Accumulation Tendencies and the Trajectory of the Cooperative Movement in Tanzania

The ways in which accumulation tendencies have shaped the cooperative movement in Tanzania are not very clear. I show that conditions for the vibrancy, decline and revival of the cooperative movement have been shaped by the process of accumulation by dispossession, which is arguably Tanzania’s key socio-economic feature since colonialism. Within this process, co-operators are moulded into subjects – who readily internalize, modify, or abandon, certain cooperative thoughts and practices – through techniques which Foucault sums up as governmentality. Thus, in the early years of Tanzania’s cooperative movement, the vibrancy of Agricultural Crop Marketing Cooperatives was consistent with moulding co-operators to enhance crop production in order to facilitate (post)colonial accumulation through cash crop production. Likewise, since the 1980s the decline of these sorts of collective has been commensurate with the emerging vibrancy of Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies, a trend which is consistent with generalized accumulation under neoliberalism. This development can be illustrated as featuring a shift of emphasis from cash-crop production to marketization of whatever can be exchanged, including money.