In 1975, the political economist Geoff Kay, who died last year, wrote in the Preface to his second book, Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis:
… Faced with developments they cannot grasp, the economists have retreated behind a veil of obscurantism and statistics vainly hoping that by measuring and correlating the appearance of effects they will get some clue as to causes. As their conventional orthodoxy, neo-classical theory, has collapsed under the weight of its own internal inconsistencies, economists have desperately appropriated terms and methods from the natural sciences in the hope that the guise of science might be mistaken for the real thing. Some students may be taken in by it, but many are bored and frustrated. Those students who turn to economics in the hope of finding some explanation of the developments they see around them: developments such as rising affluence and increasing stringency; growing wealth and grinding poverty; … urban decay, pollution and underdevelopment … which threaten the very existence of civilisation: these students are still taught the key to analysis lies in understanding the way in which an isolated individual chooses whether to buy an overcoat or spaghetti.[1]
Rather than the indifference curves supposedly representative of such individual choice, Geoff Kay spent much of his intellectual life in trying to understand and write about origin and necessity of other choices. The choice between buying food or paying for heat; the choice between either food or heat and buying the drugs necessary to manage chronic disease. How hungry do you have to be before bearing freezing cold? How sick before foregoing dinner? And what about your children?
As Mike Hobart, a former student of Geoff’s at City of University, London, recalls, “City at the time had a policy of offering places to mature students who had experience of work.” These included those employed in a wide range of trades. Hobart recalls how Geoff introduced his economics course: “To understand my lectures you have to also understand that some people have to put their hands up to get permission to piss on the boss’s time”. Hobart notes that “Geoff had the knack of relating complex ideas to the world of work, and to be honest we lapped his lectures up. He didn’t spoon-feed us, but he made us think, made our lives relevant, something worthy of study, and encouraged us to work out our own ideas. I gained in self-confidence because of that.”
It is likely that Geoff’s own early life influenced his intellectual focus on labour and poverty.
He was born in East London in 1938. After his father’s early death, his family endured poverty and, for a time, homelessness, yet his mother managed to secure him a place at a good grammar school. His teachers recognised his potential and coached him for Cambridge, one even paying for his travel. In 1958 he went up to Clare College to read economics, where he encountered Walt Rostow, then writing The Stages of Economic Growth, subtitled “A Non-Communist Manifesto” – a second-rate work of historical fiction. Rostow, an economist, wrote what, for historians, is an amusing treatise in which he laid out a linear path to something called “modernization” which began with something called “traditional society” characterised by “subsistence agriculture” and a “rigid social structure”.[2] Rostow’s work became a touchstone of Cold War orthodoxy while Rostow himself became one of the architects of the American defeat in Vietnam.
After Cambridge, Geoff held a couple of short-term appointments and then took up a position teaching economics at Legon, the University of the then recently independent state of Ghana.
Ghana, at that time, was a magnet for Black nationalists and left-wing activists: Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Muhammad Ali, Che Guevara — and even Gene Kelly the Hollywood song and dance man— all passed through. (We don’t know whether Guevara and Kelly ever met but, had they done so, it would have made for a wonderful added scene for Evita.) Geoff’s Ghana experience, it is fair to conclude, sharpened his sense of the global stakes of political economy. Ghana, its colonial predecessor the Gold Coast, and the pre-colonial polities that composed it, were a very far cry from Rostow’s fictive “traditional society”. The Fante Confederation of the south had been trading in gold, slaves and agricultural commodities with various European peoples since the early 16th century; while the rival Asante Empire further north had traded gold and slaves both north across the Sahara and south to the Atlantic depending on price differential and political conditions. The peoples of both polities specialised in producing goods for the intra-African trade as well. By the late 19th century, some of the peoples of the Gold Coast had adopted the new world crop – cocoa – purely as a result of indigenous initiative, and, by the 1930s, the Gold Coast was one of the most important cocoa producers in the world. Rostow’s fictional “traditional society” was never anywhere to be seen.
Geoff Kay’s first book, The Political Economy of Colonialism in Ghana: Documents and Statistics 1900–1960 (Kay, 1972, with Stephen Hymer), remains the most important compendium of material on the period. Its introduction closely documented, against prevailing views, that British colonial policy deliberately stifled capitalist transformation in the Gold Coast by acting to thwart the indigenous accumulation of capital, the institution of private property in land, and the growth of wage-labour. This policy was the result of a combination of sectional self-interest on the part of particular fragments of capital, fear of political unrest, and oddly enough, utopian thought inspired by the turn of the century American savant Henry George.
If Kay’s Political Economy… was relentlessly empirical; his second book, Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis was a bold theoretical statement. Here, Kay argued, perhaps with Rostow in mind, “that orthodox (development) theory was never more than elaborate apology for colonialism, and for this reason quickly came under attack from the supporters of nationalist movements…”. “This criticism,” Geoff continued,
was soon generalised against an even more fundamental proposition of orthodox theory, that underdevelopment was an original condition for which capitalism could not be held responsible. By the mid-sixties a whole school of radical development economists had emerged that held the opposite view. Glaring inconsistencies in orthodox theory were brought to light and historical studies were produced to show how important capitalist penetration had been. But this is as far as it went.[3]
And then, criticising the critics, Kay added, “The radical critics of orthodox development theory were so keen to prove the ideological point that underdevelopment was the product of capitalist exploitation that they let the crucial issue pass them by: capital created underdevelopment not because it exploited the underdeveloped world, but because it did not exploit it enough.”[4]
This conclusion, was informed by the empirical research presented in his first book which, as indicated above, documented the ways in which the development of capitalist relations of production in the colonial Gold Coast were thwarted and the motives for doing so. In particular, Kay argued that it was the prominence of “merchant capital” – subsumed by industrial capital in the metropole – but still dominant in the colonial world which was a key culprit here, in that not only did merchant capital have little interest in transforming the colonial relations of production but the very independent existence of which was threatened by any such transformation.
However, as noted above, other powerful forces were in operation to prevent or, if possible, to at least limit the social transformation that would have been necessary for colonised peoples to be “exploited enough”. The necessary condition for a change in the form, and thus an increase in the level of exploitation to which Kay pointed was nothing less that the separation of colonial peoples from access to their means of reproducing themselves and their transformation into wage-labourers. Only then could the level of productivity be sufficiently increased to achieve development. This process and the socio-economic state that resulted from such a transformation were central to Geoff’s third book, The Economic Theory of the Working Class.[5]
The first chapter of the Economic Theory… is titled “Absolute Poverty”. In Geoff’s analysis, absolute poverty was a state of being that had two essential components. The first was a complete separation of people from the means to independently produce the necessities for sustaining and reproducing life; the second was inability of such people to sustain themselves from savings or accumulated property for more than a very limited period of time. Thus, while absolute poverty did not necessarily mean destitution at any particular moment, it did mean that destitution was an ever-present threat that compelled people to sell their labour – a necessity for the development of capitalism.
Those who doubt the existence of ‘absolute poverty’ might note, among other examples, the long lines United States’ airports for prospective travellers to undergo security checks conducted by employees of the Transportation Safety Authority in early 2026. As a result of the dispute between US political parties, the employees of the TSA, although legally required to work, were not being paid. Faced with this situation, some hundreds of them quit their jobs because they were threatened with eviction for non-payment of rent and/or subject to cancellation of health insurance as the result of the non-payment of premiums and had to find other employment. Still others took to sleeping in the airports where they worked because they could not afford petrol. Suffice to say that they, like the vast majority of workers in advanced capitalist economies live “pay cheque to pay cheque” or, in Geoff’s parlance, “absolute poverty”.
In Kay’s analysis, absolute impoverishment, as both a contemporary reality and an historical process, was central to his understanding of British Colonial policy in West Africa. In England, the problems attendant upon creation and maintenance of absolute poverty had been the subject of Poor Laws and Poor Law reform from the Tudor period on. In first decade of the 20th century, some of the results of the creation of absolute poverty were addressed by what has been described as:
The far-reaching social reforms enacted by the Liberal government between 1909 and 1911have been viewed as the cornerstone of the modern welfare state, providing the foundations for the reforms of the ensuing decades. One of the key social issues they were intended to address was unemployment, which had become a major feature of British economic life and political discourse in preceding decades, not to mention a major source of social unrest. The passage of the Labour Exchange Act and the Development Act, both in 1909, and the National Insurance Act of 1911 signalled not only new Liberal priorities, but the emergence of a new moral framework surrounding unemployment and a revised role for the state.[6]
It was during this very same period that some of the most important colonial policies intending to limit the conditions for the creation of absolute poverty were put in place for much of British West Africa and beyond. After an initial thrust to develop the “imperial estate” along English large-scale landlordism, colonial policy-makers shied away from creating the conditions for the emergence of a landless proletariat in West Africa. Both my own published work on the 1910 Northern Nigerian Lands Committee and, more importantly, that of Geoff’s doctoral student Anne Phillips on the West African Lands Committee Report of 1912-17 have documented this reluctance.[7]
What British colonial policymakers were trying to prevent was the creation of “Absolute Property”, the subject of Geoff’s fourth book, Political Order and the Law of Labour, (co-authored with James Mott).[8] Absolute property was both the mirror image and the reciprocal, of absolute poverty. If the latter depicted the state of the those who were left with no other choice but to sell their labour to survive; the former was presented as the intensification of private property into capital whose sole purpose was the exploitation of that labour in the never-ending pursuit of profit. Their book details the long historical process by which first, private property, and then the intensification of private property into capital guided the emergence of 18th and 19th century political economy. One key aspect of this process was the creation of the “labour contract”. Unlike other commodity transactions in which the article being sold was physically alienated from the seller, the sale of labour necessitated the physical presence of the seller. Once slavery became illegal in a particular jurisdiction, one could neither sell oneself nor be sold. The anomaly of the sale of labour, therefore, necessitated and entirely new field of jurisprudence – labour law.
If Political Order … marked an increasing engagement with philosophy, an examination of a particular aspect of Western philosophy became the central concern of Geoff Kay’s last book – Economics, Philosophy and the Neglect of Labour – again co-authored with James Mott. This work explores, amidst much else, the ambiguity of labour in Western thought as both creative activity and arduous drudgery from Genesis to 20th century philosophy with a final chapter radically re-working the labour theory of value.
The publication of after Geoff’s death was only made possible by the relentless efforts of his longtime friend and colleague, Jan Derry and the support of Geoff’s longtime partner Jeanette Collins.
Geoff Kay – Arsenal supporter, Ashes devotee, and English Cocker Spaniel aficionado – His kindness and wisdom are missed.
This text written with a little help from Geoff’s friends
References
Kay, G.B. with Stephen Hymer 1972, The Political Economy of Colonialism in Ghana: A Collection of Documents and Statistics 1900-1960, London: Cambridge University Press.
Kay, Geoffrey 1975, Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis, London: Macmillan.
Kay, Geoffrey 1979, The Economic Theory of the Working Class, London: Macmillan.
Kay, Geoffrey and James Mott 1982, Political Order and the Law of Labour, London: Macmillan.
Kay, Geoffrey and James Mott 2026, Economics, Philosophy and the Neglect of Labour, London: Bloomsbury.
Phillips, Anne 1989, The Enigma of Colonialism, London: James Currey.
Rostow, W.W. 1960, The Stages of Economic Growth, London: Cambridge University Press.
Shenton, R.W. 1986, The Development of Capitalism in Northern Nigeria, London: James Currey.
[1] Kay 1975, p. ix.
[2] Rostow 1960.
[3] Kay 1975, pp. ix-x, my emphasis.
[4] Kay 1975, p. x, my emphasis.
[5] Kay 1979.
[6] https://bilt.online/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Labours-Right-to-Work-Bill-and-the-Politics-of-Unemployment-Reform-1907-1911-McLennan.pdf
[7] Shenton 1986; Phillips 1989.
[8] Kay and Mott 1982.
