African Political Economy and Its Transformation into Capitalism

Abstract

This chapter is about the study of political economy of African socioeconomic formations and their subsequent transformations from a simple communal mode of production, through an advanced traditional African state formation of a productive economic mode; their subsequent subjugation; and their transformation into a capitalist path to development. It was Karl Marx’s critique of the capitalist mode of production that provided the most horrendous demystification of capitalism. He debunked the myth of the “natural economic order” which was replaced by a scientific knowledge based on history, dialectics, and material evidence of the genesis of capital. Thus, capitalism was not natural to any African socioeconomic formation. Beyond just the intersection of politics and economy, the material basis of the political economy of any given socioeconomic formation was in its economic base, as it was reflected in the relations of production of the necessities for human life, and, indeed, the superstructure that manages both the objective and subjective laws that govern such social relations of production. The chapter, furthermore, shows how some African political economy of the nineteenth century became integrated into the modern African transformative political economy. The dynamics of the capitalist transformation, which some African political economy had undergone, was what can be found to be thought-provoking not only in terms of its changing logic of production of the material necessities for the humane existence of the African people but also in the context of the character of the political economy of the contemporary African states.