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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Explaining the Crisis of Capitalism in Kenya
Author:Hetherington, PenelopeISNI
Year:1993
Periodical:African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society
Volume:92
Issue:366
Period:January
Pages:89-103
Language:English
Geographic term:Kenya
Subjects:Marxism
capitalism
historiography
Economics and Trade
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/723098
Abstract:This paper juxtaposes the 1970s Marxist structuralist discourse on the development of capitalism in Kenya (the dependency discourse, advocated by writers such as E.A. Brett, C. Leys, and S. Langdon) with the emerging paradigm of the early 1980s called the 'modes of production' discourse. The purpose of the paper is to point out the underlying assumptions behind the discourses, to chart the shifts in the literature, and to discover the direction of recent Marxist writing on Kenya. The author argues that the decolonization of African history gradually undermined the dependency discourse which was not only functionalist, reductionist and predictive but was essentially Europe-centric. The shift to the 'modes of production' discourse involved abandoning the structural model which gave agency to the 'State' and to 'capital' and concentrated instead on the agency of individuals and groups at the grassroots. This shift in the Marxist discourse led, in turn, to a 'social history' discourse which is much more diffuse and sophisticated but lacks the radical edge of the earlier discourses. The overtones of pragmatism which can be detected in the work of historians who belong within this 'social history' discourse, some of whom are identifiably Marxist, may be partly explained as due to changes in political and intellectual currents outside Kenya. But this pragmatism may also be the result of their own close analysis of the complex pattern of Kenyan history. Ref. (Comment by David M. Anderson in: African Affairs, vol. 92, no. 367 (1993), p. 285-290.)
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