Dae-Oup Chang has pointed out how the literature on ‘developmental states’ suffers from a ‘one-dimensionality’ that reduces state-society relations to ‘government business relations’. As a corollary, the state is fetishised as a thing, deriving its characteristics from internal sources – such as the traits of individual officeholders and bureaucrats – rather than its position within the nexus of social relations. Meanwhile, capital is reduced to a group of property-owning individuals. The relational quality of capital – which renders it meaningless in the absence of labour – is thus omitted, and labour seizes to constitute a meaningful subject or object of the outcome of the engagement.
Contemporary literature on Ethiopia suffers from these problems to a striking degree. In sympathetic as well as critical literature, capital-labour relations are conspicuously omitted and labour, when not ignored altogether, is treated merely as a disembodied factor of production. Concomitantly, the literature is strongly marked by state fetishism. The state is consistently cast as the central facilitating force, and even while complementary space is frequently availed to private businesses, the broader social relations which constitute and are reconstituted by the state, are generally ignored. The fixation with policy – apparently formulated in a social vacuum in some prominent accounts; with policy space and bureaucratic autonomy; and with designing/achieving the ‘right’ political configuration as a precursor to socio-economic transformation, are all aspects of this tendency. Closely related is the tendency to see development as a neutral process of learning where the ‘right’ policy framework or political configuration lends itself to discovery, rather than an inherently contested process which is bound to benefit and harm different social classes and categories bound together by class relations – not merely individuals or networks.
It is particularly unfortunate that this scholarly interpretation has become dominant at a time when the Ethiopian labouring population in general and the wage labouring in particular, is rapidly expanding; when the immiseration of those wage labourers – and the profits generated – is approaching historic proportions; and when labour appears to beginning to reassert itself in militant practices. These divergent trends risk creating a major mismatch between the literature and social reality, all the while contributing to the concealment of the expanding and deepening exploitative relations which are at the core of the contemporary developmental project.
This paper will review and critically assess the state of the literature on contemporary Ethiopian developmentalism in light of the social trends and tendencies identified. It argues that the nature of the Ethiopian state and the developmental process – a process of capitalist development – can only be understood within the nexus of classed social relations, and with regards to capital-labour relations in particular. The paper draws on Chang’s work in developing a critique on how the prevalent one dimensionality of Ethiopianist developmentalist literature contributes to the mystification of social reality, the concealment of intensified exploitation, and the further marginalisation of Ethiopian labour.