Agrarian capitalism: A response to Michael Zmolek

While Brenner's theory of ‘agrarian capitalism’ with its emphasis on class struggle provides the best starting point for understanding the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the theory is not without flaws. The flaws mostly stem from the lack of a determinant theory of precisely what capitalism is in its inner most logic. Marx's Capital as reconstructed by Sekine [1997] provides such a theory, and if we are clear that the theory of capital's inner logic is a theory of pure capitalism, then it follows that this logic is never more than partially in command at the level of history. Such a theory implies not only a careful analysis of the degree to which labour power was commodified and the degree to which ‘relative surplus value’ was in force, but also it would mean considering other important elements of capital's inner logic both inside and outside the agrarian sector so as not to overstate the capitalist character of agriculture nor its particular causal efficacy in the rise of capitalism.     

Commentary: Food regime analysis and agrarian questions: widening the conversation

The central disagreement between McMichael and Bernstein boils down to how each of them analyses food and agriculture in relation to capitalist dynamics. McMichael thinks the main contradictions of capitalism now stem from agriculture, and any positive future will be guided by farmers. Bernstein thinks capitalism has fully absorbed agriculture (including farmers not expelled from the land) into circuits of capital, turning agriculture into simply one of many sectors of accumulation and a major font of surplus labor. They have arrived by different paths to the same deeper question: Granted its illumination of the past, does the food regime approach remain useful for interpreting present contradictions, and if so, how? To invite a wider exploration of this very real and important question, I have tried to shift the debate towards a conversation about the complexity of the current transition. I start by widening the frame of the debate to include other writings by McMichael (his method of incorporated comparison) and Bernstein (his distinction between farming and agriculture). I conclude that food regimes and agrarian changes must be located in a wider set of analyses of agrarian and capitalist transitions, each of which misses something important. Older agrarian thought about urban society has much to offer but misses larger food regime dynamics; socio-technical transitions and new commons literatures offer critical analysis of technics, but lack appreciation of the centrality of food and farming; recent works recovering Marxist thought about human nature in a possible transition to a society of abundance and collaboration also ignore food and farming. Connecting with literatures outside the frame of food regimes and agrarian questions offers a way forward for those literatures and for ours.     

Agrarian doctrines of development: Part I

Doctrines of development are understood through a distinction between intentional development and the immanent process of capitalist development. Agrarian doctrine consists of proposals, usually associated with official policy, to undertake agrarian schemes of development based on small‐farm, household production. The intention is to compensate for mass unemployment, urban poverty and the threat of rural emigration. This article gives a historical account of two cases of agrarian doctrine. The first, that of nineteenth‐century Quebec following self‐government in 1848, illustrates the intention of land colonisation schemes to prevent emigration from French Canadian territory to the United States. In the second case, that of twentieth‐century Kenya, schemes of household production were developed in the face of the emergence of mass unemployment; their promotion, especially after political independence in 1963, accompanied the development of indigenous capitalism. The social trusteeship of development is the key to understanding agrarian doctrine. The article concludes by showing why agrarian doctrine underlies the ‘decentralised despotism ‘ at the heart of Mahmood Mamdani's recent book, Citizen and Subject, and is an integral part of the historical roots of contemporary advocacy of decentralised rural development.     

The case for Agrarian capitalism: A response to albritton

Albritton finds Brenner's designation ‘agrarian capitalism’ inappropriate for early English agriculture, as the law of value and the commodification of labour are undeveloped. But Brenner is not theorising a ‘full‐blown’ capitalism. His theory traces a process of transition, by which new rules for social reproduction and a new capitalist logic unfolded gradually. Albritton's evidence, moreover, actually supports Brenner's thesis. Charges of class reductionism misconstrue Brenner's efforts to overcome the tendency to dichotomise society into political and economic spheres. Brenner's theory provides what the bourgeois paradigm does not: a logical explanation of how market dependency and capitalist classes emerged.     

Debate - Theory and History in Thinking the Transition to Capitalism: A Reply to Zmolek

Zmolek's condensed summary of the development of 'agrarian capitalism' is good as far as it goes, but it needs to be supplemented with how this development interacted with manufacturing, with the development of money, with the kinds and degrees of commodification of labour-power and land, with various kinds of commodity markets both internal and external, with the kinds and degrees of productivity increase in various sector, and finally with the unprecedented expansion of putting-out manufacturing in the eighteenth century. Methodologically his account suffers from anachronism, structuralism, teleology and undialectical or either-or thinking. Ironically, these are all things he says he wants to avoid. A key difference between us is the importance of putting-out manufacturing as the first historical manifestation of dynamic capital accumulation. Zmolek seems oblivious to the difficulties in referring to a period of transition to capitalism as already capitalist as in 'agrarian capitalism'.     

The Agrarian question in Mexico: Debate in a Cul‐de‐Sac

The theme of this review essay is Mexico's unresolved agrarian question and the possibility of a distinct ‘Mexican Road’. Four books on the Mexican peasantry are considered: in turn, by John Gledhill, Jonathan Fox, Frank Cancian and Roger Bartra. They all deal with the relationships that connect that peasantry to the Mexican state within a tradition of rural development that has been punctuated and characterised by revolution and state‐building agrarian reform. It is argued that our understanding of the agrarian question in Mexico continues to be bogged down by unfocused monographs on the one hand (the books by the first three of the authors named) and schematic assumptions on the other (as exemplified by Bartra); and that much research needs to be done before the ‘Mexican Road’ can be seen as an accepted option among substantive agrarian alternatives. That research needs to appraise two assumptions frequently made: first, that the hacienda economy was pre‐capitalist; and secondly, that the agrarian programme in Mexico ushered in the rural transition to capitalism.

Casi Nada: A Study of Agrarian Reform in the Homeland of Cardenismo, by John Gledhill, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1991. Pp.xv + 420. NP. ISBN 968 7230 68 1

The Politics of Food in Mexico, by Jonathan Fox. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp.xii + 280. $43.95 (hardback). ISBN 0 8014 2716 9

The Decline of Community in Zinacantdn, by Frank Cancian. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Pp.xxi + 300. $42.50 (hardback) ISBN 0 8047 2040 1

Agrarian Structure and Political Power in Mexico, by Roger Bartra. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Pp.xvii + 221. £37 (hardback); £12.50 (paperback) ISBN 0 80184 4398 7 and 4542 4     

Did agrarian capitalism exist?

Lack of clarity about key concepts of Marxian political economy and a penchant to apply such concepts too directly to history seriously weakens Brenner's analysis of ‘agrarian capitalism’. It is argued that even as late as 1700 English agriculture is not capitalist to any appreciable extent, when one considers that the corn‐modification of labour power is crucial to considering agriculture to be capitalist, and when one closely examines the actual degree to which labour power is commodified. Further it is argued that English agriculture only becomes substantially capitalist in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.     

The agro-industrial state: early agrarian influence on US state building

This contribution shows the influence of early agrarian movements on state institutional capacity building in the US, revealing how the two forces of state intervention and social movement pressure converged to produce a dynamic relationship between the transition to agrarian capitalism and industrialization or agro-industrialization. It will be shown how this protracted agro-industrial development fueled both social movements and state building responses that furthered capitalist development. By highlighting four specific categories of state building– land policy, infrastructure development, agricultural technology and agro-industrial development – this research reveals how the agro-industrial project developed out of rural class struggle spurred economic development and created unique capacities as the US state sought to quell and integrate this rural class struggle into capitalist development.     

A materialist analysis of slavery and sharecropping in the Southern United States

The historical nature of Southern slavery and of the social relations established after its abolition have for a long time been a source of heated debate among American historians. During the last decades, historians have tended to divide into two camps: neoclassical economic historians, who identify slavery and sharecropping with capitalism, and social historians, more or less influenced by Marxism, who define them correctly as pre‐capitalist social relations. Yet the contributions of the social historians have been marred by their empiricist approach and by their reluctance to avail themselves of the theoretical tools provided by classical and Marxist political economy. This work examines Southern slavery and sharecropping in the light of the studies of the European Marxists on ancient slavery and of the works of the classical political economists and Marx on French metayage. This comparison reveals the pre‐capitalist though combined character of plantation slavery, and at the same time shows that the social relations established in the South after the abolition of slavery were, due to the defeat of the Radical Republicans’ plans for agrarian reform, akin to the social relations established in Europe during the age of transition from feudalism to capitalism. The result of these backward relations of production was to retard for a long time the economic development of the South, where the transition to capitalism took place from above’ (that is, through a compromise between the bourgeoisie and a pre‐capitalist class of landowners) in the most painful possible way for the working masses, and at the same time to sustain a system of oppression and discrimination against the black population which reinforced the racist prejudices born of slavery among whites — thus further weakening a working class already divided between immigrants and native white Americans, and strengthening the conservatism of American political life.     

Migration in colonial India: The articulation of feudalism and capitalism by the Colonial State

In this article a particular factual model of the way in which imperialism worked with respect to the Indian economy, which is widely accepted, is contested. The model in question assumes that though imperialism acts to transform agriculture—disintegrating and dissolving the traditional village structure—because it also thwarted industrialisation, backwardness in agriculture and dependence were maintained: the transformation of agrarian relations of production is contrasted with the stagnation of industrial growth, and the latter is held to be the causal factor. Against this it is argued that an examination of colonial migration reveals both the specific characteristics of the colonial working class it produced and the continuing existence of feudal ties of dependence in agriculture. The situation is best conceptualised in terms of the existence within the Indian social formation of feudal (agrarian) and proto‐capitalist (mines, plantations, factories) modes of production, articulated in such a way that the main costs of reproduction of labour power that was sold in the capitalist sector were borne in the non‐capitalist agrarian sector. The article concentrates on the period from the 1880s to the 1930s.     

The legacy of social conflicts over property rights in rural Brazil and Mexico: Current land struggles in historical perspective

This article proposes an approach to the agrarian question that focuses on the establishment of absolute private property rights over land in Brazil and Mexico. The author argues that current land struggles are conditioned by the property regimes inherited from past struggles. The author examines the liberal reforms of the nineteenth century and argues that the balance of class forces led to the slow establishment of absolute private property in Brazil, while in Mexico they triggered the Revolution of 1910–1917, which limited agrarian capitalism. The author then turns to the consequences of these different property regimes in the twentieth century and argues that capitalist social relations have been more dominant in the Brazilian than in the Mexican countryside. The conservative modernization of the 1960s and 1970s is identified as a turning point in the fully capitalist development of agriculture in Brazil. The shift toward food imports, the elimination of subsidies, and the reform of Article 27 of the Constitution signal the re-establishment of the conditions for capitalist development of agriculture in Mexico. The article ends with an assessment of the MST and EZLN's strategies to protect peasants’ access to land and to influence the institutional setting determining access to land.     

I'll Take My Farm: The GI Bill,Agriculture and Veterans in North Carolina

This article examines pivotal components of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 that have largely escaped careful study. The GI Bill of Rights, as the act is familiarly known, established a broad and groundbreaking social safety net of educational and economic benefits and incentives for veterans returning from World War II. Two elements of the legislation – farm loans and on-the-farm training – aimed to advance the nation's agricultural economy, and proved to be especially popular in the South, a region deeply rooted in the agrarian history of the United States. In North Carolina, the wide embrace of the farm aid by veterans is illustrative. It highlighted an abiding desire to own and operate farms, an ambition that had survived the war. Yet, North Carolina's experience ultimately reveals that the agricultural components of the GI Bill contributed more to the capitalist transformation of southern agriculture than to fulfilling landless veterans' hopes for acquiring farms.     

The land question: special economic zones and the political economy of dispossession in India

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have become the epicenters of ‘land wars’ across India, with farmers resisting the state's forcible transfer of their land to capitalists. Based on 18 months of research focused on an SEZ in Rajasthan, this paper illuminates the role of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (ABD) in Indian capitalism today and its consequences for rural India. It argues that the existing theories of land grabs do not adequately explain why dispossession becomes necessary to accumulation at particular times and places, and seeks to reconstruct Harvey's theory of ABD to adequately account for it. It then shows the specific kind of rentier- and IT-driven accumulation that dispossession is making possible in SEZs and the non–labor-absorbing, real-estate–driven agrarian transformation this generates in the surrounding countryside. Land speculation amplifies class and caste inequalities in novel ways, marginalizes women and creates an involutionary dynamic of agrarian change that is ultimately impoverishing for the rural poor. Given the minimal benefits for rural India in this model of development, farmer resistance to land dispossession is likely to continue and pose the most serious obstacle to capitalist growth in India. The agrarian questions of labor and capital are, consequently, now rejoined in ‘the land question.’     

The landless rural workers movement (MST) in Brazil

This translation of the 1912 preface by Karl Kautsky to Salvioli's book about captalism in the ancient world confirms the centrality to his interest of the way in which economic history informs the present and maps out the future. It reveals a concern not only with pre-capitalist and capitalist systemic transition but also economic development in turn prefigures socialism. Accordingly, kautsky's focus is on the connections between yet the distinictiveness of historically specific modes of production, their forms of property and propertylessness, and the links between production for consumption and for exchange, plus the resulting patterns both of the social relations and the forces of production and of surplus appropriation licensed thereby. For Kautsky, therefore, the value of understanding the economic conditions preceding capitalism itself, and thus also the reasons for its transcendence.     

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.     

The agrarian question in Peru: Some observations on the roads of capital

Under the military governments of Velasco (1968–75) and Morales Bermùdez (1975–80) one of the most important agrarian reforms of South American history took place in Peru. According to Alain de Janvry [1981] this reform involved a shift from a junker‐road to a farmer‐road toward the development of capitalism in Peruvian agriculture. In the first part of this study de Janvry's approach to the ‘agrarian question’ and his evaluation of the Peruvian reform will be discussed. It will be argued that he overestimates the importance of farmer‐type capitalism and pays too little attention to the cooperatives established during the reform. Focusing the discussion on the co‐operatives in the coastal region it will be argued that these enterprises can be understood, to an important extent, as a form of simple commodity production. In the final part of the article a case study of the cotton producing co‐operatives in the province of Ica will be presented.     

《1857-1858年经济学手稿》中的资本逻辑与共产主义展望

资本逻辑是马克思解剖资本主义的核心视角,也是他展望共产主义终将实现的理论支持。依据《1857—1858年经济学手稿》,从资本运动的发生原因出发,资本逻辑可理解为资本自身进行辩证否定运动的内在规律,以否定性和必然性为核心规定。马克思以资本逻辑为线索,揭示资本主义社会问题产生的内在根源,论证共产主义终将实现。他认为资本本身是自身发展的最大限制,商品经济的平等假象背后隐藏了全部的颠倒关系和虚假逻辑,资本主义终将因自我否定而必然灭亡。但资本辉煌时期积累的丰富物质财富和世界交往关系,将为实现共产主义提供条件。     

From 'Political' to 'Human' Economy: The Visions of Harriet Martineau and Frances Wright

The marginalization or exclusion of women from economic theory has a long and distinguished pedigree. Michele A. Pujol, in her groundbreaking study Feminism and Anti-Feminism in Early Economic Thought (1998), wryly observes that whilst Adam Smith devotes an entire page to the question of women's economic activity in his Wealth of Nations , women 'are nowhere mentioned in Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation and in Malthus's Principles of Political Economy ' (Pujol 1992:17-23). In similar fashion Groenewegen, in Feminism and Political Economy in Victorian England (1994), notes that 'there have been few women contributors to … economic literature' (Groenewegen 1994:16). Indeed, as far as the first half of the nineteenth century is concerned, only two women - Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau - seem to have written on political economy. Both wrote as expositors and popularizers of existing theoretical knowledge, content to repeat rather than challenge established orthodoxies, and as a result neither has commanded much more than a footnote in the history of economic thought. Martineau enjoys somewhat more of an enhanced reputation in the field of literary studies but even here attention tends to focus on A Manchester Strike at the expense of her other economic fictions. The present discussion, then, attempts to expand the field of vision with regard to Martineau by examining four of her economic tales: The Rioters (1827), The Turn-Out (1829), The Hill and the Valley (1832) and A Manchester Strike (1832). The first two of these were written prior to Martineau's 'conversion' to political economy, whilst the latter two appeared as part of Illustrations of Political Economy (a series of twenty-three tales published in twenty-five monthly parts between 1832 and 1843). As a way of exploring the disjuncture between economic theory and narrative events within these tales, the narratives themselves are read as implicit commentaries on (as well as 'illustrations'of) aspects of political economy, thereby allowing Martineau to emerge as a much more complex and problematic writer than is usually acknowledged. Also under examination here are the economic ideas of Frances Wright, another early nineteenth-century woman writer, particularly her critique of the existing economic order (which sharply differentiates her from Martineau) and her proposals for a new 'feminine' economy. The intention is to show that women writers on economics were not confined to the role of 'dutiful intellectual daughter, repeating … the words of her intellectual fathers' (David 1987:35)--to borrow Deirdre David's characterization of Martineau in Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy --but were capable of articulating a thoroughgoing critique of existing theoretical models.     

First to third nature: the rise of capitalist conservation on Palawan Island,the Philippines

The social relations and agricultural lands that rural peoples in Southeast Asia hold in common are being commodified through the converging pressures of agrarian change, conservation and capitalist development. This paper examines how broader and local processes driving agrarian differentiation have been accelerated through the revaluing of people and nature in market terms to ostensibly finance conservation through development at the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park – the flagship protected area of Palawan Island, the Philippines. Drawing on the notions of ‘first’ and ‘third nature’, I show how the pace and scale of agrarian change between rural peoples has gone ‘fast forward’ with the onset of resource partitioning, objectification, commodification and, ultimately, revaluing through translocal ‘capitalist conservation’, the rise of conservation as capitalist production. I examine how the national park's valuing as a ‘common’ World Heritage has drawn major private sector investments that objectify, commodify and rearticulate the value of nature as capital that finances and merges conservation and development according to the images and ideals of the modern Philippines. The conclusion asserts that while the processes of differentiation and capitalist conservation facilitate the revaluing of nature in market terms, the overall process remains recursive, partial and context dependent.     

The ‘private plot’ in Soviet agriculture

The paper examines the main components of Mexican agrarian populism, and the attractions of the populist position in the light of the current crisis within the Mexican agricultural sector. It is suggested that the ‘campesinistas’ (agrarian populists) have incorporated various aspects of marxist analysis, but have nevertheless emphasised ways in which their approach pans company with that of most marxists in Latin America. According to writers like Gustavo Esteva, perhaps the leading ‘campesinista’, the peasant economy in the process of developing can co‐exist with capitalism for a protracted period, and considerable doubt exists as to whether the peasant economy is ‘ultimately’ inconsistent with capitalist development. The agrarian populists look to the peasantry in Mexico as a vehicle for rural development, believing that a better understanding of the internal logic of peasant production might facilitate an alternative series of policy measures. The weaknesses of the ‘campesinista’ position are explored, and doubts expressed about the viability of the populist stance as long as Mexico has the option of importing basic foodcrops.