John Saul on Colin Leys

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

I just received a copy of the 'festschrift' paper, which is too long to
send to the list but can be read at: http://www.marxmail.org/saul_leys.htm

Basically it recounts Leys start as a dependency theorist, his migration
into an anti-dependency theorist influenced by Robert Brenner and Bill
Warren and where he is today, which is neither optimistic about
socialism nor local capitalist growth.

This leads John Saul to describe his colleague's views as being
dangerously close to Przeworski's observation that: "Capitalism is
irrational; socialism is unfeasible; in the real world people starve --
the conclusions we have reached are not encouraging."

Here's my own take on Colin Leys from one of my many shotgun blasts at
the Brenner thesis:

The Brenner thesis was not only an analysis of how capitalism got
started, it also became a polemic against the "dependency theory" school
that had emerged in the 1960s. Economists on the staff of the United
Nations and visiting professors in third world countries had become
pessimistic about the possibility of development. Some, who had become
radicalized by Cuba and Vietnam, decided that socialist revolution was
the only path forward. Key to their analysis was Monthly Review author
Paul Baran's concept of the "development of underdevelopment" in the
colonial or neocolonial world. Since "dependency theory" was focused on
contradictions between the imperialist North and the "periphery," it
became vulnerable to the charge that it lacked a sufficient grounding in
the kind of class analysis that was necessary to transform an
underdeveloped country. The reaction against the Monthly Review
theorists was posited as a return to a kind of classical Marxism.
Unfortunately, this kind of Marxism was one that predated the Russian
Revolution. Essentially, it tried to resurrect Marx's famous dictum in
Capital that "The industrially more developed country shows the less
developed one merely an image of its own future."

Since many of the critics of the dependency school occupied the same
social position as their targets, it is not surprising that they would
be in a poor position to conceive of a truly Marxist solution to
development, namely proletarian revolution. A job as a visiting lecturer
at a university or in a United Nations office hardly puts you in a
position to see social contradictions from below, as a trade union
activist or peasant leader would. For these privileged foreigners, the
colonial man and woman of the subordinate classes becomes a subject for
study rather than an independent actor on a par with their observer.

The most interesting example of this sort of evolution is Colin Leys,
who transformed himself from dependency theorist into critic all within
the span of a year. Written in 1975, "Underdevelopment in Kenya: the
Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism" puts forward views similar to
those found in Samir Amin. Only a year after the publication of the
book, Leys had changed his mind completely and affiliated himself with
critics such as Robert Brenner, Bill Warren and Ernesto Laclau. What had
changed his mind?

Evidently, other students of Kenyan society--also scholars from
outside--had decided that not only was capital accumulation proceeding
apace in the country, but that it predated imperialist control of the
country which had been removed through revolutionary force in the 1950s.
Reading their arguments, Colin Leys did a self-correction and announced
that the local bourgeoisie was not so decadent and beholden to
imperialism after all.

You can find his post-conversion views in a 1978 Socialist Register
article titled "Capital Accumulation, Class Formation and Dependency:
the Significance of the Kenyan Case." To start with, Leys tries to find
some value in the writings of the wretched imperialist apologist Bill
Warren:

"The conclusion which Warren's critics drew. . .was that the
manufacturing growth rates of these countries were not evidence of
'autonomous industrial growth' in the Third World, as Warren believed.
But this is a case of too much zeal. Britain, too, was once an
'exceptional' case."

After making a place at the table for Bill Warren, Leys then proceeds to
declare on behalf of the Brenner thesis:

"Brenner, correctly in my view, stresses the centrality of the class
relations which [Adam] Smith took as given. On this view, what is
decisive for the development of capitalist production relations is the
prior configuration and character of classes--for instance, the
availability or otherwise of 'free' labour, the respective political
power of non-landed and landed classes affecting the possibility of
capital investment in land, and so on."

All these theoretical declarations are merely a prelude to his main
task, which is to demonstrate the vibrancy of Kenyan capitalism. His
notion of the centrality of class relations is less about identifying
and focusing attention on potential gravediggers of the system, but on
how the system can "develop" under the auspices of the native ruling class.

He makes much of the transfer of expatriate-owned ranches and coffee
plantations to African owners. "Passenger road transportation was also
in African hands by 1977 as were tour companies, laundries and dry
cleaning, and a rapidly growing share of the hotel and restaurant
sectors." This leads Leys to endorse comments made by an identified
Kenyan state official, "In 15 years, if the political climate of Kenya
and the world economy stay stable, 90% of manufacturing will be Kenyan
owned." In the conclusion to Leys's article, he states, "In less
abstract terms, Kenya appears, from this analysis, as a modest example
of a 'systematical combination of moments' conducive to the transition
to the capitalist mode of production."

The "moments" Leys is referring to are those mentioned by Karl Marx in
the chapter on the genesis of the industrial capitalist in volume one of
Capital. Specifically, they are the different "moments" of primitive
accumulation which are "systematically" combined at the end of the
seventeenth century in England. They include colonial plunder, slavery,
extermination of the American Indian, etc. What this has to do with
Kenyan ownership of laundries, etc., is anybody's guess. Rather it seems
more akin to what Richard Nixon once tried to promote, namely black
capitalism.

full:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/brenner_thesis_as_iberiantalism.htm






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