| | In his otherwise excellent review of Colin Leys' book, Underdevelopment in Kenya, in ROAPE number 3, Geoff Lamb omits examination of what I regard to be the most questionable element of Leys' analysis, the Bonapartist character of the Kenyan state. Lamb points out the onesidedness of Leys' analysis of the classes in Kenya. Leys gives a detailed and insightful analysis of the development of the dominant foreign and local bourgeois classes in Kenyan peripheral capitalism, but in the end he 'fails to provide an adequate account of the nature of the oppressed classes in Kenya and their varying relationships to and struggles against monopoly capitalist domination' (Lamb, p.87). But Lamb fails to follow this up with a critique of the analysis of the class nature of the state which Leys has erected on this inadequate foundation. |
