prosperous traders, and farmers. The East African colonial state had
subordinated pre-capitalist, though non-feudal, social formations to the
needs of colonial capitalism. This pre-capitalist agriculture had moved
towards commercialization without ‘quasi-feudal stopovers’ and the indige-
nous bourgeoisie was confined to mainly Asian traders (Shivji, 1973, 1976;
Saul, 1974).
Society further differed from India in that there had not been extensive
exposure to Western culture and education. There were, for example,
few African graduates or professionals. By the early 1960s all that had
happened in terms of Westernization was some incorporation of educated
Africans into the lower levels of the public service and related professions
such as teaching.
Thus class conditions in Tanzania differed considerably from those in
Pakistan. It is correspondingly more difficult to think of the state as having
to mediate between well-articulated class interests, including those owning
capital and those with only their own labour, as well as divisions within the
capital-owning classes, including capital located outside the country. The
metropolitan bourgeoisie, most notably represented by multinational corpo-
rations, was much more powerful than indigenous classes. However, the
post-colonial East African state had not become international capital’s
‘executive committee’. It retained a measure of autonomy because of its
role in the production process and strategic position within the economy.
The growing level of state intervention in the economy, with the state as the
country’s major employer and the main vehicle for social mobility for those
able to obtain educational qualifications, again appeared to parallel the
Pakistan situation. The state was a means to economic power, rather than an
instrument of an already dominant economic class. Class formation takes
time, and African experience confirms that in the interim the state can inde-
pendently act in a mediatory role and affect the process of class formation
by the success or failure of its policies, for example in protecting local firms
from foreign competition (Kasfir, 1983, p. 8).
One explanation of the economic success of East Asian countries such as
South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia also stresses the importance
of the state having sufficient autonomy to guide private investment and
intervene strongly in other areas of economic management so as to achieve
high levels of growth. These ‘developmental’ states and their attendant
approaches to public policy is owed to their independence from social
forces such as landowners, private capital, and labour, and their mainte-
nance of a competent technocratic bureaucracy. Another interpretation of
the relationship between state and class interests stresses the power of some
The State in the Third World 117