supplies the organizations necessary and the managerial, scientific and tech-
nical knowledge required. It takes over that legacy of colonialism in which
the bureaucracy dominated embryonic indigenous classes. The bureaucracy
monopolizes organization and all its attributes necessary for the management
of the economy. It articulates an ideology in support of this. Any mode of
production requires a set of ideas to justify control of the surplus by the rul-
ing element in society. In Tanzania the ideology has been African Socialism
(Stein, 1985), but different brands of socialism have been articulated by
leaders in other parts of the Third World: Mali’s version of socialism has
similarly acted as a justification for state-directed development.
There are, then, bureaucratic features which have been taken to be signs of
the emergence of a new kind of ruling class. The fact that ownership resides
with society and not the bureaucracy is taken to be a legalistic fiction.
Control is what matters, as indeed has been said about capitalism – that the
managers not the owners of corporate assets are the power-holders. In addi-
tion there is the ability to restrict access to the bureaucratic stratum from out-
side by increasingly supplying new recruits from bureaucratic families. This
is assisted by the accumulation of personal wealth made possible by a career
in the bureaucracy. Hirschmann describes how the salaries enjoyed by the
upper ranks in many African states, their easy access to credit, and their con-
trol over permits, licences and tenders have enabled them to acquire urban
and rural real estate and business ventures (Hirschmann, 1981).
However, the class interests of the state bureaucracy will not necessarily
be an indication of the class character of the state. The dominant class in
African society in the 1970s was the foreignbourgeoisie. Any class interests
which the personnel of the state might have had was only reflected in state
policy in a secondary way (Leys, 1976). Senior members of the bureaucracy
might be able to embourgeoise themselves through the opportunities to
acquire property made available by their official positions, siphoning off
‘a large part of the economic surplus that is generated in society to accumu-
late wealth for themselves’ (Alavi, 1990, p. 23) and even enjoy substantial
social mobility for themselves and their families as a result, but this alone
does not amount to evidence of the emergence of a new class structure.
Reducing bureaucracy
The role of bureaucracies in the politics of developing countries is increas-
ingly affected by the principles of economic liberalization and New Public
Management (NPM). Under conditionalities imposed by multilateral agen-
cies such as the World Bank, the IMF, UNDP and the Asian Development
Bureaucracy and Political Power 169