The Articulation of modes of production the political economy of coffee in the Ivory Coast, 1840-1975

Abstract

Processes of primitive accumulation--though more intensive at the beginning--characterise all phases of capitalist development. If the process of articulation between the capital mode of production and pre-apitalist modes is at the same time, a process of primitive accumulation, r: three outcomes are possible regarding the changes that occur in these pre-capitalist forms of producing: they can be conserved, re-structured or annihilated. By knowing the structures of the pre-capitalist societies--hence of the labour processes therein --and he kinds of the capitalist activities through which surplus value is to be extracted, we can typologise the diverse ways in which new relations of production can emerge as this process of articulation is set in motion. This is the central thesis of this study. Although we focus mainly on the Ivory Coast, looking even more specifically at one industry--the coffee industry-- some of the questions we pose, and some of our methods and approaches to the study of social change in agrarian societies engulfed in capitalistic development may extend beyond the geographical confines of this study. This is particularly so since, looking back at the evolution of this work, it will be discovered that it started out as an attempt to do a comparative study of the coffee industries in Kenya and the Ivory Coast. But, as the research progressed, we discovered that the essence of doing comparative work is not found in identifying two or more "countries" with "similar" or "different" problems of development, but in asking a central question: i.e., given that men in these societies--as men in all societies--are active in producing and reproducing their lives, how are these activities organized and how are they transformed? Our focus then became the structures of these activities and not just the countries within which they take place for countries do not act in the world scene; men, on the other hand, do. Men, as they are engaged in the processes of production--as they appertain to particular social classes and struggle to survive--lead countries, or states of countries, to take partic.ular stands in internationalpolitics e.g., to negotiate a coffee agreement. The making of history--class struggle--is then understood by us not simply in its overt, activist and physical sense of particular conjunctures, e.g., the barricading of the Parisian streets or the march on Grand-Bassam, but actually as the struggle for survival, the struggle for the transformation oi maintenance of existing relations of production which must go. on everyday. If this work is not full of "fire and brimtone!", it is because it does not concern itself with class struggle, it is because it is primarily concerned with the base in which this struggle takes place.