Global Capitalism and the Future of Agrarian Society

Arif Dirlik, Alexander Woodside, Roxann Prazniak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781612050386
• eBook ISBN: 9781317259107
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers historical and comparative analyses of changes in agrarian society forced by the globalization of capitalism, and the implications of these changes for human welfare globally. The book gives special attention to recent economic development and urbanization in the People s Republic of China which have had a major impact on contemporary transformations globally. Case studies from South and Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America in turn place these transformations in a comparative global perspective. The contributors include distinguished scholars from the UN, PRC, India, Zimbabwe, and Latin America who are also active in policy issues."

Part I

Introductory

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

THE END OF THE PEASANT? GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND THE FUTURE OF AGRARIAN SOCIETY

ARIF DIRLIK AND ROXANN PRAZNIAK

This volume issued from the Wall Summer Institute, “The End of the Peasant? Global Capitalism and the Future of Agrarian Society,” held over a week in late June 2008 at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of British Columbia. The Institute was followed in June 2009 by a weeklong field trip by selected participants to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to witness cooperative efforts in Henan Province, inspired by the efforts of Professor Wen Tiejun of People’s (Renmin) University in Beijing. The conclusions from the field trip were discussed in a daylong workshop at the Advanced Institute for Sustainable Development of the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at that university. The Institute discussions, the field trip, and the workshop presentations confirmed the sense of a major transformation of agrarian societies at work globally, reversing radical hopes of the post-WWII years but quite in keeping with long-term developments under the regime of capital. Whether or not this is a cause for optimism or pessimism is entangled very much in attitudes toward the capability of capitalism to solve the problems of its creation. These conflicting attitudes have a history of their own, as Alexander Woodside’s introductory chapter outlines. It remains to be seen whether present uncertainties over the future of agrarian society are merely a replay of the past or products of an unprecedented world situation.

Because of, for the most part, the organizers’ interests and areas of expertise, the transformation of agrarian society in the People’s Republic of China over the last three decades, and the sense of crisis that has enveloped that nation over the last decade, provided the initial impetus for the undertaking. Developments over the last two decades have catapulted the PRC to the forefront of speculation over the future of capitalism and the world economy. The future of agrarian society is part of this speculation. Since the early 2000s, the Chinese leadership has openly recognized the seriousness of what is described as the “three-nong” problem, referring to nongye/agriculture, nongcun/village, and nongmin/peasant (or cultivator, see below). The regime has made the creation of a “new socialist village” (shehui zhuyi xincun) into one of its top priorities, at least in word. What this means remains unclear, as “the new socialist village” is likely to point to something quite different from the conventional understanding of the “village,” where the village is not so much a unit of agrarian society as it is an integral part of a nationwide urban network. This also has radical implications not only for the understanding of the “peasant,” but for the organization of agriculture.¹

The coverage of the undertaking was expanded almost immediately, however, to place developments in China in a comparative perspective but also to get at structural problems that are global in scope. The food crisis of spring 2008 confirmed the validity of these concerns. As Jomo Kwame Sundaram observed in his keynote address for the Summer Institute, the food crisis had many long- and short-term causes, among them price manipulation, but a structural transformation of agriculture was one of the fundamental, long-term reasons exacerbated by neoliberal policies. Different societies are placed differently in the global topography of capitalism. But there is also a great deal of commonality in the problems they face in terms of parallel trajectories of development, as well as increased interdependence in the supply of agricultural commodities. Ironically, what distinguishes China may be the willingness of the regime to recognize the problem and plan for the future, as was observed by Joao Pedro Stedile, a prominent leader of the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil who was a participant in the workshop at People’s University.²

We would like to single out here three issues that emerged in the course of the discussions in the various meetings, which also guide the essays included in this volume: the long-term relationship between capitalism and agrarian society, the city and the countryside in the analysis of agrarian society, and the question of the peasant as a social category.

CAPITALISM AND AGRARIAN SOCIETY

The impact of capitalism on agrarian society does not call for extensive discussion here, because it is masterfully summarized in Chapter 3 by Immanuel Wallerstein. Where agrarian society is concerned, the history of capitalism appears as one long process of “de-ruralization” and “de-peasantization,” in the words of Wallerstein, or, “de-agriculturalization,” as Gregory Guldin (also at the conference) has put it with reference to contemporary China.³ Over the last half millennium, agriculture has come progressively under the domination of the capitalist market, transforming productive relations in the countryside. The transformation has changed not only social relationships in the countryside, including labor relations, but also peasant cultural identity as the “peasantry” has been integrated into the production and consumption practices of capitalism and the political demands of the nation-state.

In this perspective, what may be novel presently is the globalization of this process accompanying the globalization of capital: the transformation of the Global South along the trajectory traversed earlier by advanced capitalist societies. The sense of novelty is enhanced by the reversal of the emphasis on agrarian society of Third World national liberation movements of only a generation ago that not only perceived in the peasantry the key to national identity and autonomous development but promised to subject metropolitan areas globally to the rule of the countryside. While memories of national liberation continue to dynamize agrarian-inspired social movements, such as the Via Campesina, what has happened over the last three decades is the opposite: the urbanization of the countryside led by developmentalist states that have internalized a basic premise of global capitalism as the only available path to survival and prosperity. Urbanization has changed the nature of these movements as well, which can hardly be described as “peasant” or even agrarian movements, as much of their activity is conducted in urban centers. We will say more on this below.

THE CITY AND THE COUNTRYSIDE

This discussion of urbanization leads directly to the second issue: the relationship between the city and the countryside in the analysis of agrarian society. If capitalism has had a transformative impact on the countryside, the city has served as the medium and the agent of transformation. Recognition of the fundamental importance of this relationship forces two considerations, one analytical, the other political: Is it possible to understand change in the countryside without reference to the city, and, for the same reason, can the problems of the countryside be resolved without change in urban existence? And if the country and the city are interdependent in many ways, from the economic to the cultural, can the city survive the disappearance of the country?

The primacy of the city over the countryside long has been an assumption of social theory. The city is not just the center of economic, political, and cultural life but also, for the same reasons, a manifestation of civilization and an emblem of progress. Thus Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology that “the separation of town and country” represented the “the greatest division of material and mental labour,” tracing its origins to “the antagonism between town and country [beginning] with the transition from barbarism and civilization.”⁴ The city is nearly synonymous with civilization and, as such, the civilizer of the countryside as well.

It does not follow, however, that the domination of the countryside by the city is a foregone conclusion, that it has the same form and character at all times, or that the relationship between the two is of necessity an antagonistic one. Marx and Engels followed the statement above with an account that historicized the evolution of the city under different social formations, culminating with the capitalist city. Fernand Braudel would write with reference to the precapitalist city (in different forms) that “town and country never separate like oil and water because the bond uniting them neither breaks nor pulls lone way only. They separate and draw closer at the same time, split up and then regroup.”⁵ Since Marx and Engels were interested primarily in the emergence of the capitalist city, they projected its characteristics on its genealogy, ignoring that the relationship between town and country historically was marked as much by symbiosis (not just economically but socially and culturally as well) as antagonism. In this account, cities that could not liberate themselves from the countryside suffered from rural inertia, unable to generate the dynamism that, for better or for worse, had created capitalist society in Europe.⁶

From an ecologically sensitive contemporary perspective, the “modern” city appears instead as a betrayal of the premodern city’s promise of a more ecologically sound and sociable relationship between the city and the countryside. Making an unconventional distinction between city (or town) and the urban, Eco-Anarchist social theorist Murray Bookchin writes that “born of the city, urbanization has been its parent’s most effective assailant, not to speak of the agrarian world that it has almost completely undone.”⁷ Bookchin, who idealized the classical city, viewed “urbanization” not simply as “citification” but as the defining characteristic of the modern city that distanced the city from the countryside, followed by the urban “engulfing” of “the agrarian and natural worlds,” which in turn created the conditions for the city turned in upon itself to “devour … city life based on the values, culture, and institutions nourished by civic relationships.” A symbiotic relationship between town and country, in other words, was turned into an antagonism between town and country that would result not only in the erasure of the countryside but the end of the city itself as the location for political and cultural sociability. “Even if we think in the old terms of city versus country,” he continues, “urbanization threatens to replace both contestants in this seeming historic antagonism. It threatens to absorb them into a faceless urban world in which the words ‘city’ and ‘country’ will essentially become social, cultural, and political archaisms.”⁸

Bookchin surprisingly left out of his analysis the relationship between democracy and slavery in the classical city he admired, but that is not a pertinent issue here.⁹ Two aspects of his analysis are important for historical and critical reasons. His distinction between the urban and the city (or town) has important analytical implications: if capitalism has had a transformative impact on agrarian society, it has done so through urbanization of both town and country, rendering the urban into the indispensable referent (or even, context) in any analysis of agrarian society. Urbanization here becomes a feature of the “modern” (capitalist) city, rather than a referent for all city formation. The transformation of the countryside also requires the transformation of the city, so that the analysis of one is inextricably entangled in the analysis of the other. Within the context of the Global South presently, urbanization would mean, by implication, the transformation of existing cities and towns along trajectories demanded by global capitalism, in the process also bringing the countryside under the hegemony of capitalist relations of production. Conversely, the transformation of the rural areas of the globe has an impact on cities in both the developed and the developing worlds, if only in the form of migrant labor from the “countryside”—hence Bookchin’s conclusion that the city/country distinction itself is on its way to becoming “archaic.”

The second important aspect of the analysis is its normative but analytically relevant suggestion that the end of the country also means the end of the city. Marxists, and Marxist-inspired analysts such as Braudel, exhibit ambivalence toward the city that has come to pervade most social science analysis: the city as a realm of contradictions, of both freedom and creativity, and alienation and self-destruction. Such contradictions are clearly visible in contemporary analyses of what have been designated “world” or “global” cities, especially as they assume “mega-” sizes, as realms both of transnationalist cosmopolitanism and ethnic segmentation and parochialism.¹⁰ Bookchin’s criticism of urbanization as the death of the city forces another mode of thinking. As city-city relationships over long distances come to overshadow the relationship of the city to its hinterland, they distance the one from the other, rendering a symbiotic into an antagonistic relationship in which the countryside is the first casualty. But it is not the only casualty, because the city itself becomes subject to forces beyond its control, and the management of those forces takes priority over modes of governance that are intended to enhance the sociability that is its very reason for existence. The city is transformed into a location in a network of locations through which capital and its auxiliary services move and serves as such as a link in the process of capitalist production. As a recent Marxist analysis observes, cities provide the ideal spaces for the accumulation of capital, which in turn transforms the city on an ongoing basis in the process of its production and reproduction: “Capital accumulation and the production of urbanization go hand in hand.”¹¹

The logical conclusion here is that the grounding of capital in the city simultaneously off-grounds the city from its ecological setting by yoking it to the motions of capital. Fernand Braudel, explicitly in agreement with Marx, wrote pessimistically that,

It is the inequalities, the injustice, the contradictions, large or small, which make the world go round and ceaselessly transform its upper structures, the only really mobile ones. For capitalism alone has relative freedom of movement.… Faced with inflexible structures … it is able to choose the areas where it wants and is able to meddle, and the areas it will leave to their fate, incessantly reconstructing its own structures from these components, and thereby little by little transforming those of others.¹²

The statement successfully captures what may be distinctive about the forces driving the modern capitalist city, confirmed daily in our time by the globalization of urban forms. Neither limitations on the motions of capital nor urban and rural struggles to ground it in accordance with local needs is sufficient to refute that city and country alike have been integrated into its domain. The distancing of the city from the countryside means only that the city is now shaped by forces beyond the local, not that there is a literal separation between the two. On the contrary, as Bookchin suggests, the integration of the country to the city may be more thorough presently than ever before in history. It is also marked by its own peculiar contradictions. Cities continue to consume the countryside. The countryside strives to become citified, to partake of the promises of globality, even as it also resists appropriation by the city. But cities in their expansion bring the countryside into their midst (whether as fields or as people), so that global forces and forces of the immediate hinterland play out their antagonism in the city. At the same time, the emptying out of the countryside into the city raises the questions of what agrarian society might me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introductory
• Part II The People’s Republic of China
• Part III Tricontinental Perspectives
• Part IV Epilogue
• Contributors