Agriculture and Industry: a Case-Study of Capitalist Failure in Northern Nigeria

Abstract

Discussion of industrial activity in capitalist Third-World countries has usually centred on a series of dualistic frameworks, most recently the opposition between the so-called ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors of an economy. Such dichotomies attempt to divide the activities of labour as cleanly as possible into two groups sharing common characteristics. The categories that emerge – modern/traditional, large/small-scale, formal/informal – overlap to a considerable degree because, in effect, they all attempt, with varying crudity, to compare the socio-economic characteristics of those dominant capitalist enterprises which are based on intensive capital, high-level technology, and a large scale of production, with those activities in the economy which are not based on such features. As such, the second category tends to have both negative and residual components.