Marxist economics in Africa
What did it mean economically to be a Marxist state in the immediate post-colonial era of the 1970s in the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique? If Marxist economics necessitates state ownership of the means of production, then we are in something of a definitional quandary because there simply wasn’t very much in the way of “means of production” in either of these countries at independence in 1975.
Nevertheless, to be avowedly Marxist certainly meant something to the governments in question so it is worth looking at exactly what it meant and how it evolved as time went on. By 2013 it is safe to say that Mozambique has taken a decided turn toward a market economy not just in rhetoric but in fact. Angola has taken a similar turn in rhetoric and to some extent in reality but lags behind Mozambique in its market reforms.The stories of how these countries became “Marxist” economies in the first place was strongly influenced by the fact that their colonial occupiers were Portuguese, and were therefore members of NATO. When the predictable and necessary independence movements began to coalesce in the 1960s, there was no way they were going to get any assistance or encouragement from other NATO allies — their only viable sources of support were the communist bloc countries, particularly the USSR, East Germany and to some extent Cuba. Getting assistance and advice from these sources carried with it the Marxist economic mindset and developmental prejudices — a bias toward state control of the economy and a deep conviction that the political primacy of the party was more important than anything else. Accordingly, FRELIMO in Mozambique and the MPLA in Angola took control over all aspects of the polity and economy from top to bottom (Messiant, 1998).
To a very great extent this was forced on them. It is estimated that 95 percent of Portuguese settlers evacuated from both countries in the year during which Portugal relinquished power (Kyle, 1990, 2005).
Some of them were reluctant to lose their Portuguese citizenship while many were frightened by the Marxist rhetoric of the incoming government and were unwilling to stay if all of their assets (farms, factories, etc) were to be nationalized. Given the extreme socio-economic segregation along racial lines enforced by the colonial rulers, this meant that managers and owners of virtually every economic entity, from large plantation down to rural convenience store, departed and in many cases destroyed their assets, rather than leave them to whoever was to come next. While both FRELIMO and the MPLA tried to continue established companies and plantations as going concerns, they quickly ran into a bottleneck. The racial laws preventing education or assimilation of most Africans meant that there was an extreme dearth of experienced managers after independence. Indeed, one observer in Mozambique stated that there were only 33 college graduates in the entire country after 1975 (Personal communication, Minister of Finance, 1988).Another colonial legacy that is equally important is the fact that the Fascist Salazar regime exercised state control over the economy scarcely less comprehensively than what existed in many communist countries. Though large corporations did indeed control the “commanding heights” of the economy, the extent to which these were intertwined with government regulation and personnel should not be underestimated. Colonies were run with an eye toward extraction of surplus value and to the extent that corporations could assist in this they were encouraged and licensed by the government. Ownership of land and other productive assets was reserved for white settlers with the indigenous population relegated to less favorable zones where they were readily able to be called on for forced labor. Immigration was tightly controlled and the labor market explicitly segmented between occupations that were considered to be “white” (all formal sector jobs) or “black” (menial jobs).
Accordingly, it was no great leap to go from authoritarian “Fascist” control of the economy to authoritarian “Marxist” control. Neither regime countenanced political rivals and both employed police tactics to suppress opposition, and neither countenanced free-market economies. Both vested ownership of major productive assets in the ruling class (or state if we choose the Marxist nomenclature). All that was required in the first instance was a political “decapitation” of the old colonial regime and its replacement with new leaders. But it would be difficult to distinguish major differences between an exploitative centralizing regime run by Portuguese colonialists, and an exploitative centralizing regime run by a small indigenous ruling clique (Government of Angola, 1997, 2000 and 2006).
The degree of control and the institutional apparatus to enforce it were in some cases a holdover from the colonial era but also showed the influence of Eastern bloc economic advisors as in the formation of the “Economic Police,” whose job was (putatively) to enforce pricing and distribution of goods, but whose actual function was to serve as merely one more point at which surplus value could be extracted from productive activities via bribes or other forms of corruption.