– (Henry Bernstein)
In this article Henry Bernstein draws out the analytical implications of the work of T.J.Byres who has documented the paths of agrarian transition and capitalist development in developed West as well as periphery. He argues that the agrarian question after capitalism means appropriation of agricultural surplus for industrialization at the national or global level, in both capitalist and socialist economies. Under conditions of globalization when national political economies get integrated into global capitalism without necessarily transforming the production relations in agriculture to capitalist forms, the political salience of the ‘peasant question’ also needs to be rethought.
“[A]s the social formation comes to be dominated by industry and by the urban bourgeoisie, there ceases to be an agrarian question with any serious implications” [Byres,1991:12]
“[T]he agrarian question is an issue pertaining to capitalism and primarily to a period of transition or `articulation’ between capitalism and pre-capitalist modes of production” [Levin and Neocosmos, 1989:243]
Agrarian Transition
Bernstein argues that the relevance of TJ Byres’ work lay in his critique of the conceptualization of the agrarian question in contemporary poor countries. A limited number of historical paths that have already been successfully traversed in the past are considered by most theorists wherein “the apparently essential features of these historically traversed paths are identified and are made to constitute the elements of the models of possible agrarian transition”. Byres had argued that such a “practice in this respect is defective, and misleading in two important ways. The first is the paths in question –or the models to contemporary reality—are too few and second, the conception of these paths is too stereotyped.” Byres’ critical work on the different paths of agrarian transition in Europe conveyed three ways of understanding the agrarian question, according to Bernstein.
The first path traced by Byres shows that for the European Marxists who investigated agrarian question, it was the specific political project of how to capture power in countries which continued to have large peasantry. How to build strategic alliances between industrial workers and peasants was the essential agenda. The work of Engels precisely addressed this issue.
Byres traced the second path from Kautsky’s work stressing on the different variants in transition and different conditions of capitalist relations between industry and agriculture. Lenin’s work was a strong reiteration of Kautsky’s position in Russian context. Lenin contested Norodniks’ view that peasant economy was a self-reproducing and stagnant which did not allow growth of capitalist relations. He argued that capitalist relations had already developed in Russian agriculture. He demonstrated that the peasants were differentiated into different classes, wage relations had developed and individual ownership of land rather than communal ownership prevailed.
The third path Byres identified was that of the Soviet Union experiment and experience. Here agrarian sector was transformed to extract agricultural surplus at low price for faster accumulation and growth of the modern industrial sector. Several post-colonial countries like India too wanted to embark on this path in the sixties. Byres emphasized that agrarian transition in the 20th century was about the role of agriculture in capitalist industrialization with or without ‘full development of capitalism in the countryside’. It means a dominance of capitalist relations (in the sense of capital and wage labour) of production would be necessary for potential growth of industry.
Byres had concluded that a resolution in the third sense was eminently possible without the first and second senses. It means that a worker-peasant mobilization would not be a necessary condition and that the agrarian sector would be left with a combination of capitalist farms as well as petty commodity producers. The agrarian question would be resolved only in the third sense, in such a way that capitalist industrialization is permitted to proceed. As the social formation comes to be dominated by industry and urban bourgeoisie, there ceases to be an agrarian question with serious implications.
These three meanings of the agrarian question thus delineated can be summarized as the problematic of politics (of organizing the urban and rural proletariat), production (transformation of agriculture into capitalist), and accumulation (expropriation of agricultural surplus by industrial capitalism), which for purposes of discussion, Bernstein terms as AQ1, AQ2, and AQ3. They convey necessary political mobilization for democracy, development of production forces in agriculture and contribution of agriculture to primary accumulation for industrialization, respectively.
Framing them in the such a way or separating AQ1 from AQ2 & AQ3 may look like reducing the later two to sort of economism, Bernstein admits. But he notes that separation of development of productive forces and relations (AQ2) and extraction of surplus at unequal terms for the accumulation of industry by the capitalist system at large (AQ3) would refresh the political analysis. It means that AQ1 i.e., the question of political mobilization of peasants should take into account the broader systemic logic in which peasants are placed. One should however note that such a strategy of extraction of agricultural surplus has been common for socialist as well as capitalist ways of promoting development based on industrialization.
Different Paths to the Agrarian Transition
Bernstein points out that Byres’ work on such paths of accumulation illustrated the significant diversity in substance and form. Byres illustrated such diversity through the six historical paths – the English, French, German, American, Japanese and South Korean/Taiwan. In the English path of agrarian transformation, of capitalist free peasants, the enabling of landlords and free wage labour preceded and contributed to industrial revolution. In the French path peasant resistance led to rentier landlordism. The peasantry in the south were subsumed while capitalist farms in the North flourished from 1840 but the overall contribution of agriculture to French industry is less well known. In Japan, the period of Meiji restoration (1868) involved intense conflict between tenants and landlords. State intervention forced transition of feudal landlords into capitalist landlords by stripping them of feudal privileges. They had to invest in land to attract greater rent. The surplus production needed for industrialization was managed through this process. The Taiwanese and South Korean paths originated in land reforms under Marshall Plan. Peasantry that was historically exploited by the imperial colonialism and feudalism was freed through the land reforms in the 1950s. Such freed peasants eventually moved to the urban areas, also subsidizing the wage cost of labour as they carried food surpluses from their farms in rural hinterlands.
Prussian and American paths bear resemblance in two sense. One, in both instances, the landlords were reactionary and were opposed to change. Two, feudal relations, whether of serfdom or slavery were coercively transformed by the moves of the State. The transition from feudalism to capitalism in both cases was imposed from ‘above’.
In Prussia, Junker feudalism continued until Napoleon defeated Prussia and introduced legal reforms. Having lost state patronage the Junkers were forced to transform into capitalist farmers, by investing in land and employing free wage labour in their large farms. The German unification and subsequent industrialization accelerated the transformation of their agriculture. But the culturally homogenous Junkers continued their dominance in the political and economic spheres. As strong supporters of Nazism they also mobilized the political support of the agrarian classes for the latter. In Germany AQ1 was managed after resolution of AQ2 towards the eventual resolution of AQ3.
In the US, the southern plantation systems which used slave labour enabled a distinct form of appropriation, until the Civil War ended the slavery. Thus the AQ1 was resolved by abolishing slavery, while resolution of AQ2 and AQ3 took their own time. As part of AQ2, the plantation owners made adjustments to their dominance. They introduced sharecropping after the abolition of slavery and rented lands mostly to their former-slaves. These tenants were subjected to rack renting and usurious expropriation of surplus.
Byres compared the sharecropping systems which interlinked credit and output markets in the US with other countries (such linked markets were characterized as ‘semi-feudalism’ in Indian agriculture by Amit Bhaduri (1976) and Bharadwaj (1978) in the mid-sixties). After the abolition of slavery in the US, the petty commodity character persisted for next thirty years. It only began to change when agriculture was recapitalized with mechanization, modernization, and bank credit linkage. From 1880 to 1920, production increased massively through the capitalist boom. But the World Depression led to massive fall in agricultural prices, bankrupting the farmers, both large and small. The contribution of agriculture to the American industrialization was tremendous until different fortunes embraced the US towards the end of the World War I. In both the US and Germany it was the case of transition from ‘above’ in which agriculture was forced to transform in order to contribute for the industrialization.
Uneven and Combined Development on a World Scale
The first issue is: how do we comprehend the unfolding process of capitalist transformation in different regions and countries over time and space? It began in Europe but engulfed the rest of the world in uneven development, making it difficult to identify the markers of change within each country as they are also simultaneously part of the combined development of global capitalism. The successful agrarian transitions of the West and Japan occurred during the phase of colonialism wherein sources of primary accumulation included territorial expansion, international trade, colonial plunder and imperialist surplus extraction. Transitions of Taiwan and South Korea belong to the exceptional geopolitical conditions of Cold War period.
European colonies of Asia and Africa were integrated into the world trade at different historical moments of evolving international division of labour. For each colony, it is that particular historical moment and conjunction that shaped its subsequent transition trajectory. For all of these colonies, the question of agrarian transition/industrialisation was delayed until the moment of their independence, which began in the late 1940s and continued till the early 1960s.
This brings us to the second issue of how conditions of industrialisation in these countries changed from those of earlier transitions. When industrialization was put on the agenda by the nationalist discourses through ambitious development plans (at the moment of decolonization), it was clear that they would not have the opportunities of external sources of primary accumulation enjoyed by former-imperialist capitalist countries. In the degrees and types of industrialization achieved, whether supported or hindered by agrarian change (or bypassing it) and whatever the outcome (to date), it seems clear that intersectoral linkages between agriculture and industry are at the core of the (internalist) problematic of agrarian transition/industrialization. And they would be mediated by the (differential) effects of circuits of international capital and world markets, for each sector in any capitalist economy (central or peripheral).
In short, a century of modern imperialism has extended the determinants of industrialization far beyond the prospects of agrarian transition in landscapes inhabited exclusively by classes of landed property and agrarian labour. There is substantive diversity of forms of agrarian change, and of their contribution (or otherwise) to industrial accumulation by relatively ‘virtuous’ or ‘vicious’ means (based on the growth of agricultural productivity and dynamic intersectoral linkages, or in more or less coercive transfers), and of degrees and types of industrialization in the imperialist periphery.
Now, comes the question, which exactly are the poor countries we are talking about? Only three regions of the globe remained essentially dominated by the village and fields: Sub-Saharan Africa and continental South Asia. The countries in these regions also have not undergone substantial industrial development. They have unsteady and circulatory migrations that stand in sharp contrast with the cycle of migrations in the earlier centuries. Even the migration patterns found in South America and Asia distinctly differ from the ones that occurred in the 18-19th century.This is not so say regions that house half of the global population and are substantially agrarian did not undergo any change. Indeed there has been significant transition in the last one century.
Bernstein believes that the work of McMichael and Friedmann (…) that traces global agrarian regime (especially the changes they underwent since industrialization in the West) is extremely helpful in this context. It is well known that by the 18th century, the colonial expansion brought the agrarian production of these vast regions into global supply chain and the consequent changes in the global agrarian regime can be broadly divided into three phases.
In the first phase, from 1814 to 1914, peasant production in the Second World (Americas, South Africa, Asia and Australia) was firmly integrated with European industrialized region. This was a phase of free trade which created opportunities on one hand but also locked them into an unequal exchange and subjected the former to primary accumulation in the industrial centre. The first global food regime ended with advent of the First World War. Barring the US which had already industrialized, most of the agrarian dominated South America and Asia reeled under effects the Great Depression.
The Second World food regime began after the end of the World War II, in the post-1945 period, when the US rose to the position of the new centre of world capitalism. With its policy of foreign-aid, US flew its agricultural surpluses into its satellite States. But during the subsequent decolonization the newly independent states attempted to industrialise, ushering a new phase of food regime. The agrarian sector was given new opportunities in terms of better infrastructure, new technological initiatives, credit and limited price protection, eventually enabling primary accumulation from agriculture for industrial growth. The paths to capitalist transformation were thus tempered by the nature of involvement of the States, historical development of markets and their positioning in the global division of labour. This regime came to an end when the second wave of globalization began in the 1980s under the tutelage of international financial institutions.
In the current, third food regime, the petty commodity producers began to be subjected to renewed global primary accumulation through multinational corporations and global food chains. The conditions of 20th century capitalism and nation-state dominated political regimes in peripheral capitalist countries may not offer grand opportunities for radical structural transformation or large scale migration. As a result one now finds the agrarian populations locked up in agriculture as a default option. This situation compels us to reformulate the agrarian question beyond the national framework.
It is within this internal and external architecture of capitalist relations in agriculture, shaped by complex accumulation regimes, that the continued survival of petty commodity producers needs to be placed. Capital concentrates around farming for primary accumulation, like trading, finance, mills, fertilizer dealership, leaving actual farming to petty commodity enterprises that depend on a self-exploiting system, bearing all the risk. This is a particular arrangement that suits the accumulation regime. The traditional agrarian question of peasant differentiation and capitalist transition (AQ2) appears to have been ‘bypassed’ in these countries, due to access to global capital, resulting in a frustratingly slow movement of its resolution. However, AQ3 of accumulation is sustained by the new collusive global capital.
Conclusion
By way of conclusion Bernste in suggests a different juxtaposition of the three agrarian questions. Just as Byres demonstrates how it is possible to theorize the agrarian transition in general with or without the capitalist transformation of agriculture (AQ2), one can now pose the salience of agrarian transition in general with or without AQ1(organization of agricultural labour) and AQ2 (capitalist transformation of agriculture). The AQ3 – the transformation of agriculture as a source of accumulation for industrial capitalism – the agrarian question of capital, specifically of industrial capital has now assumed predominance. The direction of the agrarian transition everywhere is to make it amenable for industrial capitalism, at the national and global level. Agriculture is reimagined as a re-source for industrial capitalism, nothing more. It is in this context, Bernstein argues that, one needs to seriously consider the hypothesis of the end of agrarian question.
When Lenin discussed the Prussian and American paths he focused on the questions of politics and productive forces. He worried about the implications of such a path for democracy in Russia after the first revolution. AQ3 or the question of accumulation was not significant for him. Lenin posed the agrarian question of the working masses, both proletarian and poor peasant, wherein the overthrow of landlordism and increase in the productivity of peasant production came to be seen as important for democracy as well as for development – capitalist or socialist.
In the contemporary post-colonial periphery capitalist development from above or the vicious class struggles in the countryside generated by peasant capitalism cannot provide the peasant an escape from poverty and misery. Such capitalist development may be backward, plagued by landlordism and the agrarian transition may not have been complete. Under any and all of these conditions the conditions of the peasants will continue to be miserable as the current moment is characterized by generalized commodity production on a global level. Caught with-in the logic of the accumulation designed to extract surplus for the non-farm sector, the peasant will be waging a losing battle . The urgency of bread and democracy will continue to distinguish the agrarian questions of the working masses and to drive their struggles.
1. Summarised from Henry Bernstein, “Agrarian Question: Then and Now” in Agrarian Questions : Essays in Appreciation of T.J.Byres, edited by Henry Bernstein and Tom Brass, London: Frank Cass,1996.