The State and Organised Labour in Botswana

Liberal Democracy in Emergent Capitalism

Monageng Mogalakwe

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429780530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1997, this volume departs from conventional analyses of Botswana's political economy and focuses on the second phase of Botswana's capitalist development from 1966-1990, arguing that even in a formally liberal democratic country, the imperatives of economic growth and development in a capitalist context give rise to the state's close supervision and control of organised labour. Taking inspiration from Marx's theories of history, Monageng Mogalakwe examines the capitalist form of the Botswana state and its relationships with the trade unions, labour law, industrial relations, class struggle and organised labour in a period characterised by direct state intervention in the economy and in industrial relations.

1 Theorising the state-labour relation

Introduction

The empirical analysis that follows next is primarily concerned with the relationship of the state to organised labour in a developing country. It is my contention that this relationship cannot be understood without analysis of the state itself. In most Marxist theories of the state, it has been viewed in terms of its relation to capital rather than labour. The state is often conceived as an instrument that can be wielded by the capitalist class, or more specifically in the case of Third World countries, by the capitalist class in the "centre" together with its allies of the "comprador" or "national" bourgeoisie. These approaches to the state present a top- down theory of the state in which other institutions of civil society, especially the working class, have no effectivity in determining its form. This chapter briefly surveys and critiques some of the Marxist theories of the state with the view of arriving at a more dialectical understanding of the state-society relation and especially the state-labour relation. In highlighting the interactive character of the state and civil society, with specific reference to organised labour, I hope to overcome the division that has been created in the theorisation of the state in developed and developing countries, by highlighting the fact that in both situations it is the imperatives of production relations that shape the behaviour of the state to labour. Secondly, I want to show that whilst the structures of repression, maintained by political power and legitimated by ideology, are real enough, there is always space for struggle within their limits. In other words, organised labour should not be seen as an impotent plaything of the state and capital.

Theorising the modern bourgeois state

My approach to the question of the state is influenced by what I take to be the historical materialist method. My starting point is that the motive force of the development of modern society is the division of society into classes and in particular the struggle between labour and capital. My contention is that the form of the state is determined by the relations between classes and not by the ruling class alone. The form of the state is not predetermined but is decided on the conjunctural terrain, which is a field of objectively possible outcomes of class and political relations in the course of the ongoing struggles.¹

The starting point is to look at the functions and forms of the state as analytically distinct, though closely related aspects. In a capitalist society the function of the state is to secure the conditions of production and reproduction of the capitalist economy. But how the state organises this process is largely determined by other factors such as the level of the development of productive forces, class formation, class, political and ideological struggles, and the need to balance conflicting interests while at the same time guaranteeing the long term interests of capital accumulation. It is the constellation of these factors which determines the form of the state. Whereas the state intervenes in the social and economic life of the society in which it resides, its form is determined by factors which are independent of its functions. Whilst the state in a capitalist society always acts in a manner that will secure or attempt to secure the long term interests of capital accumulation, this action by the state is circumscribed by the balance of various social forces, not just the interests of the bourgeoisie alone (Fine, 1984; Kelly, 1988). Therefore the state cannot be seen as a mere instrument of class rule.

It is generally agreed that classical Marxism contains a very incomplete analysis of both the state and class. As Jessop (1982) argues, Marx and Engels did not provide any systematic or coherent theory of the state and politics but offered a variety of theoretical perspectives which coexist in an uneasy and unstable union, and their analyses of the state and politics are subsumed under their general critique of political economy of capitalism. However there are certain "key statements" that provide very useful guidelines to be followed in the analysis of the state and its relation to civil society.² Marx’s key statement appears in a celebrated passage in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in which he argued that people enter into social relations that are independent of their will and that these relations are only appropriate to a given stage in the development of the material forces of production. According to Marx (1981), the totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, which is the real foundation of society on which arises a legal and political superstructure with corresponding forms of social consciousness.

This statement has attracted a charge of "economic reductionism" because it ultimately reduces the actions of the state, the legal and the political aspects to the requirements of the economy. In a well known statement in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels (1968) put it bluntly that the executive of the modem state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The implication here is that at least the executive of the state can be wielded by the capitalist class in pursuit of its own interests. The actions of the state executive are seen to flow directly from the requirements of capital. This formulation seems to suggest that the economic base is self sufficient, that its development is the determinant of social evolution, and that its reproduction does not depend on factors outside its control. But as Jessop (1982, p. 77) points out, to argue that the transformation in the superstructure follows changes in the economic foundations is to imply that political action cannot alter the economic base or even the nature of class relations until economic factors themselves permit or require such alteration.

Engels’ key statement on the state appears in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in a passage in which he links the emergence of the state to the inception of private property and the resulting breakdown of a previously "harmonious" communal society. According to Engels (1968a, pp. 586-7), the state is a product of a certain stage of development of society and has arisen to moderate the conflict engendered by opposing economic interests in a class divided society. According to Engels:

The emergence of the state is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms and classes with conflicting economic interests might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict, and keep it within the bounds of "order"; this power, arisen out of society, placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.

Engels argued further that because the state arose in the midst of the conflict of classes, it is, as a rule:

... the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which through the medium of the state becomes also the politically dominant class and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class ... and the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage labour by capital [emphasis added].

In the passage above Engels argues that the state is "the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class", and that the modem representative state is an "instrument" of the exploitation of wage labour by capital. He also argues that the role of the state is to "alleviate" conflicting economic interests so that the antagonists, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, do not "consume" themselves and society in an endless struggle. In other words, although the state may be an "instrument" of class rule, how this instrument is actually used, that is, its form, is not something that inheres in the nature of the state, but is determined in the course of the class, political and other forms of struggles. In a letter to J.Bloch, Engels (1968b, pp. 692-3) argued that the charge of reductionism or determinism levelled against him and Marx was misplaced and pointed out that though the determining element in the materialist conception is production and reproduction in real life, that is, in the economic "base" of society, various elements of the superstructure in turn exercise their influence upon the course of the class struggle. He specifically mentions the political forms of the class struggle and argues that although economic conditions are ultimately decisive, political conditions and traditions also play a part in the historical process. According to Badie and Bimham (1983), all the states Marx referred to, like the Prusso-German Empire, Switzerland, England and the United States, had capitalist economic systems but different state forms. Marx viewed the state in the United States as weak and subordinate to civil society; the Prussian state was "nothing but a police guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms, alloyed with a feudal admixture"; and the French state was dominated by the executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organisation, an appalling parasitic body that had enmeshed the body of French society like a net and choked all its pores.

There is therefore present in both Marx and Engels a wide variety of themes and approaches which are capable of independent or even contradictory theoretical developments, but which are combined in various ways in their empirical studies of particular societies and political conjunctures (Jessop, 1982, pp. 9-12). This is due to the different economic and social contexts within which these apparently conflicting theories of the state were articulated. Their "contradictoriness" therefore derives from the fact that Marx and Engels were trying to explain a phenomenon that was spatio-temporal in its materiality. Thus Miliband (1989) argues correctly that what is more useful is not to compare text with text, but text with historical and contemporary reality itself: whether the state is seen as an instrument of class rule, a factor of social cohesion or an institutional ensemble, all are present in the classical works.³

The state in the African context

The state in non-European peripheral capitalist societies has not received the same kind of rigorous analysis as it has in developed capitalist countries.⁴ In these countries the state has always been analysed against the backdrop of the absence of an economically dominant class, "the bourgeois class", that is, the class that was characterised as the "conquering bourgeoisie", which has captured for itself in the modem representative state, "exclusive political sway" (Marx and Engels, 1968, pp. 35-8). In peripheral capitalist societies, this class exists only in a formative or inchoate form. As a result, it has often been the state, rather than the capitalist class, that has been spearheading the process of economic development in the postcolonial period and has virtually replaced the bourgeoisie (Evans, 1982). Other factors include the complexity and enormous variety of economic and political systems in these countries. In the first place, most of these countries are economically poor and are characterised by extreme inequality in the distribution of wealth and income, high unemployment, debt burdens, inadequate or virtually nonexistent social services (housing, health and education) and backward productive forces.⁵ The majority of the people still live in rural areas in subsistence agriculture (Todaro, 1992). Most peripheral capitalist countries are under either a one party system or a military administration, or sometimes even a bit of both. Generally, organisations of civil society such as trade unions, the media and various types of pressure groups are weak as compared to state organs like the army, police and civil bureaucracy.

The analyses of peripheral capitalist societies, especially the neomarxist dependency theory variants, have been conducted on a purely economic terrain, the major preoccupation being to show the effect of international capitalism on peripheral capitalist economies. These factors indicate the difficulties in theorising at a general level the nature and structure of the state and politics in peripheral capitalist societies. Pinkney (1993, p. 2) argues in this vein that:

It is these social economic circumstances, together with an unequal relationship with the "developed” world outside and in many cases, a recent experience of colonial rule, which help give Third World politics its distinctive flavour, even though there is much diversity between the individual countries.

However, in the last two decades several scholars (notably Alavi, 1972; Ziemann and Lanzendorfer, 1977; Leys, 1976; Beckman, 1981) have made valuable attempts to analyse the state in peripheral capitalist formations. The common thrust of these approaches is twofold: firstly, they reduce the form of the peripheral capitalist state to the requirements of the economic interests of imperialism and its local allies, defined variously as the national bourgeoisie or national comprador class; secondly, these theories are state-centred and ignore the impact of class struggles on the state. Alavi (1972) led the debate in his article on the state in Pakistan and Bangladesh. He argued that the original base of the state in peripheral capitalist countries lay in metropolitan countries and did not rest on the support of any of the indigenous classes; instead it subordinated all indigenous classes to the requirements of metropolitan capitalism. For this reason, he argued, the state in peripheral capitalist societies was "overdeveloped". Alavi advanced two theses: firstly, that the peripheral capitalist countries have inherited an "overdeveloped" state in the form of a huge military bureaucratic machinery; second, and flowing directly from the first, that this overdeveloped state has often pursued its own particular agenda and appropriated a large part of the economic surplus for itself. He argued:

The apparatus of the state, furthermore assumes also a new and relatively autonomous economic role, which is not parallelled in the classical bourgeoisie state. The state in postcolonial society directly appropriates a very large part of the economic surplus and deploys it in a bureaucratically directed economic activity in the name of promoting economic development. These are the conditions which differentiate the postcolonial state fundamentally from the state as analysed in classical Marxist theory (p. 62) [emphasis in the original].

The most sophisticated critique of the peripheral capitalist state theory in general and Alavi’s thesis in particular has come from Ziemann and Lanzendorfer (1977). The key point which they make concerns the potentiality of the peripheral capitalist state to promote national economic development. They doubt whether this can be achieved under conditions of peripheral capitalism. In their attempt to go beyond Alavi, Ziemann and Lanzendorfer (1977, p. 155) posit that:

With the expansion of trade into world trade and the rise of the world market, there has developed, since the days of European colonial expansion, an international economic system in which the production and reproduction of all societies in the world are integrated ... With the spread of the dominant reproduction dynamics to world level, the precolonial self centred development of the peripheral societies was blocked, being transformed, in regionally differentiated scope and form depending on the previous historical and natural conditions, into a complementary and subsidiary system attached to the metropolitan system [emphasis added].

According to Ziemann and Lanzendorfer, the condition for the integration of the peripheral capitalist societies into the world market is the imposition on these societies’ inner structures of the dominant reproduction dynamics of metropolitan capitalism. The result of this economic relationship is the development of the metropolis and the underdevelopment of the periphery as two sides of a common process, that is, accumulation on a world scale. The independent development of the peripheral societies is blocked, and their inner structure is adapted to the reproductive needs of the metropolis. According to these authors, the peripheral state must be seen as an institution which serves the international economic system. At the economic level the peripheral capitalist state aims at linking the world market with the national economy by breaking down the political frontiers between the world market and the national economy; for example, through its policies on imports and exports, foreign investment and exchange rates. According to Ziemann and Lanzendorfer, the peripheral capitalist state aims at securing the existence and expansion of the world market in the national economic arena, through the reproduction of both internally operating foreign capital and national capital oriented to the world market. To this end, the state guarantees private property rights and repatriation of profits, the extended reproduction of national capital on the home market, infrastructural development, and the reproduction of the labour force. One aspect of this is the state policy by which trade unions are turned into a political instrument for keeping workers on a leash, since their independence could be a barrier to accumulation.

In a similar mode to that of Ziemann and Lanzendorfer, Amin (1987) has argued that the decisive quality that distinguishes the state in the capitalist centre from the state in peripheral capitalism is that in the centre the bourgeois nation-state has crystallised and its essential function is to fulfil the conditions that make possible autocentric accumulation; the state can subordinate external relations to the logic of that accumulation. On the other hand, the peripheral state cannot control local accumulation but is subject to the demands of "globalised accumulation". The direction it takes is determined by the central powers, especially through their instruments of intervention, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Beckman (1981, p. 39) has also argued in this paradigm that the Nigerian state is a comprador state, its institutions and officials operating as agents of imperialism. He argues that:

The contemporary Nigerian state can ... be described as a comprador state: state institutions and state officials operate as agents of imperialism. The real ruling class is the bourgeoisie of the metropolitan countries. It is not the indigenous businessmen and bureaucrats, who merely masquerade as the "national bourgeoisie". They are allowed to play this role by their foreign paymasters. In fact they are performing a vital ideological function as their nationalist rhetoric conceals the true class nature of the state. When they travel to international conferences attacking "imperialism" and clamouring for a "new international or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Tables and figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Theorising the state-labour relation
• 2 Botswana: an overview and rapid assessment
• 3 The Botswana state in historical perspective
• 4 The capitalist form of the Botswana state
• 5 The state and the trade unions
• 6 Labour law and industrial relations
• 7 Trade union growth and development
• 8 Class organisation and class struggles
• 9 Prospects for organised labour in the 1990s and beyond
• Bibliography
• Index