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Part I
Agrarian transition: theoretical discourse
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Chapter 1
Back to the future?
Marx, modes of production and the agrarian question
A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and CristĂłbal Kay
1. The agrarian question, capitalist agrarian transition and historical puzzles
It has been almost 150 years since a specifically agrarian political economy emerged, originating in Karl Marxâs (1976, orig. 1867) analysis of the genesis of capitalism, and the processes by which the core characteristics of capitalism came to be established: a system that is on the one hand exploitative and inhumane in its construction of the differential material interests of capital and labour while being a system that is, because of its capacity to develop the material forces of production, a necessary precondition of a more economically prosperous and more socially humane society.1 This is the terrain of what Karl Kautsky later called âthe agrarian questionâ, which he defined when he asked âwhether, and how, capital is seizing hold of agriculture, revolutionising it, making old forms of production and of property untenable and creating the necessity for new onesâ (Kautsky 1988: 12, orig. 1899). Terence J. Byres (1991) has argued that in order for agriculture to no longer pose any obstacles to capitalist transformation, the agrarian question must be âresolvedâ through some form of successful âagrarian transitionâ. Byresâs definition of a capitalist agrarian transition was the occurrence of âthose changes in the countryside of a poor country necessary to the overall development of capitalism and its ultimate dominance in a particular national social formationâ (Byres 1996: 27).
Marxâs concern with the process of capitalist development, through a resolution of what we now call the agrarian question and some form of capitalist agrarian transition, was shared by the key figures of classical historical materialism in the late nineteenth century: Engels (1950, orig. 1894), Lenin (1964, orig. 1899) and Kautsky (1988), among others, who viewed it as a two-sided process. Marx had argued that capitalist agrarian transition saw the exclusion of the direct producer from the land through outright forced dispossession. This was necessary because capitalist agrarian transition required the development of a market in land, which in turn necessitated dispossessing rural labour, which in turn created a waged labour force. In other words, capitalist agrarian transition required the commodification of land and labour. What Engels, Lenin and Kautsky brought to the discussion was a second side of capitalist agrarian transition: a process of differentiation within a peasantry that was internally stratified into distinct socioeconomic groups, commonly labelled âsmallâ/âpoorâ, âmediumâ and âlargeâ/ârichâ. Engels, Lenin and Kautsky can be distinguished by their differing perspectives on the drivers of this process of agrarian class formation. Engels argued that capitalist agrarian transition required the elimination of the small peasant, who could be owners of land, tenant workers of land, or both, and who used primarily family labour in on-farm production. The small peasant was eliminated by the middle and large peasants, who required, to differing degrees, waged labour for their farms and for whom the principal source of waged labour lay in an ever-more-steadily floundering, and then disappearing, small peasantry, whose termination provided the labour force necessary for the capitalist agrarian transition to be completed. By way of contrast, for Lenin landless waged labour was the remnants of both small and middle peasant farmers, and it was the elimination of the middle peasants that was key to the process of exclusion and social polarisation in the villages. For Kautsky, the process of capitalist agrarian transition was connected to the concentration of landholdings by the large peasants as the centralisation of capital in agriculture drove agrarian transition. In this light, the survival of small peasants was, for Kautsky, not a function of their economic efficiency but rather reflected the penury within which they lived, and their willingness to overwork themselves and complement that work with marginal sources of off-farm and non-farm income in order to survive. Agrarian political economy thus approaches capitalist agrarian transition as a process of the commodification of land and labour through the dispossession of the smallholder from the land, as a consequence of either forced displacement or the dispossession created by peasant class differentiation and the exclusionary implications of the normal, everyday workings of land, labour and product markets. During the current period of neoliberalism David Harvey (2003) encapsulates both collectively, if imperfectly, in the very popular concept of âaccumulation by dispossessionâ.
What then can be made of what Byres terms âhistorical puzzlesâ (1996: 15): contemporary agrarian transitions that do not result in the full development of capitalist social relations of production and where a multiplicity of contrasting social forms might not even resolve the agrarian question (Byres 2003)? For almost two decades Henry Bernstein has argued that the agrarian question as one in which capitalâlabour relations coalesce and solidify has been rendered redundant; the current phase of capitalist development has resulted in the agrarian question, to paraphrase Marx, melting into air. This chapter does not share that perspective. It will go âback to the futureâ: situating the agrarian question and capitalist agrarian transition within Marxâs understanding of the mode of production, and introducing the famous âmode of productionâ debate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is argued that Marxâs analysis of capitalist agrarian transition was far more nuanced and complex than is commonly suggested, emphasising the primacy of the conjuncture and the balance of forces rather than a historically inevitable if unpredictable and uneven process. For this reason, and notwithstanding the significant transfigurations that can be witnessed within actually existing global capitalism, the agrarian question continues to have resonance, particularly in countries with large agrarian populations, such as India, or countries where the demand for food is outstripping its supply, such as parts of sub Saharan Africa, and in some places, contemporary East Asia (Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2009).
2. Modes of production and the transition to capitalism
In the canonical works on the agrarian question, the transformation of pre-capitalist social relations of production into capitalist social relations of production that were sketched out by Marx in Capital and analysed in much further detail by Engels, Lenin and Kautsky appeared to be a linear process, in which the new forms of social relations and organisation undermined old forms of social relations and organisation in such a way as to speed the demise of the latter, older form of social relations and organisation. As a consequence, history can appear to be a unilinear sequence of stages, in which one mode of production decays as it is replaced by another mode of production. This linearity, which many read into Marx and suggest that he was a precursor of modernisation theory, can be traced back to the classic definition of a mode of production that was offered by Marx in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society â the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or â what is but a legal expression for the same thing â with the property relations within which they have been at work before. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins the epoch of social revolution.
(Marx 1983b: 159â60, orig. 1859)
This passage has several implications for an understanding of capitalist agrarian transition. First, it indicates that a mode of production is defined as a specific correlation of two components: the forces of production and the relations of production. The forces of production consist of the means of production, and in capitalism, labour power, or commodified labour. Relations of production are a consequence of the economic ownership and hence substantive control of the forces of production. The agrarian question is thus about the process by which the forces and relations of production that together constitute the capitalist mode of production are established: about the character of a capitalist agrarian transition that resolves the agrarian question.
A second implication of the passage is that it says that the economic âbaseâ defines other aspects of the social âsuperstructureâ: âsocial, political and intellectual lifeâ. So the material conditions of the process of production within the agrarian question shape the sociopolitical ramifications of the agrarian question. A third implication of the passage is that it says that at some point the development of the forces of production become constrained by the structure of the relations of production. It is at this point that social transformation begins: that a new mode of production begins to undermine and replace an old mode of production, a process that involves not only a reorganisation of the relations of production but also the social, political and intellectual superstructure. So the passage suggests that the relations of production which structure both labour processes and surplus labour appropriation develop both out of and as a result of other, older modes of production. Thus, a capitalist agrarian transition that transforms pre-capitalist farming and agriculture and in so doing resolves the agrarian question must develop out of and as a result of a pre-capitalist agrarian question. A clear implication is, as suggested, that history is a sequence of stages and that, in a historical and developmental sense, the old and the new modes of production stand in a sequential relationship to the other.
However, seeing history as a series of stages is an extremely functionalist view of history and indeed led to a widespread discounting of the utility of a historical materialist approach to capitalist agrarian transition. Moreover, it places such an emphasis on the structure of capitalism as to discount the agency of social actors that clearly shaped the history of the development project in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the 1960s, a way of getting round this seeming impasse drew on the French Marxist tradition, paying particular attention to the theories of Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar (Althusser and Balibar 1970; Anderson 1980), and how they were applied by the historical materialist anthropologists Pierre-Philippe Rey and Claude Meillassoux (Rey 1971, 1973, 1975; Meillassoux 1980; Bloch 1983). The Althusserian school argued that Marxâs analysis of the mode of production was an abstract theory and that actual economic and political systems in societies, which they called âsocial formationsâ, involved more than one mode of production. In trying to understand the operation of multiple modes of production within a social formation, the critical issue was that of reproduction: how do different components of different modes of production intermingle, interact and interlock to sustain the operation of a social formation over time, for, as Althusser (1971: 123) wrote, âthe ultimate condition of production is ⌠the reproduction of the conditions of productionâ.
The emphasis on the conditions of the reproduction of the social formation was because the process of capitalist agrarian transition was not seen to be an abstract and timeless one but is rather a historical event: one mode of production cannot instantaneously replace another, and so there must be a period in which there is an articulation of modes of production, during which time the new mode of production slowly comes to first dominate and then undermine the old mode of production. Rey, heavily influenced by Rosa Luxemburg (1951), in particular believed that the process of articulation within a social formation could be itself stable, persisting for a very long time. If such was the case, when trying to understand social formations characterised by some forms of pre-capitalism, it was not possible to understand one mode of production in isolation from another: the methods, means and mechanisms by which modes of production articulate created what we now call âhistorical puzzlesâ and defined the unique character of the social formation.
In this light the stubborn persistence of the social formations that characterise many contemporary developing capitalist countries might be explained by the character of the articulation of the pre-capitalist and the capitalist modes of production. During the period of imperialism capital entered into what were primarily agrarian social formations in the South, often through the intermediary of merchantâs capital and the process of commodity exchange. In so doing, the law of value was imposed: the idea that the exchange value of commodities, their monetary price, must ultimately reflect the socially necessary labour time necessary for the production of the commodities. The imposition of the law of value initially took place through the process of circulation, and had the effect of starting to undermine and break down the relations of production of the prevailing pre-capitalist mode of production in the social formation. However, as capital sought to appropriate the surpluses of labour, it worked within existing pre-capitalist labour processes. So while the conditions needed for the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production may have been put in place, the changes to the labour process necessary to finally dispense with the pre-capitalist mode of production would not have been completed. In this way, historical puzzles were created.
Rey (1971) offered a clear example of this in a detailed and groundbreaking case study of Congo-Brazzaville. The entry of capital into a developing social formation created the beginnings of a class of wage labourers who were necessary for the full maturation of capitalist social relations of production. However, this process witnessed workers entering into a capitalist mode of production from initially non-capitalist divisions of labour. They were thus used to working within non- capitalist labour processes, relations of production and ideologies. Moreover, this class of waged labour required food, and a capitalist agrarian transition that could resolve the agrarian question and establish capitalist social relations of production in agriculture had not occurred. So in the interim the capitalist mode of productionâs workforce had to obtain basic foods from the prevailing pre-capitalist mode of production, drawing peasants into the process of exchange and establishing them as petty commodity producers, but in a way that did not expose them to the full force of the market imperative and the law of value because of their continuing ability to self-provide, while reinforcing the social power of pre-capitalist dominant classes that appropriated food and agricultural commodities from the direct pr...
