Commodity Production in Kenya’s Central Province

This essay attempts to show that expanded household production of the contemporary period has been set in motion by international agencies of state-sponsored capital. The outcome has been that middle peasant households have built up a preponderant position in the production of coffee, milk and tea in the old Central Province reserves of smallholder agriculture.1 Firstly, whereas before the late 1940s the control over household production came to be vested in international firms, after the second world war the immediate regulation of the process of production passed unequivocally to the state apparatus. Secondly, an indigenous class of capital was eliminated from the private circulation of household commodity production: by the early 1960s the purchasing of coffee, milk, tea and other commodities was commanded by cooperative organisations and parastatal authorities. After a series of conflicts between the state and the indigenous class of capital, private merchant capital has been eclipsed in the circulation of agricultural commodities. Thirdly, and above all, contemporary household production has been marked by the general subsumption of households to capital. The separation of labour from the means of production, the defining feature of capitalist production, has taken a specific form. Middle peasant production, on the basis of family labour processes, has become preponderant in the context of the development of the relation between labour and capital.