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Paper short abstract:

This paper offers an historically based, political economy critique of the narratives of economic crises and of the logic of the austerity focused policies of the SAPs and suggests a theory to understand the dynamics of crises and of policy alternatives, based on the Mozambican experience.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers an historically based, political economy critique of the narratives of economic crises and of the logic of the austerity focused policies of the SAPs. In doing so, it suggests a theory of capital accumulation in Mozambique that explains the dialectics of economic expansion and crises, from which policy alternatives can be drawn.

The paper looks at two great, post-independent crises, which led to large IMF/World Bank interventions, and argues that they can be better explained by studying their historically, class-based dynamics, as opposed to the monetarist approach of the SAPs. The great crisis of the 1980s, which led to Mozambique joining the Bretton Woods framework, was primarily created by a vision of state-centred accumulation that failed to address the need for transformation of the social conditions of production, specialization and labour reproduction inherited from colonialism, which was ideologically supported by a dualistic view of the peasantry and an obsession with great leaps in the development of the productive forces dependent upon expectation of foreign aid that never materialized. The crises of the 2010s results directly from the historical logic of the mode of capital accumulation, which can be described by the waves of state expropriation combined with long term austerity. The combination of the SAPs with the historical conditions of accumulation the the SAPs did not address led to a dialectic and cumulative dynamic of financialization and narrowing down of economic specialization, which reproduced the conditions of instability and crises.