M.H. Khan,A.V. Chayanov and the family farms of the North‐West Frontier Province

Mahmood Hasan Khan has argued that the agrarian structure of Pakistan's North‐West Frontier Province resembles that described in Russia in the early twentieth century by Alexander Vasil'evich Chayanov. The purpose of this article is to examine the validity of such an argument. After identifying changes in the agrarian structure of the Frontier since 1947, Chayanov's theory of peasant economy is empirically tested. Despite an absence of wage labour, none of Chayanov's static hypotheses are supported. It is concluded that the rural research of Khan, while technically proficient, does not explain processes of economic change in Frontier agriculture.     

Chayanov and the economics of the Russian Peasantry

The years after 1900 saw the emergence of the “neo‐populist” tradition as a leading tendency of economic thought in the study of the Russian peasantry. By the 1920s Aleksandr Vasil'evich Chayanov had become one of the most influential spokesmen of this tradition. His school was dispersed in 1930. But in the Western study of modern peasantries, his work is once more increasingly influential. The article considers Chayanov's place in the development of economic thought and of political controversy, and tries to locate this in the context of the history of the Russian peasantry itself. Problems and theories in the allocation of labour supplies are particularly examined. Finally, we raise the question of ideology in economic thought.     

Contested paradigms of ‘viability’ in redistributive land reform: perspectives from southern Africa

This article reviews some of the salient aspects of the controversy over capitalism and the fate of Russian peasantry, among the Russian Marxists and the narodniks immediately prior to and after the Bolshevik revolution. At issue was the characterization of peasant economies. The narodniks believed that neither marginalism nor Marxism fully captured the nuances of peasant agriculture and the economic system/systems that evolved out of it; neither the market model nor class analysis adequately described the allocative and distributive processes in such economies. While nineteenth-century narodniks stressed the role of institutions based in the village community, Chayanov's twentieth-century populism stressed the organizational dynamic of peasant households within an institutional framework. Accordingly, the economics of the Chayanovian interpretation are examined from an institutional and organizational perspective. Such an exercise, it is argued, lends more credibility not only to the narodnik agenda, but also to the peasantist model of development.     

Capitalist development,peasant differentiation and the state: Survey findings from West Bengal

The analysis which follows examines the structure of investment and production taking place in West Bengal, the reference point being the debate between Marxism and populism about peasant differentiation. The process of socio‐economic differentiation has not stopped, but in methodological terms farm size alone fails to register its extent. The main claim advanced by populism — Chayanov's argument concerning demographic differentiation, that rising consumer/worker ratios are accompanied by higher family labour input — was found to be inapplicable. Of particular interest is the role during the last quarter century of the Left Front government in the process of agrarian transformation, and the extent to which its pro‐poor policy interventions have stabilized smallholding peasant production. Among the effects of state intervention in the agrarian sector have been declines in (a) the number of holdings above ten acres (b) in the extent of sharecropping contracts, and (c) in the incidence of absolute landlessness. Although producers under 2.5 acres have been the main beneficiaries of institutional credit provision by the state, distress sales (in the form of marketed surplus) by poorer farmers are still evident.     

Chayanov and the marxists

Any school of social science with claims to historical significance must show itself able not only to understand the world but also to show how to change it. In this respect the Marxist theoretical tradition in peasant studies has sometimes proved inferior to bourgeois theory. This can be seen in the conflict between the Chayanov tradition and its Marxist critics, not only in Chayanov's time but also in our own. Suck a weakness of ‘subordinate’ Marxism has historic roots. However there also exist historic precedents helpful to the task of developing a Marxist ‘practical theory’ for peasant studies.     

Dorset,Kincardine and peasant crisis: A comment on David Craig

David Craig's paper ‘Novels of Peasant Crisis’ is to be warmly welcomed. But Craig provides no adequate analysis of the peasant crises underlying the novels which he considers. This paper considers one of Craig's novels; Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song. Craig's explanation of this book in terms of depopulation and the destruction of the Kincardine peasantry from outside is seen to be inadequate. Sunset Song is about the crumbling of a peasant mode of production through the working out of internal contradictions within that mode of production. As an introduction to this discussion of Sunset Song Craig's dismissal of the utility of Thomas Hardy's work for the analysis of rural class relations is argued to be distinctly premature.     

Rural transformation on the East Black Sea coast of Turkey: A note on keyder

This article questions the interpretation of modern Turkish agrarian history advanced in this journal in 1983 by Çaglar Key der. The preeminence of petty commodity production does not entail class homogeneity, any more than Lenin's analysis of class differentiation in pre‐revolutionary Russia was invalidated by Chayanov's theory of the family‐labour farm. Sharecropping illustrates the structural inequalities which characterise the social relations of Turkish agriculture. These are often founded upon uneven regional development. The argument is supported by fieldwork experience in the tea‐producing region of the Black Sea coast.     

‘Peasantry’ as an economic category

This paper is concerned to challenge the category ‘peasantry’ as defining a distinct and general type of economy. It is divided into three sections: i. an examination of the work of Lenin and Kautsky on capitalism in agriculture which shows that they investigated economies in which peasant production was important without using such a concept; ii. it is argued that no rigorous concept of a ‘peasant’ mode or ‘peasant’ relations of production can be constructed which has the general applicability of the common‐sense notion of ‘peasantry'; iii. the treatment of ‘peasant’ economy in non‐Marxist literature is considered.     

Rodney Hilton and the Peasant Road to 'Capitalism' in England

Arguing that Rodney was an original thinker among British Marxists, this article examines his historiographical approach to the English medieval peasantry, and in particular his contribution to the transition debate. As a consequence of their focus either on landlord enclosure or on the role of merchant capital, Marxists such as Dobb and Tawney maintained that the prosperous peasants who emerged towards the end of the fifteenth century bacame the capitalist farmers of the sixteenth. Opposed to both class and market determinism, however, Hilton insisted that the distinctiveness of the medieval peasantry lay in the possession of its own means of subsistence and access to community property. From the latter stemmed peasant resistant against feudal lords, based on peasants' self-perception as free producers with ancient rights, because of which landlords had to use military and political power to extract surplus labour. For Hilton, the agrarian conflict that culminated in the 1381 rebellion was a struggle between seigneurial power and peasant market power.     

Value,price, and simple commodity production: The case of the Zapotec stoneworkers∗

The concepts of ‘commodity’ and of ‘simple commodity production’ in the work of Marx and his interpreters are examined as a necessary departure point for the analysis of value and price in a Mexican peasant‐artisan stoneworking industry. The labour theory of value, which posits a close relationship between market price and average embodied labour cost of commodities in a peasant‐artisan economy, is applied to the stone‐working industry and is shown to have explanatory power in both the qualitative and quantitative sense. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the labour theory is a necessary tool for discerning and approximating the fundamental role of the labour process, as well as the structure of production relations, in determining the nature and conduct of exchange activities in a peasant‐artisan commodity/market economy.     

A survey of rural migration and land reclamation in India, 1885

In 1885 W. W. Hunter, Director‐General of Statistics in India, sent out a circular to all district officers enquiring about rural migration, land reclamation, and the ways in which government or private capitalists could aid reclamation schemes. The present article is based upon the replies which Hunter received. These contain much valuable information: on deserted villages, seasonal migration, the role of forest tribes as the vanguard of land reclamation, scarcity of labour as an obstacle to land reclamation in some areas in contrast with large‐scale coolie emigration from other areas, the limited ability of government to provide aid and guidance to land reclamation schemes, and some instances of successful capitalist ventures in this field. It is suggested that this information may be seen in the light of the methodological discussion on the definition of peasantry on the one hand and Boserup's theory relating demographic features and systems of agricultural production on the other (the latter being of particular importance since it leads to an appreciation of the regional setting of the peasantry process). The relationship between the state and the peasantry is also touched upon.     

Managing the ‘main force’: The communist party and the peasantry in the Philippines

Despite the success of the Communist Party of the Philppines in winning rural support, its work has consistently been characterised by an instrumentalist approach to the peasantry. The article begins with an examination of the foundations of the party's attitude toward the peasantry and its roots in Marxist‐Leninist theory and practice. It goes on to consider evidence of the party's instrumental approach in practice, examining the impact on legal peasant organisations and the experience of socio‐economic projects in the countryside. Attention next turns to an analysis of the party's attitude toward ‘united front work’ and its impact on coalition building among the peasantry. Finally, the author considers the implications of the current split and debates in the ranks of the CPP for the peasantry and for the future of radical politics in the country.     

The roots of rural agitation in India, 1914–1947: A reply to Hardiman

This constitutes a reply to David Hardiman's recent criticism of my article on the middle peasant thesis and its applicability to late colonial India. It challenges Hardiman's notion of the middle peasantry as too narrow and not the indisputable Leninist definition. Further, it emphasizes the emergence of a more flexible agrarian economy and society which, whilst not necessarily ‘capitalist’, renders redundant the concept of a traditional middle peasantry. Finally, Hardiman's interpretation of the Bardoli campaign of 1928 and its implications for understanding rural agitations in British India are critically examined.     

Theories of the exploited peasantry: A critical review

The object of this article is to discuss the theoretical foundations of the Neo‐Marxist argument which states that by a process of unequal exchange, the existence of the peasant economy in the agricultural sector of capitalist, less developed countries (LDCs) means that rent payments are avoided. The article begins by presenting a summary of the implications for sectoral exchange of the transformation of labour values into prices of production. In Section II the modern versions of the theory of ground rent are discussed, and Section III is a critical review of the divergent propositions concerning the peasant economy's exchange relations in the product market. The article ends by proposing an empirical approach for the study of the exchange relations of the peasant economy and of a heterogeneous agricultural sector.     

The Rise,Fall and Future of the Jamaican Peasantry

This article examines the crisis of the Jamaican peasantry. Jamaica's peasants are struggling against pressures old and new, with the burden of their spatial inheritance magnified by a withering state, rising food imports following trade liberalisation, and oft-conflictive social relations. It begins by examining the historical formation of the peasantry after Emancipation, emphasising the unevenness of the landscape and the tensions between individualism and cooperation, before describing the protracted process of de-peasantisation, which has sped under structural adjustment reforms. Current conditions and future prospects are assessed through the insights and experiences of peasant farmers situated on the periphery of a plantation landscape. Ultimately, the future of peasant farming in Jamaica is seen to be bound up foremost in the struggle for land reform, and it is hoped that the current de-stabilisation of the plantation system will provide a new window for historic change.     

Indian peasant historiography: A critical perspective on Ranajit Guha's work

With the publication of six volumes of Subaltern Studies (1982–89), under Ranajit Guha's general editorship, South Asian social and political history, centred round the struggles of the subaltern classes of South Asia under colonial rule, and of the peasantry in particular, was poured into an entirely new historiographical mould. The intellectual foundation for this exciting project was laid in Guha's three major works published during the previous two decades. The historiography of the Indian peasantry, cast in this new mould, constitutes not only a formidable challenge to the dominant mainstream orientations of the metropolitan liberal and natonalist elite historians but has also opened a new frontier of understanding of the dynamics of peasant insurrections which is of significance for the future and for peasant societies in general.     

Simple commodity production and wage labour in the American plains∗

Households which exclusively produce a single commodity have a dual character as enterprises and as families. Competition establishes a constant requirement for labour, while demographic variation prevents its continuous supply within the household. Using data from a county in the heart of the American wheat plains to illustrate the analysis, this paper applies a modified version of Marx's theory to the circuits of reproduction of simple commodity production, focusing on their intersection with markets in labour power. The analysis requires elaboration of the Marxist definition of class, in order to differentiate members of specialized commodity production households who work for wages as a temporary phase in the life‐cycle, from a permanent class of wage labourers. It concludes that simple commodity production, although it differs from capitalist production as well as from peasant households, requires for its reproduction a well‐developed market in labour‐power and thus an essentially capitalist economy.     

Marx's third class: Capitalist landed property and capitalist development

This article consists of a detailed discussion of Marx's theorisation of a landed class in the capitalist mode of production. It is argued that Marx does not consider landlords as feudal leftovers but does indeed succeed in providing a sophisticated theory of capitalist landed property as an independent class, which conforms in all major respects with his theorisation of capital and wage‐labour. Moreover, the role of landed property in the process of capitalist development of relative surplus‐value extraction is analysed. It is argued that it is possible to speak of different forms of capitalist relations according to whether landed property or capital provides the leading force behind the development process. Capitalist development is then shown to be the outcome of a class struggle between landed property, capital and wage‐labour. This process is briefly illustrated with reference to England in the 1840s and Latin America in the 1960s.     

Awkward Class or Awkward Classes? Class relations in the Russian peasantry before collectivisation

This article develops some criticisms of Teodor Shanin's thesis concerning the class structure of the Russian peasantry up to the end of the 1920s. Rival Marxist approaches are then discussed, especially that of L. N. Kritsman and his school who saw the relations of production of the Russian peasantry as characterised by exploitative class relations between households and thus called into question all approaches asserting the social homogeneity of the peasantry as a class.