a public property-directing state apparatus, particularly the bureaucracy.
Conditions increasingly existed for the formation of a national bourgeoisie
and therefore the forms of control, management and politics that such a
class requires. The state became a focal point of political pressure of an
urban petit-bourgeoisie demanding higher standards of living and con-
sumption, all of which encouraged manufacturing and industrialization. In
Kenya, for example, a class of agrarian capitalists was able to use its strong
representation in the state apparatus to increase the rate of indigenous capi-
tal accumulation through policies on trade licensing, monopolies, state
finance capital, private credit and state capitalist enterprise (Leys, 1978).
Independence also stimulated popular, diffuse indigenous pressures for
higher living standards, a major internal influence sustaining industrializa-
tion policies (Warren, 1973, p. 11).
Politics and dependency
Empirical tests of dependency theory have produced conflicting results
as regards political consequences. Analysis of cross-sectional aggregate
socio-economic and political variables for 20 Latin American states in the
1960s found the greaterthe dependency, the higher the level of political par-
ticipation, the better the government’s democratic performance and the less
military intervention is likely, though the greater the level of civil strife. But
a study of Africa in the 1960s found that dependence and inequality were
related – in line with hypotheses derived from dependency theory (McGowan,
1976; Vengroff, 1977; McGowan and Smith, 1978, pp. 192–221). However,
the difficulty with this type of test lies in the operationalization of concepts.
The serious limitations of aggregate data techniques are shown by some
of the indicators used to measure aspects of a ‘dependent’ economy and
society – the level of unionization and voting turnout as measures of class
structure, for example (Kaufman et al., 1974).
Political analysis was not helped by the association of capitalism with
relations of exchange. It is generally thought that capitalism exists more in
terms of the relations of production – private property, free wage labour, and
freedom of contract (Laclau, 1971; Taylor, 1979). These features were
absent in many of the societies on the periphery. It was possible for the
goods that were traded and exchanged to be produced under pre-capitalist
relations of production. Social relations of production underpinning struc-
tures of political authority need not necessarily be capitalist at all for a rich
country to be interested in what is produced. Just because the commodities
102 Understanding Third World Politics