to both the ruling class and to itself the authority to command effectively and consensually. Gramsci added, however, that only when the aspirations and demands of subordinate classes are satisfied will the interests of the ruling class achieve universality and come to embody the general interest. He contends that "the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formedin other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind. But there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential." 30 The state, in Gramsci's perspective, is integral because it has the capacity to reconcile the fundamental interests of the ruling class to certain aspirations of the subaltern groups: It is true that the State is seen as the organ of one particular group, destined to create favourable conditions for the latter's maximum expansion. But the development and expansion of the particular group are conceived of, and presented, as being the motor force of a universal expansion, of a development of all the "national" energies. In other words, the dominant group is coordinated concretely with the general interests of the subordinate groups, and the life of the State is conceived of as a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria ... between the interests of the fundamental group and those ofthe subordinate groups-equilibria in which the interests of the dominant group prevail, but only up to a certain point, i.e., stopping short of narrowly corporate economic interest. 31

Once these complex processes have crystalized, the moment of hegemony has arrived. It is the moment when subaltern classes come to accept as inevitable and just their subordination to, and the moral authority of, the dominant classes. I wish to argue for a modified version of Gramsci's concept: that hegemony relates principally to the ruling class and only marginally to subordinate classes. It is, I contend, the mechanism through which the

STATE, SITES & HEGEMONY

31

ruling class establishes its supremacy, but it has little effect in incorporating subaltern classes into the social order. As delineated by Gramscians, hegemony represents an exaggerated conceptualization of conditions in which the victims of injustice and exploitation wear their chains peacefully. Subordinate classes have always resisted exploitation; if they have rarely chosen revolutionary violence as the means to their salvation, it is only because they have preferred more mundane, more circumspect, and more muted forms of resistance. Such preference stems from pragmatic calculations and what Marx called the "dull compulsion of economic relations," rather than from total acquiecsence to the norms of the ruling class. A dominant ideology that mystifies subaltern classes into accepting voluntarily their own subordination "is not a necessary requirement of social order."32 James Scott has argued in his brilliant book on the Malay peasantry, Weapons of the Weak: There is no basis for supposing that subordinate classes equate the inevitable with the just, although the necessity of pragmatic resignation may often make it seem so. There is no basis for imagining that any of the common historical patterns of domination so completely control the social life of subordinate classes as to rule out the creation of partly autonomous and resistant subcultures. Finally, there is no reason to assume that the lower orders are so encompassed by an existing system of domination that they cannot either imagine its revolutionary negation or act on that negation. 33

If the concept of hegemony is to remain a useful heuristic tool of analysis, we must qualify it. The normative system of beliefs of the ruling class is decisive insofar as it coordinates and organizes the unity and interests of the different factions of the ruling class. It is, however, of marginal significance in the process of integrating subordinate classes into the social order. Hegemony from this perspective establishes the code of conduct that determines and stipulates what is permissible among members of the ruling class; it is the means through which the ruling class acquires the cohesion necessary to govern effectively. Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan Turner forcefully argue in their work The Dominant Ideology Thesis: "In general, [the dominant] ideology has importance in explaining the coherence of the dominant class but not in the explanation of the coherence of a society as a whole .... [Historical] studies of the dominant classes of feudal and capitalist societies suggest that the dominant class was more exposed and more receptive to the dominant ideology than subordinate classes. "34 The subordination of peasants stems not from their adherence to hegemonic constructs-which they have in fact always penetrated and demystified-but from the multifaceted forms of coercion that have continuously constrained their behavior into patterns of reluctant obedience,

32

PREDATORY RULE

on which rests the pact of consensual domination. Behind the veil of "obsequiousness, deference, and symbolic compliance"35 lies the realm of everyday resistance. This is where the powerless withdraw into their own spaces of survival and/or work "the system ... to their minimum disadvantage. "36 Hence, however hegemonic a ruling class may be, it can never prevent subordinate classes from retaining a relatively high degree of cultural integrity and autonomy. Subordinate classes are never so overwhelmed by domination as to acquiesce completely to dominant ideologies. They develop a social space in which their own discourse, their own norms, and their own ways of producing and consuming advance their estrangement from the ruling class. This is the space where the forbidden is permissible, where vain and pretentious authority is ridiculed, and where popular culture is gloriously scornful of official myths. Landeg White in his beautiful study of village life in Malawi uncovered in the peasants' songs their utter contempt for Dr. Banda's long and oppressive rule: "The new song combines parody and allusion to ridicule Dr. Banda at several levels. In Chewa, the President's language, it provides a sarcastic twist to the normal praise songs by saying Kamuzu's return is a piece of ancient history it is no longer worth waiting around for. In Lomwe, the villagers's own language, he is exposed comprehensively as a foolish old man, not entitled to respect because he can't even protect his private parts."37 The symbolic protest of these villagers challenges the hegemonic pretensions of Malawi's rulers and strips them of their moral authority, but it represents only the war of words. This war, by itself, can hardly change the peasantry's miserable situation, as it is always waged offstage. Dependent on the state and the higher circles for assistance in times of acute need, subordinate classes are just too vulnerable to confront them openly. Fear of retaliation from the rich confines the poor to invisible forms of protest and to inaudible discourses of discontent. The existence of a space of subordinate class resistance, then, does not imply an absence of repression and exploitation. On the contrary, it indicates that subordinate classes, desperately seeking a refuge from predatory state policies, tend to withdraw into areas that are not totally controlled by the dominant class. The strategy of withdrawal, or exit, is enhanced to the extent that subordinate classes retain a certain control over the labor process-that is, to the extent that they continue to own some of the means of production. Withdrawal constitutes, therefore, the privileged option of semi- or nonproletarianized subordinate classes. With the advent of capitalism, subordinate classes lose any effective possession of the means of production. They have only their labor power to sell, and are forced to enter the market, where they submit to the cash nexus in order to obtain life's

STATE, SITES & HEGEMONY

33

necessities. In these conditions, exit is virtually impossible. Hence, the more capitalism has advanced, the more limited are opportunities for withdrawal. State repression is more intense when withdrawal remains a viable alternative to the compulsion of capitalist economic relations. When subordinate classes can escape the control of dominant classes and retreat into their own social space, coercion becomes the only effective means of integrating them into the social order. Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner observed that force, both military and judicial, plays a more central role in feudal societies than in capitalist ones. Force and economic compulsion are thus inversely related; less of one means more of the other. The history of industrial capitalism in Britain has been marked by a move from the direct use of force in the transitional period ... to a less coercive regime which depends more on the workings of economic dependence. This is not to say that force is absent or that acquiescence is total, merely that the relative balance of force and economic compulsion has changed.38

Thus, in proletarianizing societies such as those of Africa, the state is more likely to be hard, coercive, and authoritarian rather than soft. It is true that in most African countries social discipline is weak and power lacks institutionalization, but this general systemic weakness favors in disproportionate ways the interests of the privileged ruling circles. In fact, the soft state is neither neutral nor suspended in midair. It unleashes its power, often violently, to defend the interests of the dominant faction of the ruling class and depoliticizes the subaltern groups by eliminating their independent organs of representation and reducing their participation in decisionmaking. The emergence of the one-party state throughout Africa is the means to these ends. In addition, the one-party state is the vehicle through which material resources are acquired and distributed, because the state in Africa is the fundamental agent of capital accumulation and extraction. The one-party state is also the organ through which the ruling faction seeks to perpetuate its sinecures of officeholding by excluding rival contenders from positions of power. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the struggle for control of the state, in conditions of monolithic political structures and generalized material scarcity, becomes Hobbesian, violent, and deadly. Such a situation of political insecurity has transformed the one-party state into a system breeding disorder rather than order. Repression has escalated as those ruling the state have sought to maintain and preserve their absolute monopoly of power. For example, in 1991 Presidents Biya, Mobutu, and Moi, the respective political leaders of Cameroon, Zaire, and Kenya, violently resisted popular demands for democratization. Political

34

PREDATORY RULE

instability in Africa is therefore rooted more in the extreme politicization of the state as an organ of absolute power and accelerated economic advancement than in the softness ofthe state, as Goran Hyden would have it. For Hyden, there exists in Africa an "uncaptured peasantry" 39 capable of resisting and neutralizing state policies. The uncaptured peasantry operates its own mode of production as a separate material and institutional structure. Peasants' lives are governed by an "economy of affection" that represents an alternative to the dominant state system, and allows the peasantry to exit the demands and policies formulated by central political authorities. In Hyden's view, therefore, the state is incapable of reproducing existing social relations and specifically of controlling the labor force in the interest of any program of economic growth. Suspended in midair without roots in a strong indigenous bourgeoisie and without the power to enforce the authoritative allocation of values, the state is soft and impotent. As a result the peasantry has the option of resisting integration into the state system: The vast majority of the population in Africa remains uncaptured. Moreover, Hyden argues, precisely because people can choose to remain uncaptured, they promote the continued survival of the economy of affection as an alternative to the macroeconomic program of the state. In Hyden's paradigm, then, the peasant mode of production challenges the implantation of modern industrial structures and sustains traditional economic methods and ideologies. Hyden's thesis has recently come under severe criticism. Charles David Smith, in his study of the Kagera District in Tanzania, has shown that peasants are in fact "well integrated into the market economy" and make "long-term production decisions ... on the basis of prices. " 40 Smith concludes that as far back as the 1930s peasant producers were forced to increase production or at least impelled to do so to maintain their standard of living. The conjuncture of low prices, record production, heavy taxes, dissatisfaction with merchants, and frequent complaints about agricultural technique indicate self exploitation of the peasantry to increase production within a framework of what appears as compulsion; despite low real prices peasants did not all exit from the market, in fact the reverse was true, they increased coffee production in order to maintain their existing standard of living which now depended on cash expenditures. 41

Clearly, African markets and states are embedded in the peasant mode of production. They structure its responses and decisively constrain its autonomy. Geschiere, in his study of the Maka of southeastern Cameroon, arrives at a similar conclusion, arguing convincingly that the colonial state began a pervasive process of rural encadrement to extract

STATE, SITES & HEGEMONY

35

resources from the peasantry and that such encadrement has been consolidated further since independence.42 Geschiere explains: In Makaland economic development was dominated by the state; consequently, state formation-rather than the direct impact of the market economy-was the main factor creating new inequalities among the Maka. The first Maka leaders with really new power were the colonial chiefs, who, despite their epithet of coutumier, were only creatures ofthe colonial administration .... [The] strong position of the state bureaucracy in Makaland has been stressed time and again: in virtually every field the villagers must take into account the sous·prefet's authority, and any opposition against it proves almost always to be impossible .... In this perspective it does indeed become logical that the power of the present African elites is still so utterly dependent upon their ability to control the state. 43 Hyden, therefore, greatly exaggerates the softness of the African state. While African ruling classes still lack hegemony, their control of the state gives them the ability to discipline the peasantry. African politics are a politics of authoritarianism, dictatorial rule, and tyranny (as Hyden himself paradoxically acknowledges), particularly when the networks of patron-client relationships are firmly incorporated within the wider structures of the state. In these cases, civil society has little space to offer a refuge to subordinate classes, and therefore cannot prevent an intensification of their oppression. Rene Lemarchand explains this phenomenon well: "Where patrons are able to manipulate traditional mechanisms of exchange on behalf of the State while relying on the full backing of its coercive apparatus to extract maximum labor and revenue from their clients, there can be little doubt about the oppressiveness of the relationship. Oppression is but the symptom of growing power disparities between patrons and clients, the former acting as agents of the State, the latter as its milch cow."44 But exploitation has its limits. It can, in fact, even be counterproductive to the designs of the state. When exploitation generates the exitalbeit hesitant--of subordinate classes and the peasantry, the process can ultimately contribute to a severe shortage of public revenues, because the state then faces a shrinking base of resource extraction. David Hirschmann reaches this conclusion in his study of Malawi's captured peasantry: In the process of using the peasantry as the principal source of accumulation, the state did become reliant upon the peasantry. It discovered that there are limits to the exploitation of the peasantry. When they were pushed too far, their production declined dramatically, and the national coffers suddenly ran dry .... But this drop in production is not a measure of peasant strength.

36

PREDATORY RULE

Rather, it indicates that there might be some limits to peasant exploitation and going beyond them becomes economically dysfunctional to the state.45

Far from implying that the state is soft, such conclusions suggest instead that the state might curb the scope and intensity of its predations when it is confronted with the exit of peasants producing critical fiscal resources. Paradoxically, when peasants are not crucial to the accumulation of public revenues, they may well escape from the most brutal forms of state extraction. They would suffer only the benign rebuke of a relatively nonintrusive state. The case of Niger is illustrative of this phenomenon. When uranium replaced the peasantry as the main source of public revenues in 1975, the ruling class could afford to relax its predatory hold on rural communities. Raynaut stresses that prior to the uranium boom, peasants endured unmitigated state exploitation: "It was not uncommon to see heads of households chained and flogged for failing to meet their fiscal obligations, and village chiefs thrown in jail for not being able to obtain from their people the amount of taxes they were expected to pay."46 The question this inevitably raises is: How and why can the state unleash its arbitrary violence, particularly against the lower and working strata of the population, if it stands in midair, uncontrolled by any ruling class? The important issue is not really whether the state is soft, but rather whose benefits are best served by the softness of the state. To characterize the state as being soft is to miss the class relationships and class struggles that provide the social context in which the state is molded and shaped. Thus, if the state in Africa is relatively weak in terms of its capacity to impose authority on all sectors of society, it is nonetheless powerful enough to unleash its violence against particular groups and classes. The relative impotence of the state to enforce its own rules is a biased impotence, one that consistently favors and enhances the power, interests, and status of the well-off and privileged classes. This is not to say that the organization, modalities, and efficiency of the state embody the most rational or paradigmatic representation of ruling class interests. Far from it-the African state is still incapable of taking charge of the ruling class's political interests and hence of establishing its autonomy. This is why ruling class power in Africa is expressed in terms of state power. The nonhegemonic character of African ruling classes impels them to seize state power as the means of constructing their class power. The fusion of state power and class power severely constrains the development of the political space required for the crystallization of compromises between dominant and dominated classes. The concept of the soft state is grounded in the perception that the typical African state constitutes a weak and corrupt bureaucratic apparatus that has consistently failed to promote the general interest. This

STATE, SITES & HEGEMONY

37

perception is flawed because, in the final analysis, the thesis of the soft state implies the theoretical expulsion of class interests from the concept of the state. The notion of a weak state that fails because it promotes the sinister policies of a predatory political aristocracy implies that a competent or hard state would do just the opposite: The assumption is that an effective state necessarily serves the common good. If this assumption, which is at the base of many current analyses of Africa, is in fact accurate, then there must exist situations in which those who exercise state power are "right-minded" people who are not solely committed to the advancement of their corporate class interests. There must be concrete societies in which rulers embrace the collective good as embodied in the universalist norms of rational-bureaucratic behavior. The reality, however, is that states are never divorced from the material, political, and ideological interests of the ruling class. Accepting the thesis of the soft state is not simply a matter of acknowledging the partial detachment of the state from the ruling class; it means viewing the state as totally autonomous from the ruling class, as embodying universality and the general interest. The ultimate conclusion of the soft-state paradigm must be the theoretical abolition of the state as the coercive organ through which ruling classes overcome their internal factional divisions, unify their political and economic interests, and organize their domination of subordinate classes. The state, for advocates of the popular soft-state thesis, is commensurate with the general will. It transcends class and class struggles; as such, it is an ahistorical utopia. 47 My intent is not to suggest that those exercising state power are incapable of aspiring to compassionate and honest public service, or that civic virtues have no role to play in the constitution of the state. When such virtues are organized in state-societies, however, they are vitiated of their essence because they are inevitably structured by class and the irreducible antagonisms of interests that this entails. The state is therefore never soft; it is always an organ of dominance, all the more so in African societies that are traversed by processes of ruling class consolidation requiring the brutal accumulation and closure of wealth, privilege, and status. The ushering in of liberal democratic practices is thus highly unlikely and will be addressed in the next chapter. NOTES 1. Goran Hyden, No Shortcuts to Progress. 2. Fred Block, "The Ruling Class Does Not Rule," pp. 6-28; Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In; and Eric A. Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State. Nordlinger asserts that "the democratic state is frequently autonomous in translating its own prefer-

38

PREDATORY RULE

ences into authoritative actions, and markedly autonomous in doing so even when they diverge from those held by the politically weightiest groups in civil society" (p. 203). See also Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, and "Political Responses to Capitalist Crisis." In this article Skocpol contends that "no existing neo-Marxist approach affords sufficient weight to state and party organizations as independent determinants of political conflicts and outcomes .... So far, no selfdeclared neo-Marxist theory of the capitalist state has arrived at the point of taking state structures and party organizations seriously enough" (pp. 199-200). 3. Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics, and Class Power and State Power, pp. 3-78; Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes and State, Power, Socialism. For a detailed analytical survey of studies on the state, see Martin Carnoy, The State and Political Theory. 4. Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa, pp.56-57. 5. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 12. 6. Crawford Young and Thomas Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, p. 328. Young and Turner's explanation of Zairianization is instructive: "The material ambitions of the politico-commercial class were [a] critical factor motivating the lunge to Zairianization. The president perhaps viewed the seizure of commercial establishments and plantations as a way of creating a new reserve of prebends to be used for the manipulation and control of the political bourgeoisie; from the perspective of members of this dominant class, forcing open access to these very profitable spheres of ownership offered a decisive opportunity to consolidate their status. Potentially lucrative assets were to be acquired as virtually free goods; the political capital of proximity to power could be thus converted into solid material equity with the promise of effortless accumulation. Among other things, the Zairianization measures were a class action by the politico-commercial bourgeoisie" (p. 328). For an insightful theoretical perspective on the deployment of class power, see Miliband, Class Power and State Power, pp. 40-41. 7. Young and Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, pp. 97-98. 8. John Saul, The State and Revolution in Eastern Africa, pp. 350-390. 9. In his study of oppression in Zaire, Schatzberg has argued that the coercive establishments of the higher circles must maintain a certain degree of strength relative to the population. They must be able both to represent the power of the state and to occupy available political space. The state, when viewed from abroad, may well be weak according to certain evaluative criteria analysts choose. But, from the vantage point of the villages and towns, even a ragtag, underpaid, poorly disciplined, and utterly corrupt platoon of Zairian soldiers represents a truly awesome power. Their often-chaotic presence and occasionally anarchistic behavior constitutes a latent threat to Zaire's peoplea threat, moreover, they understand only too well.

Michael Schatzberg, The Dialectics of Oppression in Zaire, pp. 68-69. 10. Peter Geschiere, Village Communities and the State, pp. 205-206. 11. Bill Freund, The African Worker, p. 95. 12. Thomas S. Cox, Civil-Military Relations in Sierra Leone, p. 18. 13. Ibid., pp.134-135. 14. Samuel Decalo, "Praetorianism, Corporate Grievances, and Idiosyncratic Factors," pp. 71-87. 15. William Graf, The Nigerian State, pp.156-157. 16. A ruling class is hegemonic when it has established both its material dominance and its intellectual and moral leadership over society, and when it

STATE, SITES & HEGEMONY

39

succeeds in persuading subaltern classes that positions of subordination and superordination are just, proper, and legitimate. This requires that the ruling class be prepared to make certain concessions, concessions which, while not fundamental, contribute to the political co-optation of popular sectors and the progressive expansion of the productive process. In this instance, as Gramsci points out, the ruling class "really causes the entire society to move forward, not merely satisfying its own existential requirements, but continuously augmenting its cadres for the conquest of ever new spheres of economic and productive activity" (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 60). This is the moment of "historic unity" when the ruling class has established material, ethical, and political leadership over society, and when the relationships of superordination and subordination are accepted by all as organic rather than contradictory, as legitimate rather than exploitative. When such a situation crystalizes, the ruling class has achieved what might be called paradigmatic hegemony. 17. Ibid. 18. The notions of exit and voice are developed in Albert 0. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and Essays in Trespassing. 19. As Hirschman explains: "The chances for voice to function effectively as a recuperation mechanism are appreciably strengthened if voice is backed up by the threat of exit, whether it is made openly or whether the possibility of exit is merely well understood to be an element in the situation by all concerned.... [The] effectiveness of the voice mechanism is strengthened by the possibility of exit. The willingness to develop and use the voice mechanism is reduced by exit, but the ability to use it with effect is increased by it" (Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, pp. 82-83). 20. Stephen G. Bunker, Peasants Against the State, pp. 13-14. 21. Irving Leonard Markovitz, ed., Studies in Power and Class in Africa, p. 8. 22. Ibid. 23. Frederick Cooper, "Africa and the World Economy," pp. 20-21. 24. Claude Ake, A Political Economy of Africa, and Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. 25. Peter Geschiere, Village Communities and the State, pp. 205-206. 26. Landeg White, Magomero, Portrait of an African Village, p. 245. 27. Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci's Political Thought, p. 25. 28. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 161. 29. As quoted in Femia, Gramsci, p. 28. 30. Gramsci, Selections, p. 161. 31./bid., p. 182. 32. Nicolas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and BryanS. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis, p. 50. 33. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, p. 335. 34. Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner, The Dominant Ideology, p. 3. 35. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, p. 328. 36. Eric Hobsbawm, "Peasant and Politics," p. 7. 37. White, Magomero, p. 246. See also Jean-Marc Ela, Quand l'Etat Penetre en Brousse, pp.171-180; C.M. Toulabor, "Jeu de Mots,Jeu de Vilains," pp. 55-71; and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, "Democracy and the Ideology of Order in Kenya," pp.132-133. 38. Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner, The Dominant Ideology, p. 164. 39. Goran Hyden, No Shortcuts to Progress, pp. 8-29. 40. Charles David Smith, Did Colonialism Capture the Peasantry? pp. 25-32;

40

PREDATORY RULE

see also Nelson Kasfrr, "Are African Peasants Self-Sufficient?" pp. 335-357. 41. Smith, Did Colonialism Capture the Peasantry? p. 28. 42. Geschiere, Village Communities and the State, pp. 350-357. 43. Ibid., pp. 350-354. 44. Rene Lemarchand, "African Peasantries, Reciprocity and the Market," p.46. 45. David Hirschmann, "Malawi's 'Captured' Peasantry," p. 485. See also Bunker, Peasants Against the State, pp. 267-269. 46. Raynaut, as cited in Lemarchand, "African Peasantries, Reciprocity and the Market," p. 47. 47. As Joyce Kolko has remarked: "It is wholly in the interests of the bourgeoisie that the state appear to be autonomous of economic class relations and to represent a 'national interest.' Significant now is the eclipse of this posture among the bourgeoisie and the readiness, under the condition of crisis, to discard even the rhetoric of full employment and welfare, even as an abstract goal. Curiously, academics and many on the left picked up a variant of this theme that the state is semi-autonomous at the very moment when empirically it is the most exposed as fallacious and abandoned by its principal advocates" (Restructuring the World Economy, p.187).

3 THE CONTRADICTIONS OF PRESIDENTIAL MONARCHISM IN AFRICA

In his presidential address to the twenty-sixth meeting of the American African Studies Association, Richard Sklar contended that "developmental dictatorships" have failed rather miserably in the economic and political tasks they have set for themselves. Instead of inducing unity and harmony, African regimes have generated ethnic favoritism and divisions; instead of ushering in social equality, they have spread corruption and injustices; instead of promoting economic development, they have fostered material stagnation and decline; and instead of establishing viable political orders, they have engendered divisive tendencies, military coups, and civil wars. In Sklar's view, the dismal performance of developmental dictatorships signals that the absence of democracy and accountability in African politics can no longer be defended on pragmatic or moral grounds. If given the choice, he argues, African men and women would prefer the vicissitudes, doubts, and imperfections of democracy to the corrupting and paralyzing brutality of dictatorships. By developing democratic mechanisms of accountability and representation, African people can begin to arrest their descent into hell and squalor. 1 The process of redemocratizing African politics is becoming the overriding issue in African studies.2 This focus stems from clear indications that peasants, workers, and intellectuals of Africa are no longer willing to put up with being the victims of despotic regimes. They are all engaged in a search for alternatives to authoritarianism. Throughout the continent, Africans are demanding an end to the existing presidential monarchisms and prevailing systems of class and ethnic privileges. In response to popular pressure, dictators in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Togo, and Zaire are promising to abandon their stultifying one-party states for more liberal forms of representation. 3 In Cote d'Ivoire, the Congo, and

41

42

PREDATORY RULE

Gabon, free elections-or at least promises to hold them-have generated both high expectations and a delicate measure of civil order after serious social disruptions. In Benin, Zambia, and the Cape Verde Islands, elections have brought new leaders to power. In short, democracy is high on the political agenda throughout Africa. Meanwhile, however, repression continues unabated4 in many African societies, so that rather than overtly challenging the legitimacy of their governments, many groups have opted for safer modes of opposition: They have chosen to entrench themselves in civil society. Exiting the public realm, they are creating new private spaces in which they hope to construct their own independent and parallel systems of survival. Such exit symbolizes their rejection of existing forms of governance and their desire for a new deal embedded in more democratic structures.5 The purpose of this chapter is to decipher how and why such structures can emerge from authoritarianism and what are their material, social, and political limitations. THE HIGHER CIRCLES AND THE SPREAD OF DICTA TORS HIPS

The rising popular demand for democracy cannot mask and is indeed partially explained by the reality that the higher circles in Africa are increasingly detached from the simple citizen and maintain this detachment through repressive means. They are, as Michael Schatzberg has argued in his study of Zaire, "conscious of their elevated position in the social order, intent on defending it, and more than willing to accord to each other the advantages and other courtesies that seem to go with their rank."6 He also suggests that the higher circles of Zaire have an "adversary" position to subordinate classes, which they regard with scorn and fear. By dissociating themselves from subordinate classes, the higher circles seek to validate both their elevated status and their claims to natural rights of governance.7 Abner Cohen has shown how this process of dissociation helped the Creoles of Sierra Leone develop a "cult of eliteness" and a "cultural mystique" that enhanced their supremacy.8 It can be ventured that the higher circles nurture their own corporate mystique and create a "cult of eliteness" because both are instrumentally crucial in the making of a full-fledged ruling class consciousness. To be a ruling class requires not just clear cognizance of collective class unity but also the capacity to diffuse that consciousness in the two other sites of class activities. The ethical, cultural, and material vision of the ruling class must take on the configuration of a hegemonic project. If it is to succeed, the project must represent the particular class interests of

CONTRADICTIONS OF PRESIDENTIAL MONARCHISM

43

the higher circles as embodiments of general and universal interests. This entails more than a mere mystification; it implies that certain aspirations and demands of the subordinate classes will be accommodated in the overall framework of the project.9 A process of relative and selective accommodation is inevitable, as the ideological apparatus of the state cuts across the sites of class disarticulation and subordinate class resistance. In the site of class disarticulation, the hegemonic project of the ruling class is simultaneously preserved and dissolved. It seeks to unify heterogeneous ethnic, religious, and linguistic configurations; but in the process of acknowledging them, it suffers their destructive effects. The result is a national ideology that expresses both the hegemonic project of the ruling class and the disparate ethos of disarticulated classes. The national ideology thus contains universalistic aspirations and particularistic claims. It is universalistic, however, only to the extent that the institutions articulating the higher circles' corporate interests are capable of satisfying the demands of certain subordinate classes. As Cohen has explained: An elite is an interest group, and its culture develops as a means for the coordination of its corporate activities to enhance and maintain its power. Its culture is thus to that extent particularistic. But because its members are at the same time the heads of different public institutions and the leaders of different national groupings, the very organization that articulates their social activities functions at the same time to bring about the close coordination of the national institutions and groupings and their overall integration. In this way the elite offers solutions to some significant organizational groblems on the national level, and to that extent its culture is universalistic. 0 The universalism of the higher circles is endangered, however, by Africa's political decay and economic crisis. Confronted with growing material scarcity, the higher circles lack the basic means to meet the critical demands of subordinate classes. The resources necessary for co-optation are no longer plentiful; on the contrary, they are vanishing rapidly. The universalism of African ruling classes is thus limited and precarious, all the more so since it is constrained by the multiple supraclass particularisms of ethnicity, religion, and linguistics. In Africa, the higher circles' conquest of state power has yet to generate the hegemonic mechanisms of class power. Paradoxically, this failure has resulted in both the decay of existing authoritarian regimes and the emergence of new ones. The incapacity of the African ruling classes to transform their state power into effective class power opened the door to violent and often mutually destructive confrontations between contending factions vying for domination. Faced with an impending explosion of internecine class struggles resulting from the absence of hegemonic class power, states will often move toward autonomization.

44

PREDATORY RULE

It is within the context of a state's desperate movement toward autonomization that dictatorships are born. Vicious struggles between members of the ruling class are clearly conducive to the emergence of Bonapartism, or what Gramsci has called "Caesarism," whereby "a great personality is entrusted with the task of arbitration over a historico-political situation characterised by an equilibrium of forces heading towards catastrophe. " 11 The role of personalities, the nature of leadership, and the talents of specific individuals have a significant impact on the making of African Bonapartist regimes. Historical figures emerge and make choices.12 They have opportunities that they can seize, and they can open doors to new alternatives. Caesarism can therefore reinvigorate the rule of the ruling class by paradoxically distancing the ruling class itself from the direct, unmediated exercise of state power. An autonomous political space thus develops in which African Caesars can maneuver their statecraft and individual virtU. Nonetheless, statecraft and virtU, choice and leadership are all decisively molded by the processes of class formation, the fluidity of the class structure, and the power of class interests. As Marx remarked long ago: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. " 13 Thomas Callaghy's insightful analysis of Mobutu's Zaire highlights the differences between the nature of personal rule in Africa and our understanding ofBonapartism in the classical sense. In fact, Callaghy goes so far as to abandon the concept of Bonapartism altogether; Mobutu's Zaire more closely resembles absolutism because the process of class formation is still gelatinous and politics takes patrimonial rather than bureaucratic rational forms. In Callaghy's view, "the class situation is simply more fluid, more in flux, under absolutism ... than it is under ... Bonapartism.... Political, territorial, and above all, administrative unity and centralization are still being struggled for, are still problematic, under absolutism while they are assured and assumed characteristics under Bonapartism."14 One might add that while African Bonapartes do not contest and indeed fuel social inequities and privileges, they are more interested in their own political survival than in the consolidation of the class they represent. In their quest to preserve their supremacy over a relatively dependent and disorganized group of courtiers, they manipulate bureaucratic assignments, rotate personnel in the highest echelons of government, and stymie autonomous centers of power. Such maneuvers are hardly the stuff of the making of a ruling class. Bearing these well-taken points in mind, I nevertheless feel that the concept of Bonapartism is a useful heuristic tool because it identifies the despotism of one individual

CONTRADICTIONS OF PRESIDENTIAL MONARCHISM

45

as arising primarily from an equilibrium of forces in which no social group is strong enough to impose its own social project on others. The concept can thus serve to uncover existing African realities. The equilibrium between contending classes and factions vying for power is conducive to the rise of providential, charismatic Caesars who emerge as temporary saviors of their republics. To that extent, Bonapartism embodies maximal state autonomy. As Marx explained in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the coup d'etat that brought Louis Bonaparte to power represented "the victory of Bonaparte over parliament, of the executive power over the legislative power, of force without phrases over the force of phrases." France "renounce[d) all will of its own and surrender(ed] itself to the superior orders of something alien, of authority" and "escaped the despotism of a class only to fall back beneath the despotism of an individual and, what is more, beneath the authority of an individual without authority. The struggle seem(ed) to [have settled) in such a way that all classes, equally impotent and equally mute, [fell] on their knees before the club." 15 Hence, under Bonapartism "the state seem[s] to [make] itself completely independent" from class power, insofar as it seeks to raise itself above and against the interests of the bourgeoisie. But however independent it may be from these interests, "state power is not suspended in mid-air. Bonaparte represents a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small peasants. " 16 In the end of his essay on Bonaparte, Marx qualifies the latter statement by indicating that personal rule of this type serves peasants, but only up to a point. He explains: As the executive authority which has made itself an independent power, Bonaparte feels it to be his mission to safeguard "civil order." But the strength of this civil order lies in the middle class. He looks on himself, therefore, as the representative of the middle class and issues decrees in this sense. Nevertheless, he is somebody solely due to the fact that he has broken the political power of this middle class and daily breaks it anew.... But by protecting its material power, he generates its political power anew .... This contradictory task of the man explains the contradictions of his government, the confused groping hither and thither which seeks now to win, now to humiliate first one class and then another and arrays all of them uniformly against himY

Because of its self-contradictory character, the Bonapartist state and its maximal autonomy cannot endure for long. Both are transitory and exceptional, and they soon confront the hard realities of class power. "Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes," wrote Marx. "But he cannot give to one class without taking from another. " 18 Bonapartism always represents a coup d'etat, not a revolution;

46

PREDATORY RULE

it is never able to make its antagonistic independence from the traditional ruling class permanent. What Marx wrote of Bonaparte's Second Empire in The Civil War in France is applicable to all Bonapartist regimes: "In reality, [it was] the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie [had] already lost, and the working class [had] not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation ... at the same time [it constituted] the most prostitute and the ultimate form of the State power which nascent middle-class society [had] commenced to elaborate as a means of its own emancipation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society [had] finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labour by capital. " 19 In the contemporary African context, the maximal autonomy of the Bonapartist state is thus a function of the crisis of hegemony: African Bonapartes emerge when incipient ruling classes fail to maintain their hold over state power because they lack the material, political, and moral leadership with which they could gain the consent of subaltern groups. And yet the Bonapartist state, in spite of the despotism of the presidential monarch, remains ligatured to society and to classes. It cannot free itself from the demands of class power, however immature such class power may be. The state may seek to shake itself free of society, but it has to maintain the continuity of life and civil order. Thus, it has to enhance the economic, political, and cultural dominance of the emerging ruling class. This historical context of hegemonic crisis explains why African political forms of representation are articulated through delicate patterns of ethnic coalitions. 20 Ethnoregional elites are incorporated into a cartel under the centralizing power of a personal ruler. 21 The political survival of the personal ruler hinges upon his capacity to coordinate the distribution of major state offices to ethnic courtiers without undermining his ultimate eminence in the overall chain of command. As Donald Rothchild and Michael Foley have put it, a personal ruler is a presidential monarch who organizes the process of "ethnic arithmetic" so characteristic of most African regimes. 22 Such ethnic arithmetic requires enormous political skills in balancing the authority of representative regional elites; the presidential monarch must see to it that he remains central to this whole process of ethnic arithmetic if he is to maintain power?3 He must be the only sun of the political system; the courtiers' radiance can only be the reflection of his rays. People must be led to believe that without him there could only be darkness and disorder. Presidential monarchs know that their rule depends on their capacity to suppress alternative centers of authority. A ruler thus seeks to keep his courtiers at his mercy and makes sure that they all know it. He is the ultimate dispenser of favor and disfavor, of gift and confiscation,

CONTRADICTIONS OF PRESIDENTIAL MONARCHISM

47

of privilege and ruin. He places himself above the law; indeed, he is the law. The presidential monarch, however, cannot unilaterally threaten the fundamental interests of the emerging ruling class. He merely temporarily displaces the antagonism between ruling and subordinate classes to conflict between society and bureaucracy. As Engels explained: "Bonapartism distinguishes itself by preventing [workers and capitalists] from coming to blows.... [And yet it] exists only to keep the workers under a tight rein with respect to the bourgeoisie. "24 In Africa, the Bonapartist state's maximal autonomy saves a temporarily incapacitated ruling class from extinction. THE "ONLY SUN": THE POLITICS OF PERSONAL SELF-INTEREST

It is clear that Bonapartism defends the material interest of a threatened ruling class, but it is also moved by the self-interest of the particular people in office, especially the presidential monarch, the supreme officeholder. Repeatedly we have seen African presidents using state power to extract from the popular masses those resources required to nourish "an enormous bureaucracy, well dressed and well fed ... an artificial caste, for which the maintenance of his regime becomes a bread-and-butter question."25 Moreover, the presidential monarch cannot tolerate the emergence of pluralistic sources of authority and is at ease only when surrounded by the silent mediocrity of a submissive entourage. One of Haile Selassie's subjects revealed to Kapuscinski that the King of Kings preferred bad ministers. And the King of Kings preferred them because he liked to appear in a favorable light by contrast. How could he show himself favorably if he were surrounded by good ministers? The people would be disoriented. Where would they look for help? On whose wisdom and kindness would they depend? Everyone would have been good and wise. What disorder would have broken out in the Empire then! Instead of one sun, fifty would be shining, and everyone would pay homage to a privately chosen planet. No, my dear friend, you cannot expose the people to such disastrous freedom. There can be only one sun. Such is the order of nature, and anything else is a heresy. 26

The centrality of the presidential monarch is continuously emphasized by the ideological apparatuses of the state. In an effort to legitimize his rule, these apparatuses incessantly nurture the cult of his personality, imparting to it supranatural powers and unlimited knowledge. Attending to the most trivial family conflict as well as to the weightiest national crisis, the presidential monarch has an all-encompassing sphere of competence. His presence is felt everywhere; he is the father of the nation, to whom

48

PREDATORY RULE

filial respect is always due. The presidential monarch demands and expects such respect; he will discipline and punish the sons and daughters who have gone astray. But his paternal love will always lead him to forgive those who repent and reform. Thus, Mobutu speaks of "his" dissidents: I am the chief of State, [and) as such I cannot be vindictive toward those fellow citizens who insult me. In effect, even among my own children there are those who are docile and others stubborn. One must not therefore believe that Tshishekedi, Makanda, Ngalula and associates are my enemies. [They) are militants to be reformed and capable later ... of retaking their place in the bosom of the large family of the [Mouvement Populaire de la Revolution), once proof has been established that they have come to their senses. I am the father of the large Zairian family and if I know how to love, I must equally know how to punish.27

The nation and the leader are one; they cannot be apprehended separately. The presidential monarch is thus indispensable, as his continued rule is the sine qua non for his society's well-being and prosperity. An article that appeared in West Africa describing Houphouet-Boigny's style of governance beautifully captures the essence of presidential monarchism: How often has one heard that the future of the Ivorian success saga depends on one man and one alone-Felix Houphou