Nkrumah argued African industrialization required socialist planning, not laissez-faire markets

Evidence

Nkrumah similarly argued that, although the African continent harboured extraordinary untapped wealth, this was being used to enrich Europe, not the continent’s people. Embracing the economic policies, if not the racist paternalism, of the Fabians, Nkrumah argued that, in attempting to ‘raise the living standards of its people’, Africa could not industrialise in ‘the haphazard laissez-faire manner of Europe’, but must pursue ‘comprehensive socialist planning’. Going beyond the Fabians, he also argued for political unity to challenge the liberal myth of the market as a free space of mutually beneficial exchange, and alter terms of sale of raw materials. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 289

Categorization

• XREF: Nkrumah’s rejection of ‘the liberal myth of the market as a free space of mutually beneficial exchange’ materially bears on the reader’s ethics-of-markets debate about whether markets are welfare-improving or exploitative.