What is the Agrarian Question?
Historically, the Agrarian Question has always been considered central to modern capitalist development. The term, coined by German Marxist Karl Kautsky, is synonymous with the issue of changing agrarian relations and development of capitalist relations, or transition to industrial capitalist economy from a pre-capitalist traditional agrarian economy. This issue is central to Marxists practitioners as well as academicians and policy makers. In Marxist literature, such a process off development of capitalist relations is traditionally considered to have an importance for emergence of industrial proletariat: on one hand, deciding the fate of small peasantry who either get transformed into capitalist farmers or proletarians disassociated from their tiny parcels of land. On the other hand, the capital accumulation process by the capitalist farming class and the exploitation of the wage labour, would facilitate the growth of modern industrial sector by supplying cheap raw materials, food, earning foreign exchange and labour supply from the supply side and creating a home market for the industrial goods on the demand side. This is an important understanding for communist parties to form their mobilization strategies. In case of a successful transition, a communist party has a clear task of organizing the industrial workers to sharpen the primary contradiction between labour and capital. The case of an incomplete transition presents a need to organize peasants along with workers, as emphasized by Lenin. And complete non-starters of transition would present a predicament of either waiting for and aiding a bourgeois transition or organizing a peasant revolution against the feudal establishment, as did by Mao Zedong in China. This is from the perspective of a political strategy for a communist party.
This transition is important for a developmental state and capitalism as well under certain conditions. Unlike Western capitalist countries whose transition to capitalism was negotiated under the umbrella of imperialist colonialism, postcolonial societies lack sources of imperialist accumulation. In the absence of access to global finance and trade opportunities, a growing agricultural sector plays a role of home market creator, supplier of financial surplus as well as agricultural surplus to the modern capitalist sector. Hence, such a developmental state is critically interest in modernizing agriculture; undertaking land and tenancy regulations, and providing institutional support in terms of technology, subsidized inputs, support prices, warehousing, public procurement and transport. These measures transform the agrarian sector and in turn the modern sector, which accelerates given its technological and market advantages. Here too after a point of time, a conflict emerges in terms of accumulation: agricultural sector suffers loss of relative prices, profit rates and accumulation besides confronting risk and disaster costs. Ideally, the migration of surplus labour in agriculture and absorption into the modern industry is supposed to mitigate this adverse development. Thus, the agrarian question is resolved in principle through the developmental state managing the capitalist transition. However, the absence of an ideal transition in most post-colonial societies brings us back to go back to examine the agrarian transition in both conceptual and empirical dimensions to come to terms theoretically and practically with the existing reality of a huge agrarian sector, distress ridden small peasantry, farmers suicides, poverty and squalor.
Marx’s Initiation
Marxist literature on agrarian transition probably is the most rigorous and historically realistic understanding. The debate on agrarian transition to capitalism is now 150 years old, since Marx stated his observations in Volume 3 of Das Capital. Marx traced the particular circumstances that gave rise to the capitalist farmer in the 16th century England. He narrates the historical events of the rise of agricultural prices in 14th century, Enclosures by the landlords, displacement of small peasants, the Black Death and its consequences of collapse of tenancy, and eventual emergence of middle level tenant farmer as the capitalist farmer leasing in land, hiring wage labour and earning a profit from trade. Marx also discusses the accompanying factors for the emergence of such a system. Somehow, in popular literature this is sometimes taken as the classical route of capitalist transformation –template to follow, even though Marx never said this. He however said that primitive accumulation and capitalist transition would eliminate the small peasantry and transform them either into capitalist farmer or proletariat. This broadsheet presents the two important pieces by Marx.
Will the peasant disappear?
After his death, French and German social democratic parties faced the dilemma to organize or to leave untouched a small but substantial portion of small peasantry which tenaciously survived ruthlessly destructive competitive conditions. Both Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky have dealt with agrarian question, whose short versions we have included in this volume. We include a summary of five major chapters of Kautsky’s book Die Agrarfrage (The Agrarian Question). Kautsky’s is the first comprehensive work, conceptually and empirically on the question of persistence of small peasants in Germany, written in 1899. Lenin regarded Kautksy’s work as the most notewrthy contribution to recent economic literature. Lenin’s work on Development of Capitalism in Russia is on his own admission a restatement of the Kautsky’s thesis in Russian context. Kautksy’s work somehow was lost in oblivion until two decades ago, when it was translated into English in 1988. Kautksy’s writings become extremely interesting to understand Indian context for the kind of agrarian transition that occurrs under the efforts of the Indian state in the first four decades since Independence. Kautsky himself concluded that agrarian transition does not mean total elimination of small and marginal peasantry from agriculture, who tend to survive through self-exploitation and starvation as a means to avoid joining the umemployed reserve army. Their formal subsumption into capitalist accumulation process enables extraction of surplus value from their family labour, hence these are proletarians in disguise. Can their position be redeemed within the capitalist system is the million dollar question.
What to do with the Small Peasants?
Engel’s Peasant Question in France and Germany, written slightly earlier than Kautsky’s work in 1894 addresses precisely this predicament faced by the Social Democratic Parties. Engels clearly conveyed the indefensibility of small peasant position under capitalist competition, warns the SDP not to give false promises, yet strongly suggests not leaving them to the bourgeois parties. His essay is instructive even for today’s context. He cautions against forcible taking over of their land, instead persuading them to form cooperatives for the small peasants, which is the last option for the socialized production form, even though the real resolution lies in nationalization of land and giving every peasant his/her rightful (equal) share; this is an answer to a standard question often asked, ‘what is the final solution?’. Marx’s essay on Nationalization of Land which we present here probably shows the final solution. Marx passionately argues the futility of bourgeo is individual property right which has a particular social role in production. The crisis of farmers is argued to emanate from this dichotomy which has to be resolved in unification of ownership and socialization of distribution.
What makes capitalism grow?
The debate over the revolutionary strategy recurred in the post-World War period of decolonization, which again centred around transition of pre-capitalist societies into capitalist ones. The influence of European Marxists remained strong over the third world Marxists. For instance, the position taken by two English historians, Maurice Dobb and Rodney Hilton, held sway over the transition discourse. They held that the ‘class struggle’ that takes place between tenants and feudal lords was the prime mover in the decline of an inherently inefficient feudalism, the rider being the primacy of this class struggle in any transition, and was a prescriptive idea for Marxist praxis in backward societies. The dominance of this view was questioned by the American Marxist Paul Sweezy, who tried to draw attention to other important factors such as long distance trade, monetization and growth of urban guilds. Such an argument draws one’s attention to the aspect of ‘uneven and combined development’ of Marx, which implies the historical unevenness of relations of production would be coalesced by a combination of factors that feed capital accumulation on a global dimension. The dialectical interplay of internal and external factors would determine the development of relations and forces of production. This is well known as Dobb-Sweezy debate. Quite away from this famous debate, we have tried to draw attention yet another important paper by an English historian, Stefan Epstein, who questions Dobb-Hilton’s English-centric articulation which could not comprehensively answer several questions. He highlights the role of technological progress and role of the state, patronized by the feudal regimes which became factors that led to the fall of feudal relations. Epstein’s article becomes important to see the ramifications even for the present transition and development of capitalist growth.
The Great Indian Mode of Production Debate: In search of Capitalist Farmer
The great Indian ‘mode of production debate that took place in the mid-seventies probably was the last intellectual attempt in India to seriously debate the nature of the mode of production in Indian economy in general and in Indian agriculture in particular. This extended debate, which involved over two dozen political economists and has largely remained academic and confined to few who cared to read the frustratingly polemical essays, remained inconclusive given the vastly diversity of Indian agricultural forms. The debate was centred around how to characterize the nature of accumulation: whether it is essentially is ‘capitalist’, ‘semi-feudal/semi-colonial’ or ‘feudal’. On a positive note, one can say that it brought out the complexity of the question whether one should identify a set of practices of farmers and attributes of the system to characterize the generic nature of the system. It also reflected the influence of Dobb-Sweezy debate, neo-Marxian critiques on one hand and certain particular agrarian relations as necessarily pre-capitalist or semi-feudal. We have a short summary of a review written by Praful Bidwai, and published as an appendix in his posthumous book titled The Phoenix Moment (2015). As the author writes, the subsequent scholarly work on different states in India has brought more clarity on the diversity as well as convergence in the past three decades. Reading this debate now would refresh our understanding of the limits and contours in which the discourse was conducted, and which therefore remained inconclusive.
Is there a Classical Transition Theory ?
The non-linearity of capitalist transition, in which is so important to see the multiple possible routes, is highlighted by the work of T. J .Byres, a professor of political economy who served as an editor for Journal of Peasant Studies for over three decades. Byres narrates the three distinct routes of transition to capitalism in England, France and Germany, with an essential purpose to remind us that none of them are necessarily the models of transition to repeat. Byres terms the English experience which made middle level tenant farmer emerge as a capitalist farmer with several factor leading to this outcome, ‘capitalism from below’. The French agrarian structure gave rise to a preponderance of small peasantry, who were squeezed by a large class of absentee rentiers through middlemen, and who were freed only after the French Revolution, transformed into capitalist farmers — all this without necessarily forming large farms. Some perished and many survived. Byres terms this as a case of ‘capitalism delayed’. The third case of Prussian transition shows the case of late feudalization of peasantry by large land owning Junkers, whose resistance of Napoleonic wars, is met with a strategy of commercialization and eventual mechanization in the late 19th century, as a case of ‘capitalism from above’. Byres paper is an important one to understand the contingent nature of the capitalist transition, without essentializing any one model. In subsequent work, Byres analyses the Russian, American, Japanese, South Korean and Indian paths highlighting the non-linearity.
The issue of agrarian distress became central in Indian political discourse in the recent times since the advent of economic reforms in 1991. Several works on specific empirical aspects regarding rising costs of production, falling viability, growing private and institutional indebtedness of farmers, deepening groundwater crisis, spurious inputs, unstable weather conditions, declining state support to farming all highlight the circumstances of continuing farmer suicides. While some attribute the crisis to the state apathy and others to naked plunder by intermediaries, the agrarian question is doubtless reopened. Should this be seen as purely contingent situation of the times or to see this as part of larger global reorganization of capital, in which Indian farming is reintegrated. In such a case, should the agrarian question be reconfigured? We have introduced three important interventions in the literature by Henry Bernstein and Akram-Lodhi & Cristobal Kay in global context; and Amit Basole & Dipankar Basu (2011) and Kalyan Sanyal (2007) that problemetise the Indian context.
Peasant Question in 20th Century Capitalist Development
Bernstein’s work Agrarian Question: Now and Then (2004) is probably the single most important writing which brings clarity on what actually the agrarian question constitutes. Drawing from the work of T J Byres, Bernstein argues that the initial debate in Europe on the agrarian question concerned the suitable political program of mobilizing peasants, on the ground that these are proletarians in disguise. He calls this the Agrarian Question 1 (AQ1), which is that of labour. When the transformation of the peasant is raised in the context of Soviet Union in 1927 (known as Scissors Debate) seeking to raise cheap agricultural surplus for the urban population and to facilitate faster industrial accumulation, this concern is called AQ2. Another example of this was when Green Revolution was introduced in India to raise marketed surplus, which holds an inflationary constraint and growth constraint to industry. AQ1 was seen necessary for AQ2. However, after globalization, when capital in the periphery gets access of transnational capital, and the global food market became active, AQ2 is bypassed. Now under the globalization, agrarian markets are reintegrated with global supply chains, organized by big capital, far more peasants across the world are incorporated into capital accumulation on the world scale. This process, Bernstein called AQ3. AQ1 and AQ2, which are agrarian question of labour and production are no longer necessary for the agrarian question of accumulation. In other words the traditional agrarian question is bypassed by globalised capital accumulation regime. This is perhaps single most important proposition that explains the globalization process and plight of peasants across regions.
Agrarian Question in the post-Globalisation Period
Akram Lodhi and Cristobal Kay (2010) in their exhaustive review ‘Surveying Agrarian Question’ in Journal of Peasant Studies, endorse Bernstein’s propositions and reiterate the need for reconfiguring agrarian question in the post-Globalization period. When the agricultural sector is losing its role as complementary sector and is no longer a constraint on structural transformation, the agrarian question has no resolution in the emerging capitalist regime. Internationalization of capital is argued to have ‘decoupled’ the national labour regimes from transnational capital. This is not to deny the existence of an agrarian crisis, but the system has neither the need nor the compulsion to resolve it. It can draw peasants into accumulation chain at will and abandon them through market mayhem during harvest bounties. In terms of livelihood crises doubtless the agrarian question remains. Lodhi-Kay further suggests one should even expand its scope by introducing gender, ecological aspects. Hence, agrarian question is argued to be reloaded in the context of globalization context.
Hasn’t Indian Agriculture Capitalist enough?
When the mode of production of debate took place in sixties and seventies, scholars were bereft of any reliable official statistical base for agriculture. A subsequent improvement by National Sample Survey data, in spite of criticisms, has a much large sample data, taken at regular intervals. Even though umpteen micro level studies have been undertaken in the past four decades that has brought out extremely rich information on changing conditions in rural India, a broad brush empirical view would bring clarity on larger changes. Amit Basole and Deepankar Basu have published an important article in Economic and Political Weekly in 2011, using the NSS data for marking changes in agriculture in the past 50 years (1661-2011). It has two parts, one on agriculture and other on industry, with a primary purpose of identifying the dominant mode of accumulation in India. While taking it granted that the dominant mode of accumulation in modern sector (industry and service sector) is by exploiting wage labour as in any standard capitalist system, they proceed to map out the situation for agriculture. They argue that in spite of trend of extremely acute fragmentation of holdings and rise of small/marginal holdings, all other features are unambiguously capitalist. Important trends are a rise in capital formation in agriculture, increased share of institutional credit, falling share of agricultural income for rural households for poorer households in particular, replaced with wage income from farm and non-farm sources, rise in self-cultivation, reduced share of tenancy, rise in cash rents, and so on. The authors muster impressive macro evidence to suggest that Indian agriculture made definite strides towards capitalist relations and dominant mode of surplus extraction is wage labour exploitation. Agriculture by becoming commercial does not necessarily become remunerative for lower strands of peasantry, it indeed is an immanent outcome of class differentiation.
Basole and Basu’s observations are shared widely by several empirical studies. In the context of combined state of Andhra Pradesh, though now bifurcated, the paper by Ramana Murthy echoes these views and suggests clear signs of agrarian transition. The paper presents observations from interviewing 1057 farm households in seven villages in erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh, that include Telangana, Rayalaseema and Coastal Andhra. The paper explains the causes behind the proliferation of the share of small farms in agriculture. It shows there is growing class differentiation between two classes of farmers, namely those below 10 acres and those who are above; the author characterizes them as petty commodity producers and capitalist farmers. The former combine wage income with farm income, earn a subsistence income from a simple reproduction of value, while the latter indulge in profitable farming with expanded reproduction of value. The petty commodity producing class also are compelled to diversify into non-agricultural activities, though mostly wage labour, showing the transforming character of rural labour. The paper reiterates Kalyan Sanyal’s position that the social welfare transfer in the current neoliberal age by the state appears to mitigate the subsistence crisis of petty commodity producing class, constitutes the politics of transformation and management of poverty.
Vidyasagar’s recent book comes in strong support of the argument that capitalist relations in agriculture have developed significantly in the past five decades in even the most backward regions like Srikakulam district in the state of Andhra Pradesh. From his book, we have excepted a chapter on Dalits and Land to present an important social dimension of Indian peasantry. Dalits are historically denied ownership of land in Indian society. The efforts of the Indian state to transfer some land to them were thoroughly defeated by the upper peasant castes. The majority dalits could not retain even the small parcels given to them, compelled to sell them off back to upper peasantry and go back to wage labour. The paper argues that the overall faster capitalist growth in the economy since 1990s have created opportunities to escape the countryside and its social oppression and unfree labour relations as attached labour. The migration opportunities are seen to provide escape to free wage labour in urban locations, even as circulatory labour. The article contains interesting empirical case studies.
Towards Politics of Post-Colonial Capitalism
To come to terms with our own trajectory of India’s particular capitalist transition needs more intellectual engagement. It is crucial to understand the kind of political management the state undertakes for the reproduction of capitalist hegemony and accumulation. We introduce an important and interesting work of the late Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality & Post Colonial Capitalism (2007). Tracing the diligent efforts of developmental state in post-Independence period, through planning and intervention, as it raises the resources and eases the constraints of growth, the author shows the expansion of capitalist architecture in India, and the peculiar conditions of 20th Century post-colonial capitalism, which are distinct from the conditions under which Western capitalism was incubated. Sanyal’s reconceptualization of surplus labour in the economy, as they migrate to urban informal sector, which he conceptualizes as the non-capital sector, which remains connected to the capitalist sector as it is rejected in formal incorporation. He argues this management of the conditions of capitalist political economy is a typical post-colonial feature. The establishment of a hegemony over such processes occurs through governmentality –a Foucaultian idea of how a modern liberal state manages the various population groups through welfare programs, without yielding any formal rights, constitutes the politics of the nation state. A provocative yet extremely scholarly argument by Sanyal, we introduce it with a wafer thin summary interpretation which should inspire serious scholars to read the original.
Final Remarks
The understanding of the capitalist system and the political discourse on agrarian issues are closely connected to each other and any fractured analysis would only slip into populism. The bourgeois economist who treats farmers as rational agents, is incapable of theorizing the institutional process of peasants transformed into commercial farmers. The liberal bourgeois state which allows unfettered market forces to operate often promises to look into problems of farming sector, only to renege on them after raising expectations, leaving people often confused whether to blame markets or state or the concerted interplay of the two. It will offer welfare transfers as a mitigating factor to deal with political fallout. One should clearly understand that agriculture gets transformed for the capital accumulation in industrial and service sectors, hence becomes subordinated to hegemony of the latter. Second, the unequal exchange relation between the two is the source of crisis for the agrarian sector. There are two specific dimensions of the crisis of small peasantry from Marxist methodology point of view. One, there is a crisis of realization of necessary labour value of the small peasant who over exploits himself. He fails to get his wage worth. This is largely due to unbridled competition among them. This can be resolved to some extent through organizing them into cooperatives. But there is another dimension which realization of surplus value, which has to do with retention of relative price. Here even cooperative structure can hit the dead end. The eventual solution lies in socialization or nationalization of property in general, redistribution of value. All solutions that take place under capitalist relations are temporary and incomplete. We hope these articles helps in building our understanding to think further.
RV Ramana Murthy, SA Vidyasagar, Gadiyaram Bhargava
20th February 2018
Ramana Murthy teaches at School of Economics, University of Hyderabad.
Vidyasagar is associated with the Centre for Independent Researchers.
Bhargava is with New Socialist Initiative.
Emails:
rvramana66@gmail.com
vidyasagarsriadibhatla@gmail.com
bharguma@gmail.com