Peasants and Globalization

Political economy, rural transformation and the agrarian question

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Cristóbal Kay

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415446297
• eBook ISBN: 9781134064649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In 2007, for the first time in human history, a majority of the world's population lived in cities. However, on a global scale, poverty overwhelmingly retains a rural face. This book assembles an unparalleled group of internationally-eminent scholars in the field of rural development and social change in order to explore historical and contemporary processes of agrarian change and transformation and their consequent impact upon the livelihoods, poverty and well-being of those who live in the countryside. The book provides a critical analysis of the extent to which rural development trajectories have in the past and are now promoting a change in rural production processes, the accumulation of rural resources, and shifts in rural politics, and the implications of such trajectories for peasant livelihoods and rural workers in an era of globalization.

Peasants and Globalization thus explores continuity and change in the debate on the 'agrarian question', from its early formulation in the late 19th century to the continuing relevance it has in our times, including chapters from Terence Byres, Amiya Bagchi, Ellen Wood, Farshad Araghi, Henry Bernstein, Saturnino M Borras, Ray Kiely, Michael Watts and Philip McMichael. Collectively, the contributors argue that neoliberal social and economic policies have, in deepening the market imperative governing the contemporary world food system, not only failed to tackle to underlying causes of rural poverty but have indeed deepened the agrarian crisis currently confronting the livelihoods of peasant farmers and rural workers. This crisis does not go unchallenged, as rural social movements have emerged, for the first time, on a transnational scale. Confronting development policies that are unable to reduce, let alone eliminate, rural poverty, transnational rural social movements are attempting to construct a more just future for the world's farmers and rural workers.

Part 1
Peasant Livelihoods and the Agrarian Question

1
The agrarian question

Peasants and rural change

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristóbal Kay

The fate of the peasantry and the agrarian question

A peasant is an agricultural worker whose livelihood is based primarily on having access to land that is either owned or rented, and who uses principally their own labour and the labour of other family members to work that land. Peasants rely to a significant, if not exclusive, degree on cultivating arable land. They either prosper or go hungry according to whether the land, after meeting their production expenses, provides them with enough produce for the household to maintain an adequate standard of living and, if possible, some produce that can be stockpiled as a surplus to be sold or saved for future use. Peasants do not live an idyllic rural life; their lives are harsh, are too often short, and are deeply affected by forces outside their control. In trying to obtain land, they may have to deal with landlords; in trying to sell produce, they may have to deal with traders; in trying, when necessary, to work for others because they do not have a stockpile, they may have to accept what is offered. Peasants are thus rarely self-sufficient. Although peasants must be able to undertake a wide variety of tasks with a reasonable degree of competence, if they are going to be able to survive, they do not produce everything they need for their livelihood. As a consequence, peasants do not live in isolation from wider social and economic forces that are outside their control; rather, they are subordinated to those wider social and economic forces because of their need to obtain items they do not themselves produce. Finally, in obtaining items they do not produce, their identity affects the terms and conditions under which these items are obtained. Thus, the subordinate position of peasants affects the complex network of social relationships they enter into with others, the economic transactions they undertake with others, and the content of the culture within which they live day by day. This means that, in understanding the position of the peasantry, it is necessary to understand the relationships of peasants to their social superiors, to each other, in their families and in their communities on the basis of gender, age and kinship, to the state, and to the operation of the product and labour markets they may use. It is also necessary to understand how these relationships affect the conditions in which peasants may or may not produce the surplus that can allow them to prosper.¹

More than a decade ago, Eric Hobsbawm (1994: 289), one of the most renowned historians of the peasantry, wrote that ‘the most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of this (last) century, and the one which cuts us off for ever from the world of the past, is the death of the peasantry’. Peasants existed before the dawn of the industrial world; their world adapted to the rise of capitalism, in Europe and around the world; and yet now, according to Hobsbawm, the world of the peasantry is dissolving before our very eyes. Indeed, in the words of Bernstein (2006: 454), ‘nothing is gained, and much obscured, by characterizing contemporary small farmers as “peasants”’. The reason for this is the path capitalism has taken in the past two decades. As capitalism arose, peasants accommodated it, as their subordination to the wider social and economic forces transformed from that of a variety of pre-capitalist forms, including feudalism, to capitalism. However, over the course of more than two decades, capitalism has undergone inexorable change, and these changes have had profound implications for the global peasantry. The states and economies within which peasants are subordinated have become increasingly integrated into global circuits of production, trade and finance, a phenomenon universally known as ‘globalization’.² As Ripple (2007) reminds us, food globalization is not new; it has been going on for 10 millennia, speeding up particularly in the late fifteenth century. Nonetheless, current forms of globalization demonstrate a historically significant strengthening of processes of concentration and centralization within capitalist enterprises operating internationally, a globalization of capital accumulation, and an apparently lesser role for the state. These developments have had extremely widespread effects in culture, society, politics and the economy. Granted, the immediate and long-term implications of these effects are not clear, and they are contested. Nonetheless, in this regard it is perhaps in seeking to understand the implications of globalization for the social and economic organization of rural and agricultural activity among peasants that the greatest degree of contestation is witnessed (Goodman and Watts 1997; Petras 1997; Borras 2004).

This is so, in large part, because of the emergence of a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the world food system: that in a world of unparalleled rural production and productivity, which has more than sufficient capacity to meet the food security needs of all, the numbers of those living in varying degrees of food insecurity and chronic hunger in the world’s towns and countryside is historically unprecedented, even as the vast majority of the world’s farmers, including the world’s peasants, face a livelihood crisis (IFAD 2001; FAO 2005; IFPRI 2007; Patel 2007; Weis 2007). Indeed, the World Bank’s flagship annual publication, World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development, has recently highlighted the fact that three-quarters of the world’s poor live in the countryside, deriving their principal work activity from farming that does not foster a secure or sustainable livelihood (World Bank 2007).

This articulation of a global agrarian crisis with, in a sense, massive ‘overproduction’ in some parts of the global food system, has led some to argue that fundamental shifts are under way in the world food system, as capital in the form of agro-food transnational corporations, in conjunction with states operating through the World Trade Organization, seeks to reconfigure global agriculture. As a result, it can be expected that the position of the peasantry will be, at best, as little more than contracted petty commodity-producing pieceworkers subsumed within the buyer-driven commodity chains of corporate agro-food transnational corporations (McMichael 1994; Friedmann 2004; Bernstein 2006). In this way, the subordination of the peasantry to capital on a global scale continues, as it has in the past, but assumes a new character as, out of the disorder of the past three decades, a new global corporate agro-food regime consolidates (Friedmann 1993; Bonanno et al. 1994; Goodman and Watts 1997; Magdoff et al. 2000; Buckland 2004; Patel 2007; Weis 2007). Indeed, for some of these observers, including, apparently, Hobsbawm, the evolution of a seemingly globalized capitalism marks a decisive theoretical and practical break: old issues, such as the fate of the global peasantry, have disappeared into history, and new paradigms are required (Kearney 1996), because peasants are a ‘historical anachronism, unable to survive the dynamics of the capitalist development of agriculture’ (Veltmeyer 2006: 445).

This book is about the fate of the peasantry in a contemporary world subject to seemingly ceaseless agrarian change. Given the context of a global agrarian crisis, the book will examine whether, and if so, how, the location of food and agricultural production within contemporary capitalism has been reconfigured and is contributing to processes that will ultimately undermine the livelihoods of the global peasantry and bring about, in Hobsbawm’s words, ‘the death of the peasantry’.³ To that end, this book will explore the processes underpinning the global agrarian crisis and the fate of the peasantry by examining the historical trajectories and contemporary relevance of critical issues surrounding the development of agriculture in emergent and mature capitalist societies, issues that were first identified more than 100 years ago and which are known collectively in the political economy literature as the ‘agrarian question’.

In 1899 Karl Kautsky (1988) defined the agrarian question by asking ‘is capital, and in what ways is capital, taking hold of agriculture, revolutionising it, smashing the old forms of production and of poverty and establishing the new forms which must succeed?’ (Banaji 1980: 46).⁴ Recently, Terence J. Byres (1996: 26) has elaborated this definition to mean ‘the continued existence in the countryside, in a substantive sense, of obstacles to an unleashing of accumulation in both the countryside itself and more generally – in particular, the accumulation associated with capitalist industrialization’. Clearly, the agrarian question cannot be removed from the world-historical context within which it is situated, whether that be the period of imperialism or the period of globalization. These contexts witness a reconfiguring of the development of the forces and relations of production on a global scale, and these processes have profound implications for the prospects of capital accumulation among producers within the global rural economy and beyond. This book is itself both evidence of, and seeking to contribute to, the ongoing debate⁵ within agrarian political economy as to whether, in the contemporary period, the agrarian question as it is conventionally defined continues to be of contemporary relevance for global capital; whether the meaning of the agrarian question in the contemporary period has fundamentally changed; or whether the agrarian question is now fundamentally a concept that can be relegated to the footnotes of history, as suggested by Hobsbawm.

The contemporary understanding of the agrarian question emerges from the insight that it is self-evident that mature capitalist economies are, in an economic sense, structurally different from developing capitalist economies. It is in seeking to understand the processes by which rural structures were transformed and capital accumulation unleashed that the agrarian question acquires its historical interest – in order for this transformation to occur, obstacles in the countryside to structural transformation, which are at the heart of development in its economic sense, had to be overcome. The key differences in the structures of mature capitalist and developing capitalist economies suggest that there must be changes: in the pattern of production, with a shift from an economy dominated by agriculture to an economy driven by higher-value industrial manufacturing; in produced inputs, with a shift towards capital-intensive production techniques and technologies in both the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors; in employment, with a shift from agricultural to non-agricultural occupations; and in demand, with the formation of a home market capable of sustaining accumulation. An understanding of these historical processes does have contemporary relevance: in a host of developing and transition economies, social and economic obstacles within agriculture continue to inhibit this structural transformation of the economy, potentially constraining rural accumulation. These potential limits to accumulation restrict the livelihood security of millions of people, in both countryside and town, and thus contribute to the global agrarian crisis.

However, this is not where the contemporary relevance of the agrarian question can be questioned. Rather, the heart of the current debate within political economy regarding the continued salience of the agrarian question is whether, in a real sense, agriculture ‘matters’ any more to processes of capital accumulation on a global scale. Indeed, ‘does it even make sense to speak or write of “peasants” today?’ (Veltmeyer 2006: 445). If capital and capital accumulation is increasingly internationalized, does agriculture continue to have a possible role in the emergence of capital within states, or is (in the current international economic conjuncture) agricultural transformation irrelevant to the emergence of capital within a state as the very circuits of capital have become globalized? This central issue is the overarching theme of this book.

The emergence of the agrarian question

The origin of a concern with agrarian issues within political economy can be traced back to the first volume of Capital (Marx 1976, orig. 1867), where, as Bernstein (2006: 449) reminds us, the class basis of the emergence of capitalist farming within England was explored in detail through the concept of ‘primitive accumulation’. However, it was in the 1890s that the agrarian question emerged as a clearly distinct field of enquiry within political economy, for it was in this decade that three foundational texts were written, establishing the terrain of its problematic. These were: The Peasant Question in France and Germany, written in 1894 by Friedrich Engels; Karl Kautsky’s The Agrarian Question, published in 1899; and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia, also published, coincidentally, in 1899.⁶

In The Peasant Question in France and Germany Engels (1950: 381) argued that ‘from Ireland to Sicily, from Andalusia to Russia, and Bulgaria, the peasant is a very essential factor of population, production and political power’. However, ‘the development of the capitalist form of production has cut the life-strings of small production in agriculture; small production is irretrievably going to rack and ruin’ (Engels 1950: 382). The reason was that European farm production in general, whether produced by large landowners or small peasants, was unable to compete with cheap grain produced outside Europe. This was leading to the slow dissolution of the peasantry as, unable to compete with imports, they were becoming dispossessed from the land. Only in England and in Prussia east of the Elbe was this not taking place, because these places witnessed ‘big, landed estates and large-scale agriculture’ (Engels 1950: 381) – in short, capitalism in agriculture had emerged. It was therefore necessary, according to Engels, that the European peasantry adopt a political response to this emergent agrarian crisis. However, ‘the doomed peasant (was) in the hands of his false protectors’ – large landowners that ‘assume the role of champions of the interests of the small peasants’ (Engels 1950: 382). The political party of the urban working class, which had a ‘clear insight into the interconnections between economic causes and political effects’, therefore had to become a ‘power in the countryside’ (Engels 1950: 382) by adopting a programme that reflected the political needs of the peasantry and, in so doing, forming an alliance with the peasantry. That was the road, argued Engels, to political power, in both town and country.

Engels’ emphasis was clearly on the political implications of the agrarian question – that, in a sense, the emerging globalization of the food system as a result of imperialism was undermining peasant livelihoods in Europe, and that the agrarian question was an agrarian question for and about labour. His concern was not with the issue of the emergence of agrarian capital, rural capital accumulation, or capital more generally. These broader concerns were raised, though, by Kautsky and Lenin, because for both men the force behind the rural transformation identified by Engels, including political and social transformation, was the process facilitating the generalized emergence of capital, and hence the capital–labour relationship, in the form of capitalist industrialization. For example, Lenin (1964, orig. 1899) took it as a given that from the 1880s Russia had been undergoing capitalist industrialization, which had eroded the basis of the peasant economy, albeit incompletely and unevenly, and which would as a consequence revolutionize property relations, spurring the predominance of private property. Capitalist industrialization ended the interrelationship of rural agriculture and rural petty industry in the countryside. It had increasingly commodified agricultural production. It had broken down precapitalist labour regimes in town and country as the need for a waged labour force had em...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• Part 1 Peasant Livelihoods and the Agrarian Question
• 1 The agrarian question Peasants and rural change
• Part 2 Historical Perspectives on Agrarian Change
• 2 Peasants and the market imperative The origins of capitalism
• 3 The landlord class, peasant differentiation, class struggle and the transition to capitalism England, France and Prussia compared
• 4 Nineteenth century imperialism and structural transformation in colonized countries
• 5 The invisible hand and the visible foot Peasants, dispossession and globalization
• 6 Peasant struggles for land and agrarian reform in Latin America
• Part 3 Contemporary Perspectives on Agrarian Change
• 7 The globalization of manufacturing production Warrenite fantasies and uneven and unequal realities
• 8 Gender justice, land and the agrarian question in Southern Africa
• 9 The political economy of land and the agrarian question in an era of neoliberal globalization
• 10 Agrarian questions from transition to globalization
• 11 The Southern question Agrarian questions of labour and capital
• 12 Food sovereignty, social reproduction and the agrarian question
• Part 4 The Agrarian Question, Past and Present
• 13 Neoliberal globalization, the traits of rural accumulation and rural politics The agrarian question in the twenty-first century
• Index