The Agrarian Question

A Reader

R.V. Ramana Murthy, R.V. Ramana Murthy

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000414264
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Sociology

The Agrarian Question and its resolution in the global context of capitalist development has a protracted scholarship developed over last one century and more. Capitalism in its last two centuries history has evolved through different historical stages since mercantile phase to industrial, national to imperialist and to post-imperialist post-colonial regimes. The agrarian question, understood as a process of transformation of agrarian sector towards capitalist modes, dispensing much of its small and petty producers, producing surplus for the industrial sector and supplying the industrial proletariat, with a clear resolution towards formation of industrial society remained as varied as it could be in the uneven development of capitalist system. The structural transformation that happened successfully for privileged countries in the capitalist centre, proved to be a formidable challenge for a vast number of post-colonial countries in the capitalist periphery. The global and local condition and the political and economic conditions of the contemporary times makes it a considerable challenge for political economists to explain. This reader aims to provide an understanding on range of conceptual and empirical issues of the role of agrarian transformation for capitalist system, with a special focus on Indian agrarian transition. The reader consists of short summaries of fourteen selected works on agrarian question in the Indian and global context.

This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

13

The Agrarian Question Under Neoliberalism and Land Reforms in India¹

[Jens Lerche]

This paper interrogates the positions on the agrarian question in India to reach fresh conclusions about important agrarian policies of the Left including that of land reforms. Internationally, the classical political economy approach to agrarian transitions has been challenged by positions arguing (a) that neoliberalism and the international corporate food regime have led to a new dominant contradiction between the peasantry and multinational agribusiness or (b) that the agrarian question for capital has been bypassed. It is shown that most analyses of the agrarian question in India including those of the Indian Left parties, tend to adhere either to the classical political economy approach, or their analyses are close to the peasantry versus the corporate food regime approach. In spite of this it is here argued that an empirical analysis of agrarian transition in India lends credence to some aspects of the third position, that is the argument that the agrarian question for capital has been bypassed.

Introduction

Even though the modes of production debate in India took place in the 1970s, its influence on the approach and the political stances of the Indian Left on agrarian issues are still rooted in the analyses of that time. Granted, the Indian neoliberal turn, a few decades ago, led to substantial changes in ground realities and that continue to occur, it would be shown that it needs at least one very radical rethink. But many core characteristics of the analyses and policy perspectives remain the same. This includes, in various guises, the characterization of the capitalist development of Indian agriculture as encompassing semi-feudal features; and a focus on land reforms as a main policy strategy to modernize agriculture and significantly strengthen the political and economic position of poor peasants and agricultural workers. This paper reviews the various positions in the present debate on agrarian questions relating to India, to reach fresh conclusions about important agrarian policies of the Left, including that of land reforms.

That said, as pointed out by Utsa Patnaik (1986), the modes of production debate remained a theoretical cul-de-sac. As argued by her, it is more useful to return to the classical ‘agrarian questions’ approach, which goes back at least to 1949 among the Indian left (Namboodiripad 1949). Internationally, there has been a renewed attention on the agrarian questions approach within agrarian political economy studies during the past 20 years. This paper, by mapping the important stand-points in literature, re-interrogates the various positions in the Indian debate on the agrarian question in India, to reach fresh conclusions about important agrarian policies of the Left, including that of land reforms.

Agrarian Questions

It is useful to start from the concrete meanings that Terence Byres suggested of the agrarian question in poor countries (Byres 1986, 1991, 1996) that the continuing existence of substantive obstacles in the countryside of the poor countries to an unleashing of the forces capable of generating economic development, both inside and outside agriculture. It represents a failure of accumulation to proceed adequately in the countryside—that impinging powerfully upon the town; an intimately related failure of class formation in the countryside, appropriate to that accumulation; and a failure of the state to mediate successfully those transitions which we may encapsulate as the agrarian transition (Byres 1995, 509). Byres’ positions are influenced by two important sources, one from Preobrazensky’s work on socialist accumulation in the Soviet Union in 1926 and the experience of Indian planning where an annual growth of 5 per cent for agriculture was necessary for creation of surplus that could be transferred to investment in the modern sector modelled on the Lewis Model of Development. Throughout his comparative studies, Byres has argued that successful agrarian transitions led to dynamic national capitalist development, and that blocked agrarian transition did the opposite. The nature and timing of each successful (and each failed) agrarian transition must be understood as a result of the specific agrarian class struggle, driven by the nature of the landlord class, class struggle and peasant differentiation. (Byres 2009, 34). He further added nuances to Lenin’s approach to locate two paths of agrarian change—‘from above’ and ‘from below’, are inadequate in themselves to understand the significant differences between the existing transformations (Byres 1991, 1996)².

Byres’ focus on the necessity of agrarian transformation for overall capitalist development also leads to a strong view on land reforms. According to him, land reforms maybe conceptualized either from a social justice perspective or from a productivity perspective. However ‘just’ they may seem in the short term, redistributive land reforms leading to very small farm sizes are counterproductive when seen from the angle of the need for an ‘unleashing of the forces capable of generating economic development’. Small sized farms hamper development of productive agriculture and hence are an obstacle to a proper agrarian transition. It is well known that after introduction of modernization in agriculture, the old-fashioned negative relation between holding-size and productivity had also vanished. (Dyer 2004; Rakshit 2011).³

Byres’ view on redistributive land reforms is an optimistic view of development that sees the transition to a high-growth capitalist economy as both historically progressive and also as potentially leading to better conditions for the erstwhile peasants. They may, eventually, find a better future in the modern non-agricultural economy than what is offered by farming miniature plots within a stagnant and backward agrarian economy.

However, Byres’ classical’ position on agrarian change as a process of transformation of agriculture, designed to contribute to capitalist industrialization through accumulation, differentiation and labour exploitation, faces two serious challengers, McMichael and Bernstein. Both argue that present-day capitalist development, especially under neoliberal globalization, must lead to a rethink of the agrarian question. However, they differ substantively in what such a rethink should entail. McMichael and others suggest that today, the main agrarian issue is the struggle by ‘the peasantry’ against the international corporate food regime, while Bernstein argues, from a position within agrarian political economy, that the `agrarian question of capital’ has been bypassed.

The first challenge is by McMichael and others to the political economy of the agrarian question is that the peasantry is incorporated into the global corporate food chain, in which peasantry, small and big, as a whole is subordinated⁴. Differentiation of peasantry is no longer an issue. Land reforms are welcome as a way to increase communitarian democracy. The crux of the battle lies in dealing with ecologically unfriendly corporate methods of farming, which immiserizes the peasantry on one hand and damages the ecology of agriculture on the other. To fight the global corporate clout, the peasantry becomes the radical political class. (McMichael 2008, 224). The question of economic feasibility of small farms loses attention under the concern for the larger peasant crisis affected by the corporate control over the production process. Apart from the differences with this selective anti-food-corporate regime perspective, it does address two issues that classical agrarian thinking are yet to deal with: first, extreme subordination of small-scale agrarian production to international capital in the era of neoliberal globalization; and, second, in its insistence that it is necessary to think of alternatives to economic growth based on fossil fuels.

The second challenge is posed by Henry Bernstein to the idea of resolution of the agrarian question under neoliberalism. Bernsetein argues that the agrarian question needs to be split into two different but related questions, one agrarian question of capital and two, agrarian question of labour.⁵ Classical agrarian question of capital formulation rests on the assumption that there always exists a pre-capitalist agrarian sector and transformation of specific characteristics in it as necessary for accumulation in agriculture to begin with, and to supplement the accumulation in industry thereon. Bernstein argues that such a condition is either solved or bypassed by globalization of capital (Bernstein 2006, 450–1). Therefore, in today’s world, the classical agrarian question has lost its traditional relevance; it needs a fresh look.

There are two issues here. First, Bernstein asserts that all forms of peasant production, including landlord dominated production systems are transformed into petty commodity producers and capitalist farmers, by the end of colonialism. The ‘generalized commodity production’ in agriculture is already created (Bernstein 2006, 454). Second, closed economy conditions necessary for home market-based capitalism, which rests on strong internal agriculture-industry relations are also altered. The globalization process reintegrated commodity markets and circuits of capital. Capital, even in a poor country, no longer necessarily depends on agrarian surplus, but can access global sources. Moreover, the state under neoliberal globalization lacks a will to mediate an arduous agrarian transformation for the sake of national capital, as it ceased to be sine qua non for the latter. Moreover, the increased global trade in agriculture and industry within the south has increased considerable interdependence in product and financial markets; building national intersectoral linkages is no longer necessary.

For the agrarian question of labour, land reform was considered important in classical understanding, since it not only makes small peasant farming commercially viable by assigning them economic holdings⁶; but also raises the rural wage rates and sustains aggregate demand for the non-agricultural sector. The growing non-farm sector would absorb the surplus labour. This would draw support from the bourgeoisie in the larger interest. This is often referred as the resolution of the agrarian question ‘from below’. However, under the globalized regime land reform is no longer an attainable goal that can unite capital and peasants in a quest to create peasant-based growth and accumulation from below. Thereby, land reforms are off the policy agenda today. Bernstein argues that the agrarian question ‘from below’ has been replaced by the general question of the relationship between capital and labour. All classes of peasant producers are already transformed into capitalist or petty commodity producers. Petty commodity production entails the self-exploitation of family labour, often failing to get a ‘generalized living wage’. The transformation that already ensued created ‘different classes’ of reserve army of labour, obliterating the pre-capitalist agrarian classes. For all classes of labour, irrespective of whether or not they have a foothold in the rural economy, the main problem is how to engage in struggles for improved conditions as footloose labour. As part of this, land reforms might help towards subsistence by way of providing farm plots, even if miniature in size (Bernstein 2006, 2007), even if this might be politically frustrating to achieve. However, what is noteworthy, since the agrarian question for capital has been bypassed and hence the quest for the formation of a highly productive agrarian sector is no longer on the cards, is that the objection to land reforms on grounds of reduced productivity is trumped by the social justice argument.

The Positions of the Indian Left

What is the broad academic and political position on India’s agrarian transition? Interestingly, most of the views hark back to the modes of production debate. Party programmes of three major communist parties are considered here, which remained by and large unrevised for a long time, for example, Communist Party of India (Marxist) replaced its 1964 programme in 2000, Communist Party of India CPI-ML (Maoist-PWG) replaced its 1970 programme in 2004, so did MCCI (Maoist Communist Centre India)

In the academic opinion, Alice Thorner took the position that Indian agriculture came to be dominated by capitalist relations by the late 1970s (Thorner 1982, 2063). Utsa Patnaik held the view that despite peasant/landlord capitalism taking place in terms of wage labour exploitation, mechanization and market surplus, the nature of this capitalism is still perverse with ‘built-in’ depressors. This is so, because, landlords are unlikely to invest in agriculture unless profits exceed ground rents. Further, surplus expropriation uses pre-capitalist institutions such as caste-based and non-economic means. The overall nature of this capitalism, therefore, is ‘semi-feudal’ (Patnaik 1972, 1986). This meant that Indian agrarian capitalism is incapable to deliver a growth necessary to lift the rural masses out of poverty.

Two things are little unclear, first how unproductive are the activities of landlords or rich peasants, and the second, given the uneven development and varying forms of landlordism, there are no caveats provisioned for a general party programme. However, an overall dynamic of capitalist development is seen to drive a deep wedge between the rural rich: ‘the landlords, capitalist farmers, rich peasants and their allies’ on one hand and ‘the mass of the rural poor: agricultural workers, poor peasants and the artisans’ on the other. This development has been exacerbated by the liberalization in agriculture since 1991 and the entry of multinational corporations (MNCs) into agricultural commodity trading in the countryside (CPM 2008).

Assessing the impact of neoliberalism on the agrarian classes, the party congress in 2008 stated that land acquisitions for SEZs, mining, hydro projects, are leading to displacement and...