The exploitation of ‘free’ labour – in Marx’s double sense of those workers ‘free’ to sell their labour to whom they choose and ‘free’ of any other means of survival – is central to capitalist production. In some readings it is the defining trait of capitalism. Wage labourers in this sense have historically made up a small fraction of the workforce across sub-Saharan Africa. In one estimate from the late 1920s, the proportion of African populations employed in wage labour ranged from 0.4% in Nigeria to 8.2% in the South African Transkei (Buell 1928). The most recent figures from the International Labour Organization (ILO) have 85.8% of African workers in ‘informal’ forms of work (ILO 2018). Even in South Africa, long the most heavily ‘capitalised’ economy in sub-Saharan Africa, Scully estimates that 42% of employed South Africans earn livelihoods from precarious and irregular forms of employment (2016, 303).
Comparing African political economies to abstracted models of capitalism assuming ever-widening proletarianisation would thus seem unlikely to tell us much. Stefan Ouma (2017) and Horman Chitonge (2018), among others, have (rightly) argued as much recently. As Pnina Werbner (2018) shows in an excellent recent piece in ROAPE, studies of African working classes in particular have a long history of falling into precisely this trap – studying African labour primarily by comparing it to the ‘normal’ trajectories of proletarian labour in Europe.
Yet, it’s hard to deny that African development has also been profoundly shaped by its place in a capitalist world economy. Indeed, we can go a step further: the capitalist world economy has always depended on the mobilisation of African labour – for instance through the slave trade (see Inikori 2002), or through the colonial plunder of African resources (see Rodney 1972). Equally, the present context of African development is marked by, among other things, large-scale land grabbing, extractivist development models, increasingly volatile prices for agricultural commodities, and the vicissitudes of private foreign debt and capital flows. It would be difficult, in short, to understand contemporary patterns of African political economy without reference to their location in capitalist circuits of accumulation on a global scale, and vice versa. There’s a danger, then, that in jettisoning ‘capitalism’ altogether from our studies of African political economies we risk missing important dynamics.
We’re left with a paradox: African political economies, and especially the myriad labour regimes found across the region, don’t look much like conventional understandings of ‘capitalism’. But, capitalism as a system of accumulation has always depended on Africans and their labour, and we can’t make sense of the history and development of African political economies without some reference to capitalism. In what follows, I want to argue that the way forward here is that rather than asking what ‘capitalism’ can (and can’t) tell us about Africa, political economists should be asking ‘what does African labour tell us about capitalism?’
This is perhaps an especially pertinent question because those ‘standard’ forms of work based on written contracts, regular hours, decent pay, covered by statutory protections which underpin many understandings of ‘capitalist’ relations of production, are becoming rarer everywhere. This erosion of ‘standard’ forms of work is often attributed to neoliberal reforms. In perhaps the most widely discussed recent example, Standing (2011) attributes the rise of the ‘precariat’ to policies enacted during the ‘globalization’ era, ‘a period when the economy was disembedded from society as financiers and neoliberal economists sought to create a global market economy based on competitiveness and individualism’ (2011, 26). While neoliberal reforms have been as destructive in Africa as elsewhere (see Harrison 2019), precarious modes of exploitation are also the historic norm outside the brief ‘golden age’ in mid-twentieth-century Europe and North America. To attribute precarity to neoliberal reforms, then, is to miss the ways in which it is endemic and pervasive in capitalist histories – and indeed, as I show further in the final section below, to gloss over some of the important political dynamics of neoliberalism itself. In short, paying attention to histories of irregular work in sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly the ways in which these forms of work have been governed over the longer run, is relevant both within and beyond Africa.
Placing African labour in capitalism
One promising direction comes from authors who have sought to place informal and unfree work in sub-Saharan Africa in the circuits of global capital. There is a long tradition of scholarship here. This line of thought has often resolved itself into a consideration of the relations between ‘pre-’ or ‘non-capitalist’ and ‘capitalist’ formations, often by differentiating between capitalism as a system of accumulation operating on a global scale and capitalist modes of production, nested within the former alongside others. Rosa Luxemburg, for instance, pointed to the reliance of European industrial capitalism on the violent exploitation of African labour for cheap raw materials – noting in particular the brutal depredations of the rubber trade in the Belgian Congo – in arguing that ‘capitalism in its full maturity also depends in all respects on non-capitalist strata’ (2003, 342). Samir Amin observes, not dissimilarly, that ‘the world capitalist system cannot be reduced, even in abstraction, to the capitalist mode of production’ (1974, 2). Accumulation on a world scale, in this view, requires the sustained extraction of value from ‘non-capitalist’ peripheries. Other interventions have made cognate claims while rejecting the dualism of ‘capitalist’ and ‘non-capitalist’ modes of production. Bernstein (1977, 2006), for instance, has argued that peasantries in Africa and across the global South were thoroughly incorporated into ‘generalized commodity relations’ even in the absence of widespread private property in land and wage labour.
While there are unquestionably significant differences between these authors, the vital point is that they all suggest that ‘capitalism’ as a system of accumulation has never existed without depending on a diversity of different forms of labour exploitation. Accordingly, we can’t make sense of various non-waged, unfree, informal forms of work without reference to the dynamics of capitalism, nor is our picture of capitalism – whether as a system of ‘accumulation on a world scale’ or more narrowly as a set of spatially and temporally bound relations of production – ever complete without taking such forms of work into account.
Recent critical scholarship in African political economy has detailed the role played by unfree forms of exploitation in facilitating contemporary global patterns of accumulation (see Manzo 2005; LeBaron and Ayers 2013). ‘Informal’ work too, as Kate Meagher (2016) reminds us, is still often linked into global production networks through a variety of forms of exploitation. For instance, seasonal agricultural workers play a vital role in producing cash crops for export; and labour brokers employing workers on hyper-casualised, temporary contracts are rife in the construction industry in many urban centres across the region. Studies of African labour, in short, show us in the first instance that the same historical processes that produce ‘free’ labour also simultaneously produce and rely upon a variety of different forms of irregular work.
These recent interventions are vital because they enable important critiques of the policy frameworks rolled out by the ILO, World Bank and others around irregular forms of work. Such frameworks have tended to treat informal economies, forced labour and other forms of non-standard work as the products of the exclusion of certain workers from the normal workings of global capitalism. A key ILO report, for instance, argues that ‘Where the informal sector is linked to globalization, it is often because a developing country has been excluded from integration into the global economy’ (ILO 2002, 34). The tendency has been to treat informality as a result of regulatory failures. These arguments, equally, echo Standing’s diagnosis of precarity as a result of the roll-back of statutory labour protections. The main alternative to the ILO’s perspective in discussions of informal labour is the brand of institutional economics popularised by Hernando de Soto (2001) and widely adopted by the World Bank. Here ‘informality’ becomes a form of empowerment in the face of overregulation, a reflection of entrepreneurial instincts to be encouraged by developing appropriate institutions. Policy initiatives to promote micro-enterprise development, access to credit, skills and property rights follow logically from this way of thinking about the ‘informal’. Here again, informality is understood in terms of exclusion from the ‘normal’ operation of market forces. In all of these cases, critics have rightly pointed out that policies designed without regard for the ways in which ‘informal’ or ‘unfree’ work is embedded in wider capitalist economies are unlikely to be effective – at best they can offer half solutions that treat the symptoms rather than the causes of dispossession.
Yet, there remains an important corollary here that has often gone underexplored. In practice, the lines between, say, ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ labour relations are indeed fluid; and irregular forms of work are indeed integral to capitalist accumulation. But, the drawing of those boundaries themselves are not just conceptual questions of concern to us as scholars of (African) political economy. They are more than bad policy too. They are fundamentally political interventions in the sense that they are the artefacts of specific, historical, patterns of struggle and practices of governance – processes the policy frameworks around informality noted above are directly engaged in (see Bernards 2018a). In relegating ‘informal’ modes of exploitation to aberrant spaces outside the ‘normal’ workings of capitalism, they both depoliticise irregular forms of work, and naturalise those forms of exploitation rooted in wages and legal contracts.
It’s here that serious historical attention to African labour is vital. The kinds of work performed by African workers have long been key reference points in global debates about governing irregular forms of work. The ILO’s first convention on forced labour from 1930, for instance, was aimed at growing concerns about colonial labour practices in Africa. Placing African labour in capitalism requires not just that we recognise the multiplicity of labour forms under capitalism, or that we critique the ILO or the World Bank’s approach to these questions, but also that we think seriously and in historical perspective about the politics of irregular forms of work. As I show further in the remainder of this piece, such frameworks have always been contested, and often shaped in powerful ways by the unfolding and contingent relationships between the state and various segments of working classes.
The origins of ‘informality’1
The concept of ‘informal’ work, to cite a particularly important example, was popularised in no small part by a major ILO mission to Kenya in 1972 under the auspices of the World Employment Programme (WEP). This WEP mission relied centrally and explicitly on the assumption that the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ were discrete spheres, the latter defined by its exclusion from the world economy. Hence, the core of the strategy laid out in the ILO report: ‘Our strategy of a redistribution from growth aims at establishing links that are at present absent between the formal and informal sectors’ (ILO 1972, 7, emphasis added).
While the concept of ‘informality’ was new in the 1970s, it clearly echoed colonial dichotomies between ‘modern’ (or, implicitly, ‘capitalist’) and ‘traditional’ sectors of the economy. The fact that Africans were increasingly moving from supposedly ‘non-capitalist’ spaces in the countryside into ‘capitalist’ ones in the city was the source of much consternation for colonial officials and ILO staffers in the decade after WWII. ‘Development’ and economic growth were increasingly identified with the movement of people from ‘traditional’ activities in the countryside into ‘modern’ employment in urban spaces, and the concomitant increase in labour productivity – as in W. Arthur Lewis’ (1954) seminal work. But colonial policy-makers increasingly fretted about how to manage these transitions, and how to govern those ‘classes of wage-earners who … could no longer rely on the solidarity engendered by the family or tribal community … and were consequently vulnerable to the ordinary risks of life and to the fluctuations of employment’ (quoted in Bernards 2018a, 72), and about ‘the danger of permitting towns to expand beyond a certain limit; then they became unwieldy to administer and control’ ( Ibid .).
The preparatory work for the ILO mission to Kenya very clearly echoed similar concerns:
Perhaps more important than all the rest, there seems to exist, in Kenya, a very notorious dualism between the prosperous basis of certain aspects of the economic picture, highly productive farm units, relatively good infrastructure, sophisticated financial services, high-quality education, by European standards, in some schools, and the majority of the population. ( Ibid ., 88)
The concept of the ‘informal’ economy broke down the strict rural–urban dualism often implicit in these older statements – pointing, in effect, to the rise of ostensibly ‘non-capitalist’ forms of work in urban spaces. However, it still very much framed the reduction of urban poverty in terms of incorporating African workers into global capitalism.
As a host of contemporary critics – including Leys (1973) and Sandbrook (1983) – pointed out, ‘informal’ economies in fact often subsidised social reproduction at low wages in the ‘formal’ sector: street vendors or informal domestic labour directly enabled the reproduction of wage work with cheap food, clothes and care. Moreover, dichotomies between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, or ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ economies, or ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ sectors, tended to occlude the ways in which individual workers and households often relied on livelihood strategies that cut across these areas of activity.
But critiques too often stopped there. The very things that made governing the ‘informal’ an inadequate means of addressing poverty also made it an effective political tool: it occluded any serious consideration of the structural roots of poverty, focusing instead on a relatively narrow set of technical responses aimed at fostering ‘links’ between formal and informal activity. In so doing, framing urban poverty in terms of ‘informality’ dovetailed with and helped reinforce a structure of state authority that sought to restrict any independent voice for labour in shaping development strategy. The WEP mission, it is worth noting, followed a period of consolidation and depoliticisation of the labour movement. Kenya’s Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU) had been formed in 1965 when the government dissolved the Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL) and the rival Kenyan African Workers’ Congress. The KFL had split over interlinked personal disagreements among the leadership, questions of international affiliation and the ‘political’ independence of trade unions. The new COTU was led by the factions aligned to the government, and it was prevented from pursuing ‘political’ action. The government also identified unions as the primary cause of unemployment in the 1970 report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Unemployment in 1970 – high levels of wage disparity between urban and rural areas, partly ‘as a result of the trade union activities’, were blamed for excessive rural–urban migration and the resort of capital to labour-saving technologies (Republic of Kenya 1970, 3).
The ILO report on Kenya played a considerable role in popularising the concept of ‘informal’ work. This example of the development of the ‘informal’ as a concept shows the deeply political character of conceptual struggles over the ‘non-capitalist’ character of irregular work. Critics at the time were acutely aware (a) that the notion of ‘informal’ work could ‘cocoon’ precarious livelihoods from capitalist accumulation, and (b) that in this sense it was a poor reflection of the realities of irregular work. The diagnosis of urban poverty as the result of the exclusion of the (ostensibly non-capitalist) ‘informal’ work performed by most Kenyans from (capitalist) ‘formal’ ones dovetailed well with state aims. It also clearly drew on a much longer history of colonial understandings of parallel ‘capitalist’ and ‘non-capitalist’ economies. The key thing to underline is that not only have African work and workers been very much at the core of global debates about irregular forms of work and their relationships to global capitalism, but also that these understandings have also always been deeply political, wrapped up with questions of statecraft.
Irregular work in neoliberal Africa
It is at this point that we might usefully turn back to the question of the relationships between neoliberalism and the politics of irregular work. As I’ve noted above, one of the reasons why it’s worth considering how irregular forms of work in sub-Saharan Africa are linked into global capitalism is that it complicates widely accepted diagnoses of the rise of irregular work globally as the results of neoliberal deregulation. African experiences encourage us to reject any simple equation of precarity with deregulation in the neoliberal era in favour of an emphasis on irregular work as a structural tendency of capitalist accumulation. It nonetheless still remains worth asking what impact neoliberalism has had.
Structural adjustment has unquestionably brutally undercut working-class livelihoods across the region, while at the same undermining the means through which postcolonial regimes had often disciplined strategically important segments of working classes – close links between trade unions and ruling parties in particular. This prompted widespread protests and the collapse of a number of single-party regimes. The tensions implicit in this pattern of failure, backlash and state restructuring are crucial to understanding the rearticulation of policies towards ‘informal’ economies from the 1990s onwards. On one hand, neoliberal strategies of governance shifted towards more localised interventions promoting access to ‘markets’ and property rights as mechanisms for poverty reduction in the aftermath of the failures of structural adjustment (see Best 2013). On the other, the growth of irregular work and dismantling of postcolonial institutions often raised the strategic importance of finding new means of governing informal economies for African states. In practice, irregular forms of work have been key sites of both overt and more subtle forms of contestation in this context.
A useful example here comes via the ILO’s increasing promotion of ‘microinsurance’ policies as a means of providing social protection to ‘informal’ workers.
Officials in the Social Protection Department of the ILO initially used the concept of ‘microinsurance’ in the late 1990s to refer to means of providing alternative modes of social protection to informal workers left out of both state provision and market-based schemes, through ‘community-based’ forms of social protection. This formalised a turn to ‘autonomous’ and ‘community-based’ solutions to providing social protection for irregular workers that had gradually emerged out of efforts to promote the extension of social security in the context of structural adjustment. Since the early 2000s, microinsurance is increasingly promoted by a broader complex of organisations, including financial regulators, and framed in terms of ‘financial inclusion’, a shift that has been accompanied by a growing emphasis on promoting the development of commercial markets (see Bernards 2018b). Microinsurance, then, is a key example of contemporary efforts to govern irregular work and precarious livelihoods.
On a basic level, microinsurance boils down to a privatised means of providing social protection and healthcare to informal workers not covered by conventional social security. A recent microinsurance policy framework developed in Senegal, for instance, with assistance from the ILO, is framed in precisely this way: ‘Current social protection covers about 20 percent of the population, as against the majority of Senegalese citizens … working in the rural and informal sectors, who are excluded’ (ILO 2014, 3). Making a market for small-scale, simplified insurance products, then, is yet another way of bringing excluded workers into the ‘normal’ workings of capitalism. It serves to deepen the commodification of labour insofar as it requires workers to find means of paying premiums on an ongoing basis even for the management of the vulnerabilities implicit in deregulated labour markets themselves.
As a means of reducing poverty and managing insecurity for ‘informal’ workers, microinsurance leaves a good deal to be desired. It downloads responsibility for social protection onto those least able to pay, namely poor individuals and communities. It thus shares many of the same shortcomings as the related promotion of microcredit (see Bond 2013; Bateman 2015). At best, this kind of intervention risks creating a decidedly two-tiered system with a state pension scheme supporting a shrinking core of workers and the remainder of the population covered by a privatised system partially underwritten by state subsidies. It also fundamentally depends on and mobilises an understanding of ‘informal’ workers as being excluded from the ‘normal’ workings of proletarian labour relations.
We can make much more sense of the specific roll-out of microinsurance policies with reference to the specific political relations of force prevailing in the context of neoliberal reforms. Here it is useful to return to the example of Senegal. It’s particularly worth noting that, in this context, microinsurance policy has been shaped less by commercialising impulses (capital, by and large, has often not been particularly interested) and more by political imperatives to organise irregular workers in the context of the dismantling of the mechanisms by which relationships with subaltern populations had been managed in the postcolonial period.
The impacts of structural adjustment are a particularly important part of this story. The governing regime in postcolonial Senegal depended on the articulation of state monopolies over agrarian exports with local and foreign merchant capital, and with a series of mechanisms for securing the consent of subaltern groups, including urban employment in the civil service or in an industrial sector dominated by parastatals and agrarian cooperatives for rural workers. Trade unionism in postcolonial Senegal was premised on a particular model of relations between trade unions and the ruling party called ‘responsible participation’, which granted unionist members in the Parti socialiste a share of cabinet seats and made all salaried worker members of the party into members of the Confédération nationale des travailleurs du Sénégal (CNTS, the National Confederation of Senegalese Workers). Implicitly, the arrangement rested on the rigid differentiation of salaried formal workers from the precarious urban poor – particularly insofar as these policies meant that public servants and workers in publicly owned enterprises made up the considerable majority of CNTS’s membership. This arrangement was undercut from the early 1980s onwards by structural adjustment – the devaluation of the regional currency (the CFA franc) dramatically reduced real wages, and retrenchment and privatisation led to major job losses in the public sector.
These costs of adjustment for workers led to intense debates within CNTS about whether or not to remain affiliated to the Parti socialiste, and perhaps ironically, the political pluralism that resulted from protests against neoliberalisation encouraged the formation of rival trade union confederations. These trends were accentuated when the Parti socialiste lost the 2000 election, and CNTS subsequently opted to officially disaffiliate. The new government, meanwhile, encouraged the formation of new confederations out of rival tendencies in CNTS by greatly facilitating the registration of rival trade union centres. At the same time, the incidence of irregular forms of work has expanded considerably.
Microinsurance makes political sense, then, in a context in which a growing proportion of the working population is involved in irregular forms of work, and in which the means by which urban workers had been organised politically under the postcolonial regime have splintered. The rigid political distinction between formal and informal work implicit in the model of ‘responsible participation’ is no longer viable in the context of deindustrialisation, privatisation and the casualisation of work in a number of key industries. As with the Kenyan mission, the promotion of microinsurance diagnoses ‘informality’ as a result of exclusion from the normal workings of global capitalism. In obscuring the ways in which urban informality remains bound up with wider patterns of neoliberalisation and capitalist restructuring, it similarly lends itself to depoliticised solutions. The point here is that closer attention to the history of governing irregular labour in Africa suggests the emergence of distinctly neoliberal modes of governance grappling with the political challenges posed by irregular forms of work.
Conclusion
I have two big points to underline here about what this means for future research on African capitalism:
First, I think it’s a mistake to dwell on whether or not African political economies fit this or that model of capitalism. If our frameworks for understanding ‘capitalism’ don’t allow us to make sense of African political economies, we should be reflecting on how African experiences push us to rethink those frameworks, rather than debating the value of ‘capitalism’ as a concept per se. Equally, if we choose not to analyse African political economies with reference to their ‘capitalist’ character, we risk treating the pathologies of irregular forms of exploitation in Africa as a result of their own cultural peculiarities and missing the ways in which they are embedded in wider circuits of political order, production and accumulation. An understanding of ‘capitalism’ that can’t account for the forms of labour predominant in sub-Saharan Africa is necessarily an impoverished one. This is perhaps an especially pertinent point at present given the erosion of standard forms of employment on a global scale. As a number of authors have pointed out, precarity has long been the norm in Africa and elsewhere across the global South (see Munck 2013). There can be no worthwhile critique of ‘capitalism’ that fails to account for this. The good news is that there is a long lineage of critical political economy that has spoken to these kinds of questions – around how irregular forms of work slot into circuits of capitalist accumulation – including Marx and Luxemburg as well as the more recent authors cited above. If we accept that our histories of capitalism need to account for the variegated forms of exploitation we can locate in African political economies, past and present, then there is real scope for creative engagements with these thinkers and questions, thinking about how histories of African labour push us to rethink our models of capitalism.
Second, debates about African labour and its links to global capitalism are never simply abstract or of purely academic interest. A big task for critical political economy needs to be confronting the ways in which the links between the irregular forms of work that are predominant in Africa (and increasingly elsewhere) and the global circuits of capital accumulation are governed and understood. African political economists have long been very good at subjecting the policy frameworks promulgated by the ILO and World Bank to effective critiques. The actual processes by which understandings of irregular labour have been developed, contested and translated across time and space – in a word, the practice of governing irregular labour – have largely escaped serious critical attention. There is an implicit understanding of governance at work in many of these perspectives that often winds up curtailing the scope of critical work. Governance is seen as something that reacts upon more or less accurate images of the world of production and accumulation. The latter are (often implicitly or de facto) understood as ontologically separate from processes of governance. The integral but fraught role of regulatory processes in producing the boundaries between ‘normal’ and ‘irregular’ forms of labour, and in securing the reproduction of prevailing modes of accumulation in the process, has not been examined in much theoretical or empirical detail.