Towards A New Political Economy Of Agriculture

William H Friedland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000009453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The emergence of a truly global economy in the 1970s and the need to understand the subsequent changes in economic structure provided the impetus for this synthesis of the sociology of agriculture. The book offers the first formulations of a political economy theory that explains the transnational social and production relations of food and agriculture. Drawing upon studies of labour, technology, the state and gender, the contributors put forward a basis for reassessing and restating the intellectual framework of agriculture.

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Introduction:
Shaping the New Political Economy of Advanced Capitalist Agriculture

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William H. Friedland with the assistance of Frederick H. Buttel and Alan P. Rudy

DOI: 10.4324/9780429269493-1

This book originated in a miniconference held during the 50th Anniversary meeting of the Rural Sociological Society in Madison, Wisconsin in August 1988. The reasons that miniconference on political economy was held in conjunction with the annual meeting of a sociological society will be explained later in this chapter.

This introduction begins by explaining the origin of the volume's tide and, in so doing, explores the reasons for the Madison miniconference. This is followed by an historical discussion of theoretical analysis of agriculture in populist and marxist circles and the relationship of marxist analyses to the agrarian, peasant, and colonial questions. This discussion will reveal a major hiatus in the analysis of agriculture by marxist writers.

Next, Ae developments of the 1970s are examined by chronicling how a new generation of neopopulist rural sociologists and neo-marxist scholars in the U.S. "rediscovered" agriculture. This rediscovery led to the emergence of a new disciplinary sub-field, the sociology of agriculture. The formulation of this field took place in parallel with similar developments among European scholars. Scholars from other disciplines such as anthropology, social and oral history, economics, and geography have also contributed to the new sub-field. These developments, in turn, led participants to begin referring to their common activity as the political economy of agriculture.

I am grateful for helpful comments and suggestions from Jim O'Connor.

The ways in which the field has emerged over the last two decades is then examined. The discussion thai turns to a consideration of the intellectual substance of the new political economy of agriculture, assessing die parameters of the field and some of the topical areas that are emerging but which were not encompassed in the Madison miniconference and, hence, ate not included in this volume. This introductory chapter concludes with a brief analysis of the chapters of this book according to the way they are organized in the volume.

The New Political Economy of Capitalist Agriculture

Central to the chapters in this volume is that something new is happening in agriculture - something different from earlier agricultural practices and, importantly, qualitatively different from earlier stages of capitalist agriculture. What can be genetically called the food sector has been repeatedly and qualitatively transformed over the last sesquicentenaiy. Most recently, the economic crisis of the early 1970s, a crisis substantially a product of larger structural cycles within capitalism and, more specific to agriculture, the Soviet-American grain deal, contributed to the final emergence of new national and international divisions of labor in all sectors of the global economy, including agriculture. This coming forth of a global food regime had been immanent for some time; its fruition resulted from the conjunction of several crises in the early 1970s producing the final emergence of a new, but still nascent, stage of global economy.¹

¹ See Friedmann 1987, for a summary of the recent transitions of the global food economy, and Agnew and Corbridge 1989, Gordon 1988, and Thrift 1989, for assessment* for the long-term significance of changes in the world economy.

Related to the changes in global economies and agricultural production, something new is occurring in the analysis of agriculture, specifically in the political economy of capitalist agriculture. As a result of the social movements of the 1960s, coincident with the economic crises that began in the 1970s, new populist and marxist critiques of capitalist agriculture began to merge. Particularly within the marxist tradition, theoretical analysis of agrarian social relations and die revolutionary character of peasantries has a significant history. What has occurred with the new international division(s) of labor in agriculture is the heightened search for a political economic theory which explains the social and production relations of food and agriculture since, as is stressed below, theorization of the peasantry, rurality, and/or fanning is no longer adequate.

For better or worse, the critiques presented here are largely from the industrialized nations of Europe and North America (though several chapters address topics which encompass issues beyond the core capitalist economies while two chapters [on technology and gender] draw heavily on Third World-oriented literatures that have new implications for issues of concern in the advanced capitalist world). Nonetheless, within the advanced industrial nations, neo-marxist analysis has become consolidated, transforming social analysis and the analysis of agricultural social relations, one result of which is the articles in this collection.

A key component of the new national and international relations in agriculture, and central to the populist and neo-marxist critical theories, is that the modern developments in agriculture are capitalist in character. This means that the modern crisis of capitalist agricultural accumulation must be placed in the context of historical transitions within all sectors of the global capitalist economy. This is die transition from the national and international relations associated with post-World War II U.S. hegemony to the global economy now characterized by interrupted and increasingly uneven accumulation (MacEwan and Tabb 1989; Gottdiener and Komninos 1989), by state fiscal crises (see O'Connor's [1973] pioneering analysis), and by a realignment of economic power from the west eastward. Analysis of capitalist social and production relations demands class analysis, studies of capital accumulation via the exploitation of labor and labor markets, and attention to localized developments in production and reproduction as mediated reflections of global trends.

Finally, the political economy of new relations within global capitalism requires an examination of the transitions which began long before the immediate historical era, from polyglot local farming practices to concentrated corporate-capitalist agricultural production. This movement from rural farming to industrial agriculture is directly related to the development of new productive practices and new economic formations within, and outside, the food sector. Peasant production, simple commodity production (i.e., fanning), and the "Fordist" (see Aglietta 1979; Lipietz 1987; lessop 1988; and Kenney et al. in this volume) extension of chemical and mechanical agriculture across the globe have given way to a highly industrialized and capitalized food sector which utilizes generic inputs for the production of durable foods. Simply put, the present situation is one in which the connotations of "farming" - in particular, rurality and community, but also other categories that are limited to national economies, nation-states, and national societies - are giving way to vertically and horizontally integrated production, processing, and distribution of generic inputs for mass marketable foodstuffs. These developments cannot be encompassed by traditional analyses of agriculture - neoclassical, populist, and marxist - and demand a new theoretical approach to political economy, an approach with which this volume seeks to grapple. The principal theoretical variations emerging in the literature and major theoretical issues at stake within the political economy of agriculture will then be discussed.

Populism and Marxism: The Development of a Critical Agricultural Social Science

Capitalist economies experience cyclical crises. While it has not been possible to suggest that agricultural production has approached full capitalization until recently, agricultural markets have long experienced cyclical crises, mostly associated with overproduction (Berlan 1989; Ehrensaft 1980). These crises have periodically resulted in radicalized politics most often associated with populism, and less often with marxism, depending on the political traditions of particular regions and nations.

In this context, since the 1880s, populism's power has been embodied in its ability to mobilize people in persistent, if erratic, social movements, often agrarian in character. The weakness of populism has been its failure to produce an enduring and useful theoretical analysis (though, typified by Rodefeld et al [1978] and Strange [1989], much of the more sophisticated work in this genre has undeniable utility).

Populist struggles generally undertake simple, usually local but occasionally developing into regional and national, attacks on large-scale capitalist enterprises, recognizing the damage monopolies of economic power can do to specific communities. The strength of populism has been its ability to identify processes of economic concentration within capitalism; its failure has centered on an inability to grapple with fundamental processes of capitalist development - i.e., class analysis, commodity fetishism, uneven and combined development - which has meant that its movements, which re-surface phoenix-like with economic crises, have not generated an enduring theoretical analysis. Rather, as each new form of populism develops, a few theoreticians are generated to work with its more populist practitioners yet without a coherent, long-lasting, analytic paradigm.

The history of marxist analyses of agriculture has teen very different, although marxists have certainly ignored the development of agriculture in advanced capitalist nations for too long. The mandan case varies from that of populism if only because, historically, marxist analysis has focused primarily on Europe and Asia rather than on the United States, where populism has had a major home. More importantly, unlike populism, marxist analysts had an early theoretical preoccupation with agriculture although that preoccupation was not focused on agriculture per se.

Marx, himself, seeing the peasantry as a doomed class lost in the stupefying parochial conditions of rural life, paid only sporadic attention to agriculture.² Instead, he concentrated his analytic powers on the industrial proletariat of the nineteenth century. Despite Mane's distress at the parochialism of die peasantry and his emphasis on the proletariat, two classic analyses of agriculture appeared early within the marxist tradition. The first, Karl Kautsky's Die Agrarfrage (1988 [1899] - The Agrarian Question) was enormously influential in shaping the views of the marxist political parties in die early 1900s. The second, V.I. Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1943a [1899]), while influential in Russia, did not have a significant impact on marxist thinking outside of Russia until after the Russian revolution of 1917, a revolution which elevated Lenin's writings into canon for several generations of marxists.³

² The attention Marx gave to agriculture far transcends the ubiquitous quotations about "the idiocy of rural life" sad the likening of the peasantry to "a sack of potatoes." For a thorough discussion of Marx's writings on agriculture and natural resources, see Pcrelmsn 1990. Specifically, there were four major foci in Marx's analyses of agriculture: (1) the expropriation of the peasantry as a basis for primitive accumulation (especially in Capital Vol. 1, and Theories of Surplus Value; (2) an occasional implication that independent peasant production of commodities exists outside the capitalist mode of production (in Theories of Surplus Value); (3) the theory of ground rent (in Capital Vols. 2 and 3); and (4) the (often misinterpreted) comment in The Eighteenth Brumaire about the peasantry being like "a sack of potatoes."

³ Lenin was far more prolific in writing about agriculture and the peasantry than Kautsky, a reflection of the industrial backwardness of Russia and the much greater social importance of the Russian peasantry. See, for example, Lenin 1943b (written in 1908 but not published until 1918), and 1943c [1903].

While Kautsky's writing in Germany at the turn of the century in effect "settled" die agrarian question for most marxists fa* the next seven decades, in fact, neither he no- Lenin wrote their studies because they were interested in agriculture in itself. It is only possible to understand how agriculture, as a sphere of production, came to be studied by marxists by considering the problematics that spurred the production of these two now-classical studies of agriculture.⁴

⁴ For a thorough analysis of the agrarian question in marxist circles in the early stages of the development of marxist and socialist movements see Hussain and Tribe 1981. Volume 1 of this two-volume publication deals with "German Social Democracy aid the Peasantry 1890-1907"; Volume 2 discusses "Russian Marxism and the Peasantry 1861-1930."

Kautsky's Die Agrarfrage was published in 1899.⁵ This study attempted to resolve an issue which had arisen within the German Social Democratic Party as to the relationship of the German peasantry to social democracy (i.e., the parliamentary road to socialist power). The debate arose out of the rapid growth of the party and its successes in winning the loyalty and adherence of the urban proletariat Some segments of the party leadership were concerned that the structure of German politics would preclude the party from achieving political power unless the party's base was broadened beyond the proletariat. In 1894, Georg von Vollmar and several other German social-democrats suggested that the party begin the active pursuit of a peasant following (Russell 196S: 152-163; Steenson 1981: 181-188). It was as part of this debate, culminating in the abandonment of the peasantry at the Breslau Congress in 189S, that Kautsky wrote what later emerged as Die Agrarfrage.

⁵ No English translation of Di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Shaping the New Political Economy of Advanced Capitalist Agriculture
• PART I: Agriculture and Agri-industry in the New National and International Divisions of Labor
• PART II: Agricultural Crisis and the Restructuring of Agriculture and Agri-industry
• PART III: The Political Economy of the Technological Transformation of Agri-food Science and Technology
• PART IV: Agriculture and the State: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
• PART V: The Political Economy of Gender: Women and Agriculture
• INDEX