(Akram Lodhi and Cristobal Kay)
The agrarian question in the context of a developing country is very often discussed in an analytically impoverished way, due to the stereotyped and narrow understanding of the classical context. Such a discussion neglects the full range of historical possibilities visible in the varieties of transition in England, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. To dispel this theoretical haziness, the authors revisit the debate on the agrarian question from Marx to Bernstein from a contemporary standpoint. They point out that neither Marx nor Engels nor Kautsky nor the later writers envisaged a singular or linear model of transition from agrarian feudalism to agrarian capitalism, as the contemporary popular left debates in the subcontinent portray. If looked at carefully, the debate on the agrarian question in the 19th and 20th centuries provides a rich historical and contextual understanding of the peasant question, so as to find a pathway (or ways) to re-imagine the peasant question in the current context of globalization. Reviewing two centuries of debate from the vantage point of the 21st century peasant, they bring the necessary analytical clarity and enable the reader to see the peasant question in a new light.
Where do we begin?
More than a century ago, for Karl Kautsky the agrarian question meant ‘whether and how capital is seizing hold of agriculture, revolutionizing it, making old forms of production and property untenable and creating the necessity for new ones’ (Kautsky, 1889. See summary in this volume). A century later, for Terence J Byres (1996. See summary in this volume)), it was the ‘continued existence of obstacles in rural areas in a substantive sense, (preventing) accumulation both within agriculture and outside in industry’ that was the core of the agrarian question. In the age of globalization, does capital still transform the peasantry like national capital did at certain historical junctures or do the peasants continue to survive as petty commodity producers? AL and K argue that globalisation produces a complex dynamic that integrates peasantry with global markets, intensifying their crisis beyond relegating them to reserve army of labour. For the authors, it is the farmers resistance to the logic and imperative of their marginalization that constitutes the peasant question now.
Peasant question in classical Marxism: Differentiation and Transformation
AL and K begin by charting of the important trajectories of capitalism’s entry into European societies (as theorized by Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Lenin). This entry transformed the organization of agrarian production and lives of peasants in different ways. Multiple political regimes and the imperialist expansion through colonization led to multiple trajectories of capitalist transition in agriculture. The authors contest the popular understanding that Marx viewed peasantry as ‘a pre-capitalist remnant that will be dragged into modernity by capitalist mode of production’, They direct our attention to the better and fully developed view of Marx which appeared in Capital, Vol.I,
“all revolutions are epoch making that act as levers for the capitalist class in course of formation. But this also is true for those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly separated from their means of subsistence and hurled into the labour market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer or the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation assumes a different order of succession and at different historical epochs. Only in England which we therefore take our example, has it in the classic form” [Marx 1976, 876].
AK and K also direct our attention to the observation of Marx that capital does not destroy peasant classes in some regions, but subsumes the labour of peasant class using ‘hybrid’ modes of surplus extraction. Reading Marx’s (1881) letters to his friend Vera Zasulich (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/) on the fate of Russian peasantry under rapidly industrializing Russia enables us to see his deep insight into the possibilities of multiple resolutions of agrarian question facing small-scale production.
What is interesting and useful in Lodhi and Kay’s method is the attention to the historical context of each theoretical formulation.
They note that Engels examined the agrarian question in the context of internationalization of food regime resulting from European imperialist expansion that began to undermine peasant livelihoods in Europe (See Engels in this volume for more details). Kautsky (1880) and Lenin (1889) who arrived later in the century, focused on the continuing transformation of agriculture in the wake of industrial capitalism. They saw capitalist industrialization break the traditional link between agricultural and rural petty manufacturing by commodifying the former and linking it to distant markets (See Kautsky in this volume for more details). For them, industrial capitalism thus propelled agrarian capitalism.
Next, AL and K also delineate the distinct ways in which these classical thinkers identified the coping and surviving mechanisms of peasantry under industrial capitalism. They note Marx’s identification of social differentiation between households which transform into accumulating households and those which fail and struggle to sustain their subsistence; Kautsky’s identification of self-exploitation of small peasantry and intensification of rural production under industrial capitalism where agrarian question gets linked to the imperialist world markets and Lenin’s identification of class differentiation in agriculture between the the exploiting big landlords and rich capitalist farmers and exploited classes of small tillers and landless labour. For both Kautsky and Lenin, they point out, agrarian capital need not rely on dispossessing the petty commodity producing peasants..
Peasant question in planned economies: Socialist primitive accumulation
If industrial capitalism world over made accumulation faster by repressing the relative prices of farm products, created through unfettered competition among peasants and opening up the market for imports, what did countries that embarked on planned growth do is another question that AL and K explore. The obvious case for them is Soviet Union.
AL and K note that a situation arose after the formation of Soviet Union when the planners had to take a call on agriculture and peasantry: rural peasants began to enjoy favorable prices from rising urban demand. Modern industrialization and shortages of agricultural goods led to sharp rise in agricultural prices. Such an increase vis-a-vis manufactured goods prices slowed down accumulation in industry. Even as Bukharin argued against imposing any curbs on food prices, favoring a long term balance of prices, Evegy Preobrazensky, a Marxist economist in Russia and a contemporary of Bukharin, argued that for the modern industrial sector to accumulate, agricultural prices have to be kept relatively low. As modern sector is a harbinger of development that would accommodate surplus labour evicted from agriculture the relative prices should move against agriculture. This advice was implemented through forced collectivization which involved violence and incarceration of resisting farmers. Preobrazensky called this, “socialist primitive accumulation”.
Agrarian question after Lenin: Debate among historians
AL and K note that after Lenin, it was primarily historians who debated capitalist transition. The focus was on two issues. First was to understand what led to fall of feudalism in Europe and second was to understand the rise of capitalism as a different form of surplus creation and appropriation. Maurice Dobb (in 1963) argued that feudalism ended in England because of conflicting social relations between feudal lords and peasants: feudal exaction in the form of rents and others led to violent clashes with peasantry. Eventually, the small peasantry were expropriated from their holdings through land enclosures established by the landlords, and were reduced to wage labour while a better off class of free peasantry emerged as capitalist tenants to lease in the lands of lords. Rodney Hilton (1976) marshaled archival evidence for the conflict which is described as class struggle by Dobb. The class struggle led to change in production relations to allow productive forces to grow. However, Paul Sweezy (1976) contended that it is the long distance trade towards middle of 15th century that enabled the change to happen, hence the external factors in the sphere of exchange played important role as elsewhere.
In 1976, Robert Brenner reopened the debate after studying European transition more comprehensively and produced a much more rounded explanation within historical materialism. Brenner identified development of private property rights and class differentiation as crucial moments that brought the resolution to the conflict. Private property rights, granted by the state created incentives to lords to make improvements to their lands and enter clear contractual relations with the free peasantry in leasing their lands. Thus it was the changes in class structure, and class relations that, in Brenner’s view, brought resolution to the class struggle.
Agrarian Question in the late 20th Century
Noting that by the end of 20th century, a new understanding of the agrarian question developed extending the classical account, AL and K draw attention to the important analytical distinctions made by Bernstein in the agrarian question along three ‘problematics’, before moving onto outline what they think are the crucial agrarian problematics for 21st century. Bernstein made these distinctions while reviewing the corpus of T.J.Byres’ writings on multiple capitalist transitions in Europe, Asia and North America.
AQ1 problematic of ‘accumulation’ (the ‘agrarian question’ is called AQ in general in this essay) is derived from Preobrazhensky’s theory of socialist primitive accumulation. This analyzes agriculture’s potential ability to generate `surplus output’ and `financial surplus’ over and above its own requirements – to support industrialisation, structural transformation, accumulation and the emergence of capital both within and beyond.
AQ2 problematic of ‘production’, has its origin in Kautksy, Marx and Lenin’s works. This analyzes the extent of capitalist development in the countryside, the form that it takes and the barriers to its development. It looks at the micro political economy issues affecting structural transformation of petty commodity producing peasant labour into its commodified form through rural labour processes [the large body of empirical work in ‘mode of production debate in India’ falls into this category].
AQ3 problematic of ‘politics’is drawn from the theoretical works of Engels. The dynamics between structures of dominance, subordination and surplus appropriation and the agency of social classes in the transformation lie at the centre of this problem. So the political struggles against feudal oppression for resources which eventually contribute to agrarian transition constitute the question of politics [The classical debate about the balance of class forces, the debate between Dobb and Sweezy and later Brenner’s critique falls under this question].
This increasing analytical clarity provided by Bernstein on the agrarian question, AL and K note, has made it possible to imagine multiple transformatory possibilities by the end of 1990s. One could have transformation, non-transformation, or partial-transformation of petty commodity producers into wage labour, hence of labour power and the complex forces of dispossession. Once the peasants (or other rural petty commodity producers) are unable to produce a sufficient fraction of their consumption need, they must start selling their labour power to buy basic needs (food or other needs) that they previously produced themselves. Such wage labour would be sold to an urban employer or a rural capitalist farmer or non-farm enterprises. Thus rural petty commodity producers (peasants, artisans, service providers) are transformed into wage labour or agrarian proto capitalists. This happens under a market that works with its own logic and becomes necessary destination for their produce.
In short, it is the commodification of labour which underpins the deeper process of generalised commodity production as well as the concomitant transformation in the process of production – from production for use to production for exchange and accumulation. The agrarian transition is hence a process by which this does or does not occur and its implications for accumulation or emergence of capital. In this sense, AL and K argue, Bernstein (2004) framed the agrarian question of capital initially as emergence of capital and later expanded it to the reproduction of capital, which is predicated on appropriation. It is also important to examine the way in which accumulation, production and politics are contributing to or are constraining the agrarian transition.
Agrarian Question under Globalization
AL and K argue that globalization has transformed the development of the forces and relations of production on a world scale. How then has globalization changed the conditions for agrarian transition in the late 20th century?
In the heyday of Keynesianism during the 1950s and 1960s, land reforms and distributional interventions of the state were seen in line with boosting the aggregate demand. Soon, such a home market based state-led capitalist development strategy was replaced with export-led market led strategies of production. By encouraging agricultural exports in Africa, Asia and Latin America through varieties of policy-conditionality based loans, international agencies like IMF and World Bank have managed a reintegration of agricultural production with the global markets. By facilitating international repayment mechanisms, giving access to investments and promoting technical change, the new strategies have managed to enhance productivity, production and profits. [World Bank 2007, Akram Lodhi 2008, Veltmeyer 2009].
In this context, AL and K find it imperative to ask, with Bernstein (1996) whether, under neoliberal globalisation, agrarian transition is possible or even relevant?
The first key issue is that over the second half of the twentieth century, agriculture was effectively ‘decoupled’ from the problem of capital accumulation. The authors note that capital accumulation in the periphery is today driven by manufacturing and services on a world scale. Capital, now globalised, connected with transnational capital, does not require access to surplus agricultural resources in order to facilitate accumulation. It therefore no longer needs to reorganise agricultural production. Agrarian transition is no longer the necessary pre-condition for development of capitalism. Rather, transnational capital requires the technical capacity to ever more efficiently allocate resources on a global scale to enhance this surplus value and its realisation (Araghi 2009).
The second key issue is implicitly embedded in the first. The internationalization of capital has ‘decoupled’ transnational capital from national labour regimes, which are becoming ever more fragmented. They become helpless in providing a livelihood. It is not that agriculture does not matter for the global capital accumulation; but by segmenting labour on a global scale, enlarging global reserve army and fostering a crisis of reproduction among the fragmented classes, transnational capital has made agrarian question redundant.
In this context, AL and K identify seven different and competing analytical approaches that are being followed and used by theorists to frame the contemporary agrarian question.
Seven agrarian questions in globalization
AQ1 Agrarian question of class forces
It is argued here that articulation of forces and relations of production can take place in complex and multifaceted ways. Such transition is contingent, subject to diversity even on a global level. By implication, it becomes necessary to understand the diverse and uneven ways in which rural production processes are transforming (or not) into capitalist mode of production. These processes must be globally contextualised. Social differentiation, nature of the landlord class, market imperatives and severity of law of value, and character of the state, all matter in the framework of this mode of formulating the agrarian question.
In short, AQI investigates the peasant differentiation and the emergence of rural capitalism,
AQ2 Path-dependent agrarian question
Articulated by Bill Warren this approach argues that imperialism through colonialism introduced capitalist relations of production throughout the world. Even though this process was uneven across time and space, it has unleashed an inexorable, if contingent and dynamic, process of labour commodification across developing countries. Thus the ongoing expansion of wage labour signals that the capitalist mode of production is deepening in rural worlds and transforming agrarian production system. So no part of this would eventually be left untransformed.
AQ 2 focuses on the struggle to resist de-peasantization and later that of wage labour under rural capitalism.
AQ 3: Global reserve army of labour agrarian question
Farshad Araghi (2009) initiated this question by arguing that the unchallenged neoliberal globalization of today is the direct continuation of liberal imperialism witnessed in 19th century. So between the periods 1834 to 1870 and 1973 to the present, have in common the following: economic liberalism, anti-welfarism, free-market fetishism, global division of labour for ‘workshops of the world’. Araghi argues that modern forms of neoliberal globalisation have constructed an ‘enclosure food regime’ that produces, transfers and distributes value on a world scale. The enclosure food regime has established a subsidized consumption and overconsumption among the classes of the global North. This also created global ‘slums’ and an global unemployed reserve army, who migrate globally for livelihood. Thus the agrarian question is reproduced under more demanding terms.
AQ 3 Studies the capital-centric perspective over protracted condition to dispossess small producers from realm of production.
AQ 4 Decoupled’ agrarian question of labour
This question, raised by Bernstein, argues that under the globalised capitalist regime that reintegrates national capital with transnational capital, capitalist transformation of agriculture has become irrelevant and redundant for capitalist transformation in the developing countries. The agrarian capital is a subordinated entity and has limited influence on the alignment of class forces in the countryside, even though it influences and changes production relations. Thus Bernstein prioritizes a ‘rural politics problematic’ over a ‘production and accumulation problematic’
AQ4 sees struggle between globalizing capitalism and peasants pauperized in the global value chain.
AQ 5 Corporate food regime agrarian question
This is is associated with Phillip McMichael (2009). Like Araghi, McMichael argues that agrarian question should be reconfigured in the global context. Unlike Araghi, McMichael stresses the specific historical condition of financialization, neoliberalization and creation of a ‘global food regime’ that fosters a commodity accumulation ‘fetish’ in agriculture. Corporate food regimes operate in an enclosed space of high end markets, excluding larger poor masses. Global capital movements organize these corporate food regimes. The peasant economy is reproduced by the terms dictated by these regimes.
AQ5 also uses a world historic perspective on agrarian question of food as struggle over rural livelihood and globalizing generalised commodity production (of labour and capital).
AQ 6 The agrarian question of gender
This is a variation of the earlier problematic raised by Bridget O’Laughlin (2009) who argued that the accumulation, production and politics have a gender dimension. Non-commodified unpaid labour of women for families has a considerable contribution to the creation of value. The politics of agrarian question should at least understand and raise the issue of gendered division of labour.
AQ6 is critical of conception of struggle and formulation, bringing in a gender dimension.
AQ 7 The agrarian question of ecology and environment.
The agrarian production and accumulation and rural politics have another dimension, namely biophysical agro-ecological setting, which influences the assets, production process and class formation. The myopic commercial regime that uses up the agroecological resources through unsustainable technologies will begin posing limits on the rates of accumulation. The agrarian question must address, in the light of ecological degradation, caused by corporate agricultural practices, the character of ecological relationships and contradictions of class and ecology (Piers Blaikie 1985, Tony Weis 2007 and Bellamy Foster 2009)
AQ8 suggests political ecology of struggle shaped by the biophysical contradiction in capitalism that are integral to understanding agrarian question.
To arrive at the the contemporary relevance of agrarian question, AL and K argue, one has to assess the seemingly conflicting aspects connected to transformation. While there are complementarities among many of the above, there are a few like AQ6 and AQ7 that come into conflict with the others.
The Agrarian Question in 21st Century:
AL and K argue that neoliberal globalization and the global agricultural export regimes have led to more capital-intensive production. It has increased peasant differentiation, pulling in the petty commodity producers in the lower order to join these supply chains, only to get entangled in the viability crisis, indebtedness, poverty and semi-proletarianisation throughout the developing countries. Export markets in several countries have replaced home market orientation. Tropical products like cocoa, tea, coffee, spices, maize, sugar and confectionery; temperate products like milk, cheese, edible oils, animal feeds, fish, sea foods, fruits and vegetables, tobacco and cotton are all linked to global value chains. Global agro-business corporations co-ordinate the supply chain management through extending backend infrastructure, cold chains, and contract farming. All this reorientation is aiding rural accumulation among capitalist farms as well as distress among the petty commodity producers. When capital restructures globally, the mobilisation of agricultural surplus is also being globalised.
AL and K further argue that despite the ongoing systemic global subsistence crisis of 21st century, there is not going to be any ‘death of peasantry’ as historian Eric Hobsbawm predicted. There are several other trends like decollectivization and repeasantisation in post-socialist countries like Vietnam, and Central Asia on one hand, and semi-proletarianization and fragmentation without full polarization on the other. All these represent a reconfiguration of livelihoods, increased world farm production, deepening market imperative, and law of value across world capitalist economy under neoliberal globalisation and expanded commodification of natural resources under global restructuring of farm production. This has raised several political questions on the agrarian front which are all connected with peasant question.
For AL and K, all these are not aspects of a linear process, but form a dynamic, multi-faceted and contradictory patterns. The agrarian question appear to have lost the role that it played in the classical transitions, in building accumulation. But now its role has shifted in building global industrial capital. This becomes apparent the moment the question is reconfigured at the global context. While the process of globalisation has brought more and more petty commodity producers into the value chain than before, the consequences of differentiation and pauperization manifest now in more complex ways. The peasant question has not disappeared but re-emerged as the global peasant question with multiple sub-questions within it.
Notes:
1. Summarized from A Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay, “Agrarian Question: Unearthing Foundations” in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol 37, No.1, Jan 2010, 177-202.
2. From Akram Lodhi and Christobel Kay’s Surveying Agrarian Question Part I
3. From Akram Lodhi and Christobel Kay’s Surveying Agrarian Question Part II
References
Akram Lodhi 2009 ‘Modernizing Subordination? A South Asian Perspective on World Development Report 2008: Agriculture and Development’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36 (3)611-20.
Araghi, F 2009. ‘The Invisible Hand and the Invisible Foot: Peasants, Dispossession and Globalization’ in Akram Lodhi and Cristobal Kay edited Peasants and globalization: political economy, rural transformation threat to farmers, food and environment, Monthly Review Press, New York.
Bernstein, Henry 1994. ‘Agrarian Classes in Capitalist Development’ in L.Sklain edited Capitalism and Development, Routledge, 99.40-71.
Bernstein, Henry 1996. ‘Agrarian Question, Then and Now’ The Journal of Peasant Studies, 24(1/2),22-59.
Bernstein, Henry 2006 ‘Is there an agrarian question in the 21st century?’ Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 27(4) 446-60.
Brenner, R 1977. ‘The Origins of Capitalist development : a critique of non-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, 104, 25-92.
Blaike, P 1985. The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in developing Countries, Longman, London.
Byres, T J 1977. ‘Agrarian Transition and Agrarian Question’ The Journal of Peasant Studies, 4(3), 258-74.
Byres, T J 1996. Capitalism from Above and From Below: Essay in Comparative Political Economy, Macmillan, London.
Byres TJ 2003. ‘Paths of capitalist transition in the past and in the contemporary world’ in VK Ramaswamy and M.Swaminathan edited Agrarian Studies: Essays in Agrarian relations in less-developed countries, Zed Books, London.