Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- 1 The demographic background to development in Africa
- 2 Development projects and their demographic impact
- 3 Conceptualization of the impacts of rural development projects upon population redistribution
- 4 Capitalism and the population landscape
- 5 Unequal participation of migrant labour in wage employment
- 6 Africa's displaced population: dependency or self-sufficiency?
- 7 Population redistribution and agricultural settlement schemes in Ethiopia, 1958–80
- 8 Populating Uganda's dry lands
- 9 Environmental and agricultural impacts of Tanzania's villagization programme
- 10 Development and population redistribution: measuring recent population redistribution in Tanzania
- 11 Communal villages and the distribution of the rural population in the People's Republic of Mozambique
- 12 A century of development measures and population redistribution along the Upper Zambezi
- 13 Resettlement and under-development in the Black ‘Homelands’ of South Africa
- 14 Development programmes and population redistribution in Nigeria
- 15 Population, disease and rural development programmes in the Upper East Region of Ghana
- 16 Demographic intermediation between development and population redistribution in Sudan
- 17 A typology of mobility transition in developing societies, with application to North and Central Sudan
- 18 Rural population and water supplies in the Sudan
- 19 The impact of the Kenana Project on population redistribution
- 20 Migrant labour in the New Halfa Scheme
- 21 The Gash Delta: labour organization in pastoral economy versus labour requirements in agricultural production
- 22 The impact of development projects on population redistribution to Gedaref Town in Eastern Sudan
- 23 The growth of Juba in Southern Sudan
- Index
4 - Capitalism and the population landscape
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- 1 The demographic background to development in Africa
- 2 Development projects and their demographic impact
- 3 Conceptualization of the impacts of rural development projects upon population redistribution
- 4 Capitalism and the population landscape
- 5 Unequal participation of migrant labour in wage employment
- 6 Africa's displaced population: dependency or self-sufficiency?
- 7 Population redistribution and agricultural settlement schemes in Ethiopia, 1958–80
- 8 Populating Uganda's dry lands
- 9 Environmental and agricultural impacts of Tanzania's villagization programme
- 10 Development and population redistribution: measuring recent population redistribution in Tanzania
- 11 Communal villages and the distribution of the rural population in the People's Republic of Mozambique
- 12 A century of development measures and population redistribution along the Upper Zambezi
- 13 Resettlement and under-development in the Black ‘Homelands’ of South Africa
- 14 Development programmes and population redistribution in Nigeria
- 15 Population, disease and rural development programmes in the Upper East Region of Ghana
- 16 Demographic intermediation between development and population redistribution in Sudan
- 17 A typology of mobility transition in developing societies, with application to North and Central Sudan
- 18 Rural population and water supplies in the Sudan
- 19 The impact of the Kenana Project on population redistribution
- 20 Migrant labour in the New Halfa Scheme
- 21 The Gash Delta: labour organization in pastoral economy versus labour requirements in agricultural production
- 22 The impact of development projects on population redistribution to Gedaref Town in Eastern Sudan
- 23 The growth of Juba in Southern Sudan
- Index
Summary
This chapter seeks to provide a very modest contribution to the theoretical conceptualization of population studies by suggesting the incorporation of a social dimension in any population theory. It therefore looks past the superficial spatial and sectoral appearance of population movements at the inner essence and the social nature of these movements. Using some empirical evidence from the Sudan, it looks into the hypothesis that under capitalism the major spatial and sectoral population movements emanate from deep and multiple, but dialectically interrelated, social processes, and that the population landscape is determined mostly by the needs of capital. The distinction between private and public capital is immaterial when both are guided by the same laws of accumulation.
Theoretical framework
Classical theories of population are only an integral constituent of the whole body of bourgeois social science, popularizing the same concepts and perpetuating the same mode of thought and ideology. Bourgeois social science, including population theories, equates ideological validation with scientific verification through the segmentation of total reality, distortion of rational knowledge, and presentation of ideological concepts as universal truth. Most models of man presented by these population theories are examples of abstract man; likewise, populations are projected as isolated, competitive individuals or, at best, aggregations of individuals. ‘Average’ man and abstraction of population are used as concrete categories. These theories, and, indeed, all bourgeois social science, are ideological postulations and a conscious mystification of the social forces at work in society and of the class division of population.
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- Population and Development Projects in Africa , pp. 41 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985
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