Claims of Labor: Africa and the Integral State in an Era of Globalization

Conventional accounts of rights, citizenship, and political belonging are often deeply rooted in concepts of labor. The study of labor, however, generally continues to derive its concepts from Western histories and experiences. African social history enables scholars to challenge this approach and to rethink labor as such. Relatedly, scholarship on modes of citizenship, political mobilization, and belonging in Africa, especially in relation to labor, goes back at least to Fanon. How do people access the state, its resources, and its patronage when employment or entrepreneurialism do not fulfil this role, as is often the case in Africa and much of the Global South? Addressing these questions via Fanon and Said, both of whom lead us to Gramsci’s concept of the integral state, we argue that to claim the state—rather than the nation or the market—we must recognize as labor the life-worlds and struggles of the poor, the unemployed, or those marginally connected to global markets.

In its earliest incarnation, labor history studied labor movements in those regions with sizable and organized industrial working classes, primarily Western Europe and North America. These histories relied on an unstated assumption that the historical path industry and labor had taken in the West would be replicated around the world. Workers in the colonies would one day become modern industrial wage laborers and form trade unions. In the 1960s and ‘70s, a new focus on working-class lives and communities invigorated the field. However, during the 1980s and ‘90s, the decline of organized labor coincided with a waning interest in labor history (see Heerma van Voss 2013). This diminished field has retained from its once more vibrant traditions a predominant, though certainly not exclusive, focus on the West and on wage labor—or, at least on forms of labor that are recognizably commodified, such as cash cropping or slavery. Formal wage labor, however, is and has always been an exception in much of the Global South. Beyond privileging spheres of labor that are ordinarily gendered as male, this focus marginalizes those who do not engage in supposedly typical wage labor—that is, the vast majority of the world’s workers—and often reduces the experiences of wage laborers to their formal employment, though many rely extensively on other economic activities as well (cf. Callebert 2017).

While there is an extensive literature on informal economies, it equally tends to prioritize modes of informal labor that more closely resemble wage labor, such as larger informal businesses and people who provide services in semi-regulated sectors. India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) is a favorite (cf. Crowell 2003), as at first sight it somewhat resembles a trade union. Others, most notably Hernando de Soto, focus on the formalization of informal labor for the poor to be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. De Soto takes for granted that these workers operate within a universal market logic and are gifted with an innate entrepreneurial spirit waiting to be freed from overbearing state regulations (2000). Though they characterize many livelihoods, survivalist and other economic activities that do not fall under a universal market logic generally receive less attention. Moreover, much of the scholarly and policy literature on the informal economy discusses this sector as somehow separate from formal employment (Hart 2010; Callebert 2014).

The nascent field of global labor history has made great strides in challenging this privileged position of both ‘free’ wage labor, frequently studied in isolation from other activities, and the West. However, the field’s approach has been largely additive: adding some countries into the mix, adding a chapter on informal and on domestic labor, etc. While justly asserting the need to move beyond the limits of traditional labor history, this literature frequently has little to say about forms of work that are not readily recognizable as commodified, or at least as reproducing wage labor or producing for world markets. Marcel van der Linden, one of the main proponents of global labor history, chooses to focus on labor that produces for global capital or on labor that is in the process of being commodified (2012). If these workers are not wage laborers, they are slaves, cash croppers, or engaged in the reproduction of commodified forms of labor. Indeed, women in labor history are often reduced to their ‘function’ of reproducing wage labor (cf. Bozzoli 1983). Capitalism, and with it the West, thus remains the touchstone for the study of labor (see also Callebert 2016).

By privileging commodified forms of labor, these accounts overdetermine the role of capitalist markets. While capitalism has become the globally dominant economic system, it has not everywhere reshaped social relations and the logic of production along the lines of Western industrial capitalism. In Sub-Saharan Africa, John Saul and Colin Leys note, “there is some capital but not a lot of capitalism” (1999: 13). Capital’s ability to operate and generate (often massive) profits without incurring the expenses of building “the wider social, economic, and political structures required for the development of capitalist production relations and sustained, broad-based capital accumulation” (16) challenges commonplace portrayals of globalization as comprising seamless connections, all-encompassing flows of capital, and a flattening of social relations. Rather, James Ferguson argues, the present conjuncture of globalization is characterized by “highly selective and spatially encapsulated forms of global connection combined with widespread disconnection and exclusion” (2006: 14). Capital does not flow across the world; this metaphor implies a frictionless and even process. Rather, it leapfrogs to those places that garner its interests: mining enclaves, oil fields, export zones, plantations, war zones, etc. Seeing labor through the lens of its connections to global capitalist markets therefore excludes vast numbers of workers.

This approach turns the wage labor relationship, or otherwise-commodified labor relations, normative. That is not to say that forms of labor that are not clearly commodified or show no direct links to global markets are not discussed, but they are often adjuncts to accounts that center on connection and commodification. Marx’s historical account of the violent process of primitive accumulation allows us to denaturalize the supposedly normative labor relationship of Western industrial capitalism and the system of private property that undergirds it. This account enables us to challenge the productivist assumptions that underlie dominant political responses to poverty, inequality, and exclusion. These responses find their clearest expression in welfare states: get more people into wage labor, protect them in the workplace, pay better wages, and use taxes and other deductions from these wages to fund a limited system of social security and welfare. Central to these policies is waged employment: people can only be lifted out of poverty by getting them into employment or entrepreneurialism. Generally, welfare is only considered an option when employment is impossible.

In both the Global North and especially the Global South, however, whole generations are growing up never having had access to a job for an extended period and with limited prospects for meaningful employment. Large sections of the world’s population have no land on which to farm, no resources to invest, and no-one to whom they can sell their labor. They are surplus to the needs of ever more efficient global chains of production (Li 2010; Smith 2011). Political answers to inequality that center on employment thus leave out large and growing sections of the world’s working (if not necessarily in waged employment) population. A government-guaranteed basic income and the provision of decommodified essential services have been suggested and partially implemented as alternative routes to social justice. Such measures can separate basic needs from access to elusive employment opportunities, yet there are also many potential problems with these solutions (Weeks 2011; Ferguson 2015).

The political and intellectual challenge for the twenty-first century is not just to implement such alternative policies, which in themselves are worth considering, but also to rethink the relationship between the state and the citizen. Our notion of citizenship is often predicated on being a taxpayer and a productive member of society, i.e. on having a formal job or business and not depending on criminal activities or welfare. Hence, in contemporary political discourse, taxpayer is frequently substituted for citizen, the poor are criminalized, and politicians tout their measures aimed at weeding out ‘undeserving’ welfare recipients. Wage, or otherwise recognizably commodified, labor thus becomes a prerequisite for meaningful access to civil society. The unemployed, and in some contexts also the underemployed, are marginalized in a society where employment remains the preeminent marker of being a good citizen (see also Barchiesi 2011). Free basic services or a guaranteed basic income, moreover, do little to address questions of social exclusion and belonging (Ferguson 2013). Our insufficiently democratic imagination, which Franco Barchiesi labels a “labor-centered welfarist imagination” (2016: 153), has yet to break out of this employment-based conception of citizenship.

It is neither our intention in this article to review the field of labor history nor to set up a straw man; as we noted, other forms of labor do get discussed in many excellent works, even if assumptions of normativity and the emphasis on commodification and connection often survive. We also do not want to dwell on the limitations of the wage labor or market universality paradigms for the study of Africa, as one of the authors has extensively discussed this problem (Callebert 2018). Rather, we wish to bring Africanist perspectives to thinking about labor, citizenship, and the state. Our argument is thus less about labor history than it is about the limitations of conventional accounts of labor and citizenship. African social and political history offers alternative perspectives on labor, citizenship, and political belonging.

In the next section, we look at how the link between employment and political belonging fell apart in post-colonial Africa, partly because of the scarcity of waged employment, and how political elites relied on patronage networks and other ‘vertical’ relations of power to establish their authority. These histories challenge our understanding of citizenship and the state, a challenge we take up via the writings of Fanon, Said, and Gramsci. We argue that Africanist perspectives highlight the relational nature of state power and allow us to think about citizenship beyond commodification and productivity. To allow people to claim citizenship rights, we contend, we must recognize as labor the lives and struggles of the poor, the unemployed, or those marginally connected to global markets. While we come to these conclusions through African history, their significance is global.

Labor, citizenship, and belonging in African history

Africanists have extensively studied the complex strategies households use to eke out a living in the absence of employment opportunities. Even when wage labor and/or production for the market do contribute to people’s livelihoods, they seldom are households’ only or even main source of income. These strategies include small-scale informal entrepreneurialism, subsistence production and domestic labor, market production, wage labor, and very importantly: non-market-based redistributive (rather than productive) labor—i.e. begging, making claims on those who do have resources, maintaining social networks of kinship and solidarity, and more (cf. Berry 1993; Callebert 2017; Ferguson 2015: chapter 3).

In many African contexts, where employment is thus not the main or even a significant mode of economic and political inclusion, the politics of belonging take other forms. Hence, a conception of citizenship and social justice based on employment fails us here. In the late-colonial and the early post-colonial period, it did seem as if the labor-citizenship nexus would be reproduced in Africa. Colonial officials and missionaries had of course linked work and civilization since the early days of colonialism (Comaroff 1991; Barchiesi 2016). Moreover, late-colonial attempts at social engineering sought to create a small stabilized urban working class in the image of the modern industrial man. This urban working class enjoyed rights that Africans without legal access to the city did not have. These small groups of formally employed workers were at the center of struggles for independence (Cooper 1996). Early nationalist regimes did thus cater to, and largely recruited their political class and cadres from, the urban working classes (Rathbone 2000; Bates 2005). Nevertheless, this soon proved insufficient for building a broad political base and for securing the authority of the state. Thus, other forms of political inclusion took center stage and the results were often not salutary: patronage and patrimonialism, politicized ethnicity, warlordism, and big-men-ism frequently govern relations between political elites and the masses.

Constituted mostly of urban elites, the ruling parties of many newly independent African states had limited political clout in rural areas where chiefs retained their power and influence. Indeed, chieftaincy did not only survive colonial rule: backed by colonial might, chiefs’ authority often became less negotiated and more authoritarian even when it was curtailed (Ranger 1992; Spear 2003). Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, and his ruling Convention People’s Party (CPP) were generally hostile to the rural traditional authorities, whom they saw as undemocratic and as rival centers of power. The CPP tried to democratize rural governance and curb the power of chiefs by introducing local councils. However, frequent conflict between the councils and chiefs paralyzed local governments, forcing the central government to bypass the democratic process and appoint administrative committees. In the end, to bolster its authority in the countryside the CPP resorted to supporting and promoting loyal chiefs and demoting those who challenged their authority. While the party aimed to eliminate the divisive ethnic politics of chieftaincy, it could only assert its control over rural Ghana by involving itself in it (Rathbone 2000).

Not all post-independence regimes wanted to uproot the colonial system of indirect rule through traditional authorities. These chiefs, headmen, and kings formed a governing class that relied both on personal authority and traditional legitimacy, and on military support and patronage from colonial administrations. Indeed, indirect rule provided many opportunities for personal enrichment. Conservative nationalist regimes thus often enshrined this colonial legacy into their post-independence constitution, as was the case for Swaziland. In the absence of individual land tenure, chiefs throughout most of the continent continue to control access to land, which partially explains the continued support for the institution of chieftaincy despite its frequently overt corruption. Leftist regimes in Tanzania and Mozambique, however, attempted to democratize rural administration and to replace the personal rule of the chief with a central administration. As was the case in Ghana, these governments underestimated the rural support for chieftaincy. In their attempts to bypass chiefs and integrate the rural areas into central governance, they increasingly had to rely on undemocratic and heavy-handed strategies (Mamdani 1996: 170-78).

In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) also came to power largely with the support of urban populations. The tripartite alliance of the ANC, the Communist Party, and COSATU, the country’s largest trade union federation, initially found its constituency among urban workers and elites, urban youth, and the urban poor. Animosity between the ANC and rural traditionalists, however, led to a civil war in the early 1990s. Once in power, the ANC worked to appease traditional authorities, co-opt rural elites, and assume the symbolism of tradition. The power of the state in rural South Africa operates through building patronage networks; access to government resources is the new source of power for rural elites who are thus bound to the ruling ANC. The balance of power within the ANC has consequently shifted. The urban base is no longer dominant, as the largest delegations at ANC conferences now come from rural provinces (Gibbs 2014). Moreover, electorally the ANC now stands strongest in the rural provinces and has lost heavily in Gauteng, South Africa’s most urban province.

The contrast between Jacob Zuma, an avowed rural traditionalist, and his urbane predecessor Thabo Mbeki, with a reputation of intellectual elitism, symbolizes this geographic shift in power. Conflict and competition between urban and rural constituencies continues within the ANC and was brought to the fore in December 2015 with the firing of finance minister Nhlanhla Nene, the weekend-long tenure of the post by David van Rooyen, and the prompt return of former finance minister Pravin Gordhan. The latter was himself ousted in March 2017. These developments were the outcome of a struggle between rural politicians and the ANC’s urban faction over access to the treasury and its opportunities for patronage and corruption (Friedman 2015). This conflict was further exposed in the struggle to succeed Jacob Zuma as ANC president. Zuma’s unpopularity and the many scandals that plagued his government helped Cyril Ramaphosa, a trade unionist turned mining magnate generally seen as allied with white capital and the ANC’s urban faction, get the upper hand. However, the so-called Premier League, the political bloc comprised of the influential premiers of three rural provinces, managed to install key-allies in powerful posts alongside Ramaphosa (Poplak 2017). The 2017 National Conference of the ANC thus resulted in a stalemate.

This shift in the center of ANC power reflects the tension between two competing understandings of citizenship and political belonging. On the one hand, there is the conception of citizenship in which individuals relate to the state on an individual basis, as was envisioned by the urban youth and workers that formed the core constituency of the ANC in the 1980s; on the other hand, there is a conception of belonging where political inclusion is mediated by rural networks of patronage and chieftaincy, that is by personal networks of power and vertical or ethnic solidarities—rather than horizontal class-based solidarities. Of course, these conceptions of citizenship are neither exclusive, as many urban workers are happy to benefit from patronage whenever they can, nor does the gradual shift from the former to the latter remain uncontested.

Soon after independence, as the highly anticipated employment growth failed to deliver as a form of inclusion and route to social justice (cf. Ferguson 1999), nationalist leaders in many countries turned to the state’s resources to which they had recently gained access. These resources offered opportunities to build patronage networks and to bolster the power and authority of their governments. Such patronage networks are vehicles for what is often too easily dismissed as corruption. In multiple sub-Saharan African countries, politics is discussed and understood in metaphors of eating; this is the “Politics of the Belly” (Bayart 2009). The politics of the belly refers to the clientelism, ethnic politics, and petty distributive corruption that allows people to eat and binds populations to politicians and ‘big men’; however, it also refers to the possible excesses of corruption that take food and wealth away from the population, as kleptocratic and gluttonous elites eat the country and its resources. Patronage and clientelism are thus not necessarily seen as negative, as long as their excesses are avoided; they are also more than just remnants of pre-modern ‘tribalism’. Ethnic politics cannot be divorced from material concerns, as the vertical relations between clients and patrons, frequently organized along lines of culture and place, allow the poor access to all-important resources. These vertical relations are central to Bayart’s classic analysis of politics in Africa (2009); the state and political belonging in Africa are thus primarily social relations.

It is this personalization of power that makes the binary of state and civil society largely irrelevant in sub-Saharan Africa. Vertical ties of clientelism, patronage, and ethnicity carry more weight than the horizontal solidarities of socioeconomic and political interests that the concept of civil society assumes. This does not mean that there are no associations and movements that can organize opposition. In fact, many African countries have a vibrant associational life, yet “the business of politics is more usually conducted along informal vertical channels of relations (patron-client networks, communal organizations, etc.) linking the elites with the rest of the population” (Chabal and Daloz 1999: 21). Where the horizontal solidarities of workers’ activism and peasant organization were critical to the success of anti-colonial movements (Cooper 1996), these organizations were frequently either repressed or domesticated by bringing them into party patronage networks. Post-colonial governments thus nationalized or banned rural cooperatives and associations (Bayart 2009: 186-87). In South Africa, COSATU’s alliance with the ANC and the Communist Party bought the trade union federation political influence and advanced the careers of many union officials, but this came at the expense of the labor movement’s independence.

Peter Ekeh discussed this lack of coherence in civil society in terms of the “existence of two publics instead of one public, as in the West” (1975: 91). Rather than a public and a private sphere built on a common moral foundation of Christianity, there are two public realms in Africa that relate differently to the private sphere. The ‘primordial’ community-based public shares the moral basis of the private sphere; the civic public sphere, however, is historically associated with the colonial state and is based on civil structures and administration. The relation to the civil sphere is amoral. Where mainstream theories of citizenship recognize a transactional relationship between rights and duties, this relation is split between both publics in African politics. Here, rights are associated with the amoral civic sphere, and duties are associated with the moral primordial public: “The native sector has become a primordial reservoir of moral obligations, a public entity which one works to preserve and benefit. The Westernized sector has become an amoral civic public from which one seeks to gain, if possible in order to benefit the moral primordial public” (100). Of course, the ethnic character of this primordial sphere does not have to exclude moral understandings of citizenship and belonging rooted in labor, as John Lonsdale argues for Kenya (2008).

In this primordial ethnic sphere, vertical and personal relations trump horizontal solidarities. The neoliberal privatization of the state further empowers these personal networks of patronage and authority, as the outsourcing of the state’s prime functions, including customs and tax collection, creates golden opportunities for those with the mandate to contract private actors for these functions. Moreover, such outsourcing removes what little accountability existed before. States like the Ivory Coast thus come to resemble criminal and informal enterprises, replete with parallel legal and illegal structures and double bookkeeping. The edifice of public administration remains but is ineffective; in the parallel state, you can get things done if you know the right people. Béatrice Hibou sees public servants fulfilling two roles: “one public but not very active, the other private and often highly lucrative” (2004: 7). She concludes that “the economic liberalization imposed by aid donors leads not so much to the ‘minimum state’ of the neoclassical Utopia as to a redefinition of new state regulations, dispersal of decision making centres, and the primacy of mediations” (10). It is in this sphere of mediations that astute operators can put their personal networking to its best use (see also Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1999: 20).

The failure of African political elites, now as in the past, to control and appropriate surpluses from the domestic economy parallels their failure after independence to provide political inclusion and govern populations through employment and the civic sphere. This continuity is what Bayart calls African elites’ strategies of extraversion: they derive their power and ability to mobilize resources from control over their society’s frequently unequal relationship with external environments (Bayart 2000). This was the case during the slave trade, during colonialism, and continues to be the case today, as independent states with export economies are often little more than gatekeepers. These gatekeeper states (Cooper 2002) have little control over the interior of their countries but they do control the gates, i.e. the ports or railway depots through which export commodities leave the country and consumer goods are imported. These gates are the main sources of revenue and of opportunities for nepotism, for example through the granting of import and export licenses to political allies. These revenues become the basis of domestic authority, as they allow for the building of patronage networks.

Populations can access these networks, and thus the state’s resources, through claims of clientelism and of belonging to ethnic or national groups. These strategies of political inclusion, however, also contain an exclusionary equivalent: nativism and xenophobia. Nationalism, autochthony, regionalism, and politicized ethnicity thus serve as problematic and conflict-ridden vehicles for political and economic inclusion and exclusion. Africans and Africanists have ample experience with these forms of belonging and alienation, which ascend in importance when conceptions of citizenship rooted in employment fall short of enabling political inclusion and economic justice.

In recent decades, several African countries, including South Africa, the Ivory Coast, and Cameroon, have witnessed recurrent episodes of nationalist, xenophobic, and nativist violence. As citizens and locals try to exclude outsiders from patronage networks, the scarce resources of the state, and (mostly in South Africa) from rare employment opportunities, welfare payments, and public housing, politicians manipulate discourses of autochthony and belonging for electoral gains (Geschiere 2009; Fourchard and Segatti 2015). Despite the prevalence of such violence, many scholars and activists, especially in South Africa, have paid limited attention to postcolonial and post-apartheid African nationalism, apart from denouncing it, as they often prefer to “celebrate oppositional movements as embodying a post-nationalist (indeed cosmopolitan) cutting edge” (Hart 2014: 12).

Fanon, however, predicted the failures of early nationalist projects and recognized that postcolonial Africa had a problem of “ultranationalism, chauvinism, and racism” (2004: 103). His agitation for a shift from nationalism to social consciousness—a collective striving for “responsibility on a truly historical scale” that reimagines citizenship beyond “flags […] government buildings,” and “the false glitter of the capital” as “symbols of the nation” (144)—remains exigent today, when many South Africans perceive foreign Africans as stealing their jobs, government grants, and public housing. Violence against the latter continues to assume the alibi of economic nationalism. It is this reimagined citizenship that we explore in the following sections.

Between “the state as a state” and “a state without a state”

More than fifty years after the publication of Wretched of the Earth, we still clearly struggle with Fanon’s question: How to elicit a transition from nationalism to social consciousness? That is, how to rethink citizenship as accessible to the destitute, the unemployed, and populations for whom systematic violence and social exclusion are more rule than exception? Today the relevance of Fanon’s question is irreducible to Africa, precisely because it underscores the persistence of the state-form in globalization. We explore these corollaries via Gramsci and Said on the State as neither a nation nor a national state. In globalization, we can only approach the state as such through a culture of the state rather than the nation and its marketizations—that is, the growing tendency for citizens’ and noncitizens’ access to the state to depend on their documented or undocumented positions in the market (Root 2007; Beck 2017). This venture to the interior of the state finds its form to be precisely as imaginary or aesthetic (Chytry 1989) as it is substantive, institutional, or bureaucratic. How can one claim such a materially abstract state? The attempt to make such a claim forces us to reshape our concept of labor. As we have argued, the labor-citizenship nexus reduces labor to recognizably commodified forms. Hence, for us to claim the state, rather than the nation or the market, we need to recognize as labor the life-worlds of the poor, the unemployed, or those marginally connected to global markets. If labor is to claim the state, then we must wrest labor itself from its reductions to wages, taxpayers, and the nation-form.

To be sure, Fanon’s social consciousness hinges on what Said, when he reads Gramsci, calls “culture”: “a separately capitalized endeavor” whose “historical force possess[es] its own configurations, ones that intertwine with those in the socioeconomic sphere and that finally bear on the State as a State” (171; emphasis added). When reading Gramsci, Said focuses on culture’s incomplete serviceability to authority: culture tends to capitulate to the national imaginary because the latter readily claims and is shaped by the state’s material and abstract structures. Said emphasizes that when “culture serves authority,” its servitude is “ultimately [to] the national State” and thus to reductive nationalist logics of power.

Nevertheless, when Said turns to the Gramscian intellectual, he finds that culture always affords a measure of internal resistance through its complicities with “authority and power” (171): irreducible to its own servitude, culture is “separately capitalized” because its historical deference to the “national State” is never fixed.ⁱ Rather, for Said the Gramscian intellectual may organically reposition culture apart from the national state and thus toward “the State as a State.” The prospect of shedding the nation-form to which culture remains overly tethered is crucial for Said, who sees in Fanon’s dialectic of “[t]he violence of the colonial regime and counter-violence of the native” (qtd. in Said 1993: 271) a struggle that “must be lifted to a new level of contest, a synthesis represented by a war of liberation, for which an entirely new post-nationalist theoretical culture is required” (1993: 268). Thus, Said implicitly fuses Gramsci’s organic intellectualism and Fanon’s social consciousness qua a post-nationalist theoretical culture whose endgame would be none other than the State as a State, rather than as a national State.

While Said’s crosshatching of Gramsci and Fanon is pivotal, we suggest that “the State as a State” only partially captures Gramsci’s slippery “expansion of the state concept” (Buci-Glucksmann 1980: 69). More precisely, Said’s phrase rather ambiguously sums up Gramsci’s appeal to the state-form, with all its cultures and their claims. For instance, how does Said’s “the State as a State” relate to Gramsci’s “‘image’ of a State without a State,” which for him stems from “the greatest political scientists and legal thinkers” having imagined “the state-coercion element withering away gradually” (2007: Notebook 6, §88). The distinction between Said’s reflexive simile (as) and Gramsci’s reflexive preposition (without) is suggestive. Indeed, to reclaim labor beyond wages and productivity, we must rethink its very concept in the crucible between Said’s “State as a State” and Gramsci’s “State without a State.” In the process, we conjecture that Said’s phrase matches the spirit, if not the letter, of Gramsci’s.

Said’s phrase hinges on a simile that differentiates two articles: the definite the, and the indefinite a. Whereas Gramsci counterbalances two indefinite articles and thus two indefinite States, Said writes neither the State as the State nor a State as a State. The simile comparing these States underscores their non-identity, and hence their abstractions into figures rather than entities. Moreover, it is historically impossible to locate the State or a State as such, precisely because the “state idea” exceeds material institutions that most often lay claim to its ideological effects (Abrams 1988). This suggests that our reading of Said’s phrase would not have proceeded all that differently had his articles been symmetrical. The grammar of Said’s expression thus cancels the referential drift of his articles and nouns, linked as they are by a glaring trope: as. His grammatical units complicate the figures they house—namely, the State and a State.

Lacking the subtractive force of Gramsci’s “State without a State,” Said’s “State as a State” sounds as though it might harbor a reification of the state-form as a material apparatus bound to conventional governance. This risk is apparent if we read Said’s phrase too quickly. Indeed, although the semblance of reification likely was not Said’s intention, his redoubling of the state as a reflexive form of power seems nevertheless to resonate with the simile in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. Hinging on a perceptual metaphor of seeing, on the simile like, and thus on a certain consonance with Said’s as, Scott’s book hardly ventures into the state’s immaterial production, or into what Philip Abrams calls its “triumph of concealment. It conceals the real history and relations of subjection behind an a-historical mask of legitimating illusion” (1988: 77). “In sum,” Abrams writes, “the state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is” (82; emphasis added).

This prevention is precisely what Scott’s all-seeing state does not see. In Seeing Like a State, that is, the state approximates a transcendent actor whose functionaries stand outside society; a clear entity with its own logic and unilateral exertion of power. Indeed, under further rubrics of “a viewer … whose vision is synoptic” as well as “state simplifications” that “provide authorities with a schematic view of their society,” Scott’s titular simile culminates in yet another symbolic comparison for the state’s apparent being and seeing: “Rather like U.S. highway patrolmen wearing mirrored sunglasses, the authorities enjoy a quasi-monopolistic picture of selected aspects of the whole society” (1998: 79). However, can we really say that state functionaries, who form the “institutional structure” of “a state-system” (e.g., highway patrolmen, immigration officers, parliamentarians, etc.), are identical to “a state-idea” that is “projected, purveyed and variously believed in” (Abrams 1988: 82)? Even via a figure of speech that aims to personify and thus unify an abstraction as mystifying as the state (77), the gap Abrams discerns between state-system and state-idea is not so easily bridged.

The integral state

At this juncture, the rigor of Gramsci’s subtractive preposition looms large. For, whereas Said’s “State as a State” might, without cautious handling, succumb to the governance apparatus of Scott’s all-seeing state, Gramsci’s “State without a State” emerges when the “state-coercion element wither[s] away” (2007: Notebook 6, §88). In this “true ethical State” there is no “internal division of ruled (and rulers)” (Bellamy and Schecter 1993: 125), nor is there a separation between political and civil society. This is the regulated society of communism as Gramsci explored it via his ideas about the state. While this regulated society of communism may seem utopian, it nevertheless reveals a crucial element of Gramsci’s thinking: the integral state, without which one cannot critique actually-existing societies, let alone imagine their transformations. Even when the distinction between state and civil society does not (yet) disappear, as it would in regulated society, its borders are often already murkier than common understandings of civil society and its relationship to the state allow. As Peter Thomas explains, for Gramsci “the distinction between the state and civil society is, properly understood, methodological rather than organic” (2009: 69n89). This blurred border between political and civil society complements Marx’s and Engels’s understanding of (wage) labor as an alienated form of human life-activity, the work and social activity that fulfills our species-being (1998: 96-97). This alienation, however, can never be complete, a point Polanyi emphasizes by identifying labor as a “fictitious commodity” (2001: chapter 6). Wage labor and labor as life-activity are thus neither identical nor separate. While this is true everywhere, it is particularly labor history beyond the West that grounds this observation.

In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci posits a society “wherein the historical unity of civil society and political society is understood dialectically … and the state is conceived as surmountable by ‘regulated society’” (2007: Notebook 6, §65). This state is the bourgeois integral state, qua “the dialectical unity of political and civil society, and not their identity or fusion” (Thomas 2009: 69). However, when we write that this state “is” the integral state, we mean to distinguish between the state’s presumed static being and its Gramscian becoming; for, the integral state functions as a vital force of competing claims on resources, land, redistribution, citizenship, protection, etc., rather than as a reified object that only ever fixates on its seeming opposite, i.e. civil society. It is once again the history of clientelism and patronage in Africa that highlights how state power operates through such claims. Too often we only recognize claims when they are made in the language of the market and by wage laborers or tax payers. We thus ignore claims emanating from forms of work that are neither countable nor recognized as labor and are predominantly performed by women and by the poor.

As Gramsci implies, dialectical and oppositional thinking are not synonymous: “It must be remembered that the appellation ‘night watchman’ for the liberal state comes from Lassalle, a dogmatic, nondialectical statist” (2007: Notebook 6, §88). In other words, even as we reasonably fear the extent of state-justified power, we should avoid the trap of a dogmatic, nondialectical allegiance to civil society. Avoidance of such a trap is an aspect of Gramsci’s approach to the integral state’s dialectical unity. That unity emphasizes the integral state’s verbal activity (i.e., what it historically becomes or may become) rather than its apparent substance (i.e., what it is for the positivism of a given historical moment):

In the theory of state  regulated society (from a phase in which the state equals government to a phase in which state is identified with civil society), there must be a transition phase of state as night watchman, that is, of a coercive organization that will protect the development of those elements of regulated society that are continually on the rise and, precisely because they are on the rise, will gradually reduce the state’s authoritarian and coercive interventions. This is not to say that one should think of a new “liberalism,” even if the beginning of an era of organic freedom were at hand. (2007: Notebook 6, §88)

Gramsci’s emphasis on immanent transformation here is unmistakable: the state in one phase “equals” yet is clearly irreducible to government; in another “transition phase,” it assumes the metaphorical charge of a “night watchman” that is distinct from the night watchman as liberal state, precisely because it coercively protects the will to socialism in capitalist societies. Such a will, moreover, is itself emphatically “on the rise,” indeed to such an extent that authoritarian aspects of the state are inessential to it. As forces, these phases, wills, and claims are powerful enough, in Gramsci’s estimation, for us to jettison the reformation of liberalism as modernity’s political paradigm.

Gramsci does not map a socialist teleology of history (Sotiris 2017: 120). Rather, he focuses on the immanent transformability of the state qua the immanent transformability of civil society. In other words, whether or not we are banking on a materialization of regulated society, the fact that state might notionally “equal” government or seem interchangeable with governmentalization (Foucault 1991: 103) does not reduce it to that description. If the “state was born out of civil society’s differentiation from itself” (Colas 1997: 305; emphasis in original), and the former is thereby the latter’s history in “a reality whose unity was that of a contradiction” (302), then the most we can say is that both state and civil society “are” not objects so much as transformative claims on the tenuous power of their dialectical unity. Such transformative claims are always claims of labor, in the sense of life-activity rather than alienating wage labor. As such, they materialize the integral state’s dialectical unity.

Scott’s state as an all-seeing, all-governing force that stands outside society is thus an inadequate conception. Civil society activists often regard the state as a concrete entity external to themselves that can be resisted through “the classic dream of civil society”: “to finally become one with itself outside the alienated condition it suffers under the domination of the state” (Dean and Villadsen 2016: 31). As “the form that many modern political eschatologies take,” qua envisioning “the end of the form of power that is constitutive of the state: sovereignty,” this classic dream of civil society hinges on the logic of state phobia (31). When idealized, civil society manifests as a pure sphere driven by its putative separation from a state replete with unilateral forces of oppression and impunity. A similar idealization, moreover, conceives of the market and (informal) entrepreneurialism as spheres of individual agency and of freedom from oppression and regulation. The state is then reduced to its coercive element or to a mechanistic apparatus of governance, rather than engaged as a social relation; or, in Poulantzas’s words, as “a relationship of forces, or more precisely the material condensation of such a relationship among classes and class fractions” (1978: 128; emphasis in original).

Nevertheless, following Gramsci and Poulantzas, we argue that the modern state and civil society are not separate entities but are rather interwoven in a dialectical unity. In this sense, porous boundaries between state and personalized networks of power in many African countries are neither a departure from the norm of the modern state, nor an indication of the latter’s failure. Rather, African states are more unmasked versions of this same state-form. As such, our argument about labor, citizenship, and the state is not unique to Africa but allows us to see different perspectives. Hence, because the state only emerges “as a claim to domination” (Abrams 1988: 77), claims to civil society and the market are integral claims on the state, and vice-versa; presenting both in binary opposition, however, confounds the nature of our claims on the state as well as the state’s own claimable, indeed interior, nature.

Accordingly, in his passage on “war of position and war of maneuver, or frontal war,” Gramsci writes that when the modern Western, and now quasi-global, “state tottered, a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed. The state was just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements” (2007: Notebook 7, §16). When Gramsci writes of sturdy fortresses and emplacements behind and thus within the forward trench, he metaphorically intuits the integral state as the enfolding of civil society within the state. However, if we read Gramsci’s metaphors too quickly, we might be tempted to see a unilateral relation of power wherein the state is always the container and civil society always that which is contained. To pursue dialectical unity as a philosophical loadstone of Gramsci’s integral state, one would also have to see civil society as the container and the state as that which is contained. Admittedly, in an era defined by state violence and state phobia, this is a counterintuitive inversion.

Indeed, to complement Gramsci’s recourse to fortresses, trenches, and emplacements, we would advance our own metaphor of matryoshka dolls, or Russian nesting dolls, whose interior structure is chiasmatic: that is, if the largest doll is the state that contains a second largest doll that is civil society, then the third interior doll would again be the state, and so on ad infinitum. We devise this complementary metaphor in relation to Spivak’s discussion of international civil society: “If one looked behind the international civil society into the decimation of the modern state and its transformation into management of capitalist globalization, with the sanction of the North in the South, informal markets would remain competitive within the ruling view of the world that can no longer think democracy” (2015: 2h56m24s to 2h56m52s). An inversion of Gramsci’s perspective on civil society’s fortresses and emplacements as situated behind, and thus within, the state’s tottering forward trench is clear in Spivak’s imperative for us to look behind the bastions of international civil society to mark the financialized decimation of the contemporary state. Precisely because it is a social relation rather than an objectified apparatus, the state is implacably within civil society, even if the latter identifies itself in perfect opposition to the former.

Democracy and citizenship in the integral state

Notably, our point on the inversions of state and civil society reflects Spivak’s similarly chiasmatic structure of ‘the North’ and ‘the South’. Rather than simply producing a binary of rich and poor nation-states, global capitalism disseminates in the Global South many of the social relations we associate with the Global North (exemplified in financial and national elites, managerial and technocratic classes, gated communities, and upmarket shopping malls), and vice-versa (embodied in destitute poverty, the growing normalization of austerity, and informalization and precariatization of labor). Globalization today is thus not so much characterized by the ‘flow’ of capital, Western cultures, and social relations from North to South; rather, our era of financialized capitalism develops complex, because crosshatched, patchworks of exclusion and integration, and of state coercion and market governance (Ferguson 2006; Ong 2006).

Binary understandings of socioeconomic relations thus fail to capture common social and economic realities in the Global South and North; this results in seemingly contradictory attitudes to economic phenomena that do not fit normative paradigms of economy and regulation, let alone of politics. (Neo-)liberal commentators celebrate markets and informal labor in the Global South as modes of agency found in civil society, with the poor pulling themselves up by their bootstraps (de Soto 2000; Bates 2005) beyond oppressive state regulations and constrictions of formal wage labor. In the Global North, however, the gradual disappearance of formal sector wage labor is increasingly deplored. While “being your own boss” retains a romantic appeal (Pendakis 2015), the harsh realities of insecurity and self-exploitation experienced by Uber drivers and ‘independent contractors’ are increasingly recognized as a new, and often less attractive, form of regulation rather than as an example of freedom from states’ and employers’ regulations (Rosenblat and Stark 2016; Pasquale and Vaidhyanathan 2015). Indeed, Africanists have long recognized that the informal sector is not characterized by less regulation but rather by different forms of regulation (cf. Meagher 2010).

Moreover, in a template of democracy that has yet to break out of its employment-based conception of belonging and social justice, these precarious workers are not only super-exploited. Just like those of the poor and the unemployed, their claims on the state and on citizenship are often not recognized. They are frequently excluded from the protections of labor laws and from unionizing, that is from workplace democracy, and usually they do not have equal access to pensions, unemployment benefits, and health benefits. Similarly, the destitute often find it hard to exercise their democratic rights to voting, health care, and housing. The limitations of this wage-labor model of citizenship are borne out by African social and political history; and the outcomes of these limitations have generally not been encouraging. As this model of citizenship fails millions worldwide, however, the point we are making has global significance. Indeed, as we have argued, the historiography of Africa highlights the relational nature of political power, which reveals the state as immanently claimable. This point, however, is not limited to Africa.

Reintroducing our article’s key phrases from Said and Gramsci, one might say that the very concept of labor is perhaps what’s most at stake today in the crucible between “the State as a State” and “a State without a State.” Indeed, if we remember that Fanon approached social consciousness as the decisive charge of postcolonial citizenship; if we underscore that this charge matters both for the Global South and the Global North because of their matryoska embeddedness in globalization; and if we acknowledge that this charge, as an exigent shift in collective consciousness, must but “hasn’t yet taken place” (Said qtd. in Courville 2007: 221), then Said’s “State as a State” can only thread its way through Gramsci’s “State without a State.” For us, that is, these phrases are powerfully metonymic, precisely because Said’s “as” is an iteration of Gramsci’s “‘image’ of a State without a State” (2007: Notebook 6, §88; emphasis added). Nestled within this enigmatic image of “a State without a State” is the reflexivity Said attributes to a state formation that forever labors not to mistake itself either for a species of nationalism or for one of the market. At odds with the simile by which Scott orients his all-seeing state, the reflexivity of Said’s “as” channels, in our view, the same dialectical unity that may allow state and civil society to grapple with their interiority to one another, with their integral state, and thus with their claims of labor.

In Gramsci’s subtractive preposition, we see a state-form whose amenability to sociopolitical claims, regardless of whether these are claims of labor or patronage, is irreducible to a mere apparatus of governance. Crucially, for our claims of labor Gramsci’s radically affirmative “without” counteracts the radically negative “without” experienced in life-worlds of homelessness and abject poverty, where the destitute effectively have no claims on citizenship. For, by reducing labor to wages and productivity, we deny the concept of labor to life-worlds of the impoverished and thus render them “without” the state in a manner contrary to Gramsci’s “without,” to Said’s “as,” and to Fanon’s social consciousness. Vis-à-vis Fanon and Said, Gramsci’s “without” entails a post-nationalist culture of the state from below, where labor is irreducible to commodified work or even to discrete physical acts, such as rummaging for scraps and begging. Qua survival as labor’s denominator, Gramsci’s “without” registers as labor the life-worlds of poverty experienced daily by millions worldwide: evading police brutality, staying warm in subzero urban climates, keeping cool in forty-degree cityscapes, surviving destitution in rural areas, fostering relationships with volunteer caregivers or kin, trying to manage one’s own or others’ mental health in homelessness, etc. In an integral state comprehended from below—that is, an integral state that challenges the equation of wage-labor and social belonging—these life-worlds are themselves inherently claims of labor and citizenship outside the folds of market and nation.

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i If culture is “separately capitalized,” then we must read it “as an environment not fully determined by capital logic” (Spivak 2014: 41m11s to 41m17s).