I have to say that yesterday, when I listened to all the talks, I felt slightly alienated simply because I'm an historian of Africa.
I'm not an economic historian and I work on the 20th century and I have to say that
the debate about the Great Divergence has had not many effects on African economics,
of course, got us. Austen was one of the few historians of Africa who felt inspired by this debate, William as well.
But William works on all kinds of topics and all over the world, so I wouldn't consider him as an historian of Africa only.
But otherwise, this debate did not really attract a too many people.
On the other hand, there has been, at the same time, a certain rise again of economic history of Africa.
But I think not very closely connected to the Great Divergence debate,
and also fuelled very much by economist hijacking African history and writing or producing a lot of peer reviewed nonsense in my context.
I'm talking here is more on global labour history. That's another story of Africa branch that started to grow at around 2000.
And what I'm looking here despite my title, which I had to give far too earlier and later, I thought about what I could say.
And so I would talk mainly about the relationship of capita and labour at the example of Africa,
20th Century Africa and two elements of the relationship of capitalism and labour stand out.
I think that on the ground,
relations between power and ideology and the starting point for analysing both is the writing of the concept of this gentleman.
Maxwell, I think, is still an important figure when we talk about capitalism and we share the same hairdresser, by the way.
And what I want to talk about here, especially, is Mark's concept of primitive or as one has to say,
in our original accumulation because it's Drummond, but user-friendly means original and primitive as a kind of slightly disorienting translation.
And then the twenty first twenty five first chapters of Carpenter and Marx portrayed a powerful,
systemic logic built on the assumption that Labour was fully commoditized.
And then in Chapter 26, you argued that these assumptions had notably, in the case of Great Britain,
been met by the forceful removal of most cultivators from land and the legal and administrative structure that enforces political,
social and coercive process and and led to an expropriation that was written, as he put it, so nicely in letters of blood and fire.
How this came to be, how this came to be could not be explained on the basis of capital logic,
primitive accumulation was contingent process located at the intersection of different historical trends,
including the relationships of Crown and there was autocracy in Britain,
the changing legal framework in which event lots and different categories of tenants operated the extensions of British commerce overseas,
including the slave trade and plantation aquaculture and the West Indies,
and into imperial rivalries that shape the capacity of the state and financial institutions to reinforce each other's influence.
And all these points have been the subject of considerable scholarly investigation and questioning ever since,
and some people in the room have been part of that debate.
The other side of the story of primitive or original accumulation was the way it was written out of elite ideology.
Despite much effort on the part of its victims,
what Marx termed the fetishism of commodities treated the human story of how labour became an object as if it was a natural condition,
a relationship of things rather than the relationship of people.
As most recent scholarship has shown, employer workers relationships even in the British case,
where nested in layers of state regulation, political enforcement and outright coercion.
But if free and coerced labour were anything but dichotomous,
the representation of labour in Iran defined by the legal control of property or lack thereof and the neutrality
of the market relationship was crucial to the development of an ideological basis for capitalist development.
The anti-slavery movement, as Thomas you hold and others have shown, however diverse the motivations of leading actors were,
had the effect of defining a ram of an ethically defensible form of labour distinguished from others and such a political structure.
The working class movements could still make claims as they did,
but the domain of claim making was defined by the acceptance of the wage relationship itself.
I think, and a number of people start to think that again,
that the concept of original accumulation is extremely useful beyond the paradigmatic English case, which of course has its own complexities.
And I don't dare to delve into that. Of course not, because it can be applied as a template, but exactly because it cannot.
One can focus on specific processes in Africa by which people are quite productive resources and excluded others from them land productive trees,
noted points on trade routes, for example. The concept encourages us to us exactly what resources were commanded by whom,
on what basis and who was excluded from them on what basis and was what effects.
These are by all means empirical questions and will give rise to diverse answers.
And, of course, a couple of cases when you talk about capitalism in Africa and the first cases always South Africa,
because in South Africa land, the elimination of land went further than any place.
It's complicated by the racialised nature of the process and the fiction that Africans maintain the integrity of free capitalist societies,
the mineral discoveries, the second half of the 19th century and subsequent expansion of the industrial sector of the economy.
That to the emergence of an industrial workforce that included thousands of European immigrants and a large number of Africans,
and for short appeared also Chinese workers. And Indian workers, the workforce in the South African mines was divided along racial lines,
whereby Europeans were assigned to supervisory positions by Africans were relegated to unskilled and menial tasks.
A crucial legal step was the Land Act of 1913 that consolidated the policy of depriving the vast majority of black South Africans of land ownership.
This act was crucial in driving down black real wages.
We talked about real wages yesterday for two reasons and not only reserved 93 percent of the land for whites,
but also prohibited African tenancy on white owned land.
Before that time, sharecropper tenancy had probably been the most important way in which black farmers
could still sell produce to the market rather than selling the Labour Party.
The key to the capitalist character of South African development can be located in agriculture.
Since the 17th century and culturally and socially distinct land owning class has been
emerging on the one that tightening its grip on land in the context of industrialisation,
forcing tenants to become wage labourers and bringing about this African proletariat in the process.
Elsewhere, there were specific regions where such an took place,
but there were many more regions where differential access to land and other resources
took farms more complicated than a dichotomy of land alienation and community land tenure.
The classic case a case goes No Sowell is West African cocoa producers.
Whether people was a prior claim to land migrants who planted the cocoa, the cocoa,
bushes and kinsmen, clients, labour tenants and other workers who did the labour.
Mark, a system of relations that brought about innovation and relative prosperity without corresponding to the elite norms of freehold property,
basically to both Marxists and neoclassical economies.
And still, other instances, Africans were able to straddle this varying degrees of autonomy and security.
And over the individual life cycle and all the family unit between wage, labour and agriculture in the context of family and community.
In recent decades, governing elites and foreign investors have been buying up land, not necessarily using its productivity,
but leaving many people without either the security that access to land through kinship and community had once provided,
or any realistic possibility of supporting themselves through wage labour.
The sentiment of land grabbing, as this is called, is widely discussed for a number of years.
In the 1970s and 80s, when African labour history was at its height,
scholars were keen on words like proletarian ization or to show that the good Tanzanians the making of an African working class.
The stories of millenia of capitalism spreading steadily over the globe.
The story didn't just get the future wrong, that something historians as often as economists.
But it got the past wrong as well. The growth of a labour force was con. Conjuncture, not an evolutionary phenomenon and state policy,
at least in the French and British African colonies in the years following World War Two, was not geared towards proletarian ization.
But as it was called at that time, towards stabilisation.
Oops. It recognised that which labour and strikes had become issues in cities whereby lines, mines and ports,
and that the best way of making those workers productive was to stop treating them at tribesmen temporarily at work.
But as a budding working class that could and should be separated from the vast majority of Africans who lived in the countryside
and whose relationship to the means of production could only slowly be transformed and only was in their own social media.
By defining and separating out a working class from the rural masses, that class could be that was at least a fantasy.
That class could be reproduced under the watchful eyes of doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers and labour officers.
Civilisation implied a particular state directed programme to reconfigure the life cycle and intergenerational relations.
The post-war doctrine of stabilisation looked to some Africans becoming a cultural modern men,
but kept in place older stereotypes of the rule or rather tribal African.
The dichotomous view, papered over the historical record of colonial regimes,
had lacked the power to bring about systematic transformation that is, to bring about a version of primitive original accumulation.
Africans could engage in wage labour without given the totality of that time to their beings, add to it or the beings to it.
They could find nieces and colonial economies for themselves that allowed them to stave off capitalist discipline.
Space could be place against time. Mobility was the defence against the rhythms of that marks described in this chapter on the working day.
The consequences of such forms of struggle were beyond what either side could anticipate from one point of view.
Africa was an unexplored continent and the of a sense that the quantity of surplus
value that could be extracted was limited by the ability of so many Africans.
Until recent decades, to avoid complete subordination to the one that mattered in capitalism and the classic sense.
That meant a wide variety of social relations of production coexisted in time and over space.
And it makes sense to analyse them, not in relation to the individual work at any point in time,
but to the worker over the life course and each life course in relation to kinship groups, networks, pets and client relations and so on.
And one can go to argue that this complexity,
this overlapping of social forms over the life course and other different kinds of social connexions was both a protection and over time constraints.
As Mark Jennings argued a few years ago, the West faced and Covenant Society perhaps is to be unexploited.
What I'm suggesting here is that by turning the model of capitalism, a model of capitalist development into a set of questions,
one can develop a set of perspectives that take us away from single stories of the ever extending reach of proletarian ization.
The stories are about time, life cycle and growth, but more than linear time, and they are about space.
But, so to speak, lumpy space. Uneven space.
Not the infinitely connected space of the book globalisation implies.
So if we look at the trajectory of Africa, of labour in Africa in the 20th century,
we see that colonial regimes for all the advantages and technology and communication face limits on the capacity to harness African labour power.
Islands of labour exploitation and mines, port cities and settler farms were surrounded by vast labour catchment areas,
which supply labour power was producing a working class. But the category game was still being played.
Mission knows that humanitarian groups campaign to define and exercise forced labour from the repertoire of colonial power,
even if they usually defined forced labour rather narrowly as the use of official coercion for private profit.
All the abuses of government recruitment and did not penetrate the patterns of land seizure and power that actually shaped the condition of labour.
The tendency to treat free labour as a fetish in colonial circles or amongst free market purists today should not lead us
to invert these conceptions and treat the labour questions in Africa as if a single category of racialized subordination,
the efforts of Africans, as individuals and as communities to defend themselves against subordination need to be taken seriously,
as does in some places, the ability of some Africans to create a modest prosperity for themselves.
Africans were often trying in their own ways to put family life together.
Women might provide much of the labour that kept the wage labour force alive, play a bigger role in agricultural labour than regimes intended,
and participate in migratory initiatives to get away from forced labour and
to try to establish a more family oriented pattern of work and social life.
It wasn't this content that's a category game as played by France and Britain could use a stabilisation concept.
This is that this would further fragment. African society was considered a positive step towards modernising Africa.
Family allowances and other welfare programmes did not necessarily produce the kind of bold and working class
officials wish to see the made between my juices wages to support his wife's engagement and put it straight.
Or perhaps his own move out of which labour he himself might be more intend to become a big man in the sense practised by his ancestors and relatives,
rather than the cultural worker and urbanites of the colonial imagination.
The relationship of the categories of gender and labour were much more complicated in practise than the divisions of colonial reformers.
The line between those included in this colonial vision and those excluded was never very clear.
So in any case, sterilisation was not proletarian position.
post-World War to Africa in this specific and somehow bounded way was part of the 20th century trend towards
providing a measure of security to working classes as myself and the Lyndon and others have pointed out,
this was not a linear trend, but a conjunction was in the longer term pattern of capitalist development,
which depends on the precariousness of the worker's position to enforce labour discipline.
The protections afforded to workers in Europe and to a significantly lesser extent, the United States are, according to this interpretation,
a product of special circumstances of the 20th century, not least of power and potential threats of labour movements,
fear of socialist alternatives, the rise of mass consumption and attempts by elites, especially in democratic societies,
to blue cross class conditions and foster something like the French are fond of calling solidarity.
This model is now, as we all know, under threat.
More and more labour contracts are short term and benefits are called into question in the name of austerity and flexible labour markets.
And Africans moment of this welfare moment or the Tom Glorious as the French call it, was particularly brief.
And Jim Ferguson has eloquently described in the case of Zambia,
what it meant for the gains which destabilised workers of the 1950s and 60s had
made in the copper belt that made to be eroded by hostile government policies,
the undermining of trade unions, inflation and the decline of commodity prices.
Ferguson has since gone gone on to argue that precarity is no longer needed to drive people into the labour market.
Rather, precarity reflects the decreased need for labour in the work market.
Perhaps more acute in Africa than in any other places rather than unemployment.
Being a temporary condition within the life course, producing certain disciplining effects, but also requiring certain kinds of social interventions.
It is becoming a permanent condition. South Africa, for example, has come to grips, has to come to grips with the importance of the non-working class,
which has been excluded from much of the gains of post-apartheid South Africa.
Indeed, the low paid worker and the migrant worker are likely to be regarded as less than true citizens for citizenship.
And indeed,
human worth is in the minds of South Africans governing elites linked to productive work that is available only to a fraction of the population.
Some argue that the South African states should get away from the equation of both livelihood and dignity of this work.
And think of mechanisms like basic income grants that allow people to get by independent of whether they work.
But even such an argument presumes that the only work that needs to be done is that forbids capitalists
willing to pay more over the premise that capital in Africa no longer needs so many workers.
It's questions, but some questioned by some authors who argue that multinational capital is finding new uses of workers as long as they are cheap,
particularly to reach customers of modest means.
Though this was a kind of rather a tour de force, so 20th Century African labour history and what I tried to emphasise is,
in fact, that the relationship of capitalism and labour is neither homogenising nor linear.
So if capitalist developments makes development, makes it possible to imagine labour as a universal construct across across a space.
In reality, capitalism has homogenised neither space nor time, but has produced great unevenness.
This lumpiness is not necessarily optimising for capitalist accumulation,
nor does it produce a community between economic practises and ideological representations of them.
Thank you very much.