Reconsidering the links between poverty,international labour migration,and agrarian change: critical insights from Nepal

The role of international labour migration in processes leading to the (re)production of rural poverty in the rural South continues to shape critical academic and policy debate. While many studies have established that migration provides an important pathway to rural prosperity, they insufficiently analyse the profound effects that migration and remittances have on agrarian and rural livelihoods. This article uses the case of rural Nepal, where over half of the households are involved in foreign labour migration, as a ‘window’ to understand the processes shaping how migration effects poverty. The paper analyses how migration generates outcomes across the domains of rural people's changing relationship to land and agriculture, their experience of migration, and rural labour markets to advance our arguments. First, it argues that migration leads to the commodification of land, generating changes in patterns of land uses and tenancy relations. With respect to rural people's engagement with agriculture, migration generates both processes of ‘deactivation’ and ‘repeasantization’. Second, foreign migration offers an exit from poverty for some while also creating processes of deeper impoverishment for others. Third, migration leads to structural changes in rural labour markets, reducing the supply of agrarian labour. Consequently, in contrast to the simplifying ‘narrative’ accounts of a migration pathway out of poverty, this paper concludes that the effects triggered by migration are highly contradictory, providing an exit from poverty when linked to diversification strategies, while engendering rising inequality and rural differentiation.     

Exit from agriculture: a step forward or a step backward for the rural poor?

World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development recommends that rural smallholders unable to compete in higher value production should exit agriculture. For the old and new landless, the way forward is wage labour in agriculture, in rural off farm work, or in urban areas. Disjunctively, the Report also proposes ‘farm-financed social welfare’ as a safety net when urban workers are ejected back to countryside at times of ‘urban shock’. My essay contrasts the Report's narrative about felicitous trajectories away from and back to the farm with the historical and contemporary experience of Asia's rural poor.     

Postmaternal,Postwork and the Maternal Death Drive

ABSTRACT

The term ‘postmaternal’ has recently emerged as a way to articulate the effects of neoliberalism on the public devaluing of caring labour [Stephens, Julie. 2011. Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care. New York: Columbia University Press]. This term suggests a valorisation of values associated with care and mothering that have traditionally been gendered and rely on a heterosexist matrix for their intelligibility. Marxist feminist writers during the 1970s struggled with the question of the particular form of care that reproduction entails, and this feminist archive has been recently extended to a discussion of ‘post-work’ [Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke], in which calls for the valuing of unpaid work as a viable form of labour have been reanimated. In this article I examine the relation between these two analytic categories – ‘postmaternal’ and ‘postwork’. Both categories require that we re-think some of the most trenchant issues in feminist thought – the sexual division of labour, the place of ‘reproduction’ in psychic and social life, and the possibilities for a new feminist commons.     

Bolivia's soy complex: the development of ‘productive exclusion’

A significant transition is underway in Bolivia where both domestic and foreign capital are monopolizing commercial agriculture and leading a highly mechanized, capital-intensive production model which has considerably diminished the need for labour. This paper explores mechanisms and processes of ‘productive exclusion’ in the soy-producing zones of Santa Cruz in relation to the expansion, concentration and mechanization of the ‘soy complex’. We provide an analysis of how the agrarian structure has developed since soy was adopted – from ‘putting land into production’ to ‘expanding the agricultural frontier’ and ‘controlling the agro-industrial chain’. We explore how and the extent to which the penetration of new capital is leading to new processes of agrarian change which exclude the rural majority from accessing the means of production. While a process of ‘foreignization’ of land began to take shape in the early 1990s, new processes of capital accumulation are eroding the ability of small farmers to engage in productive activity, potentially leading to ‘surplus’ populations no longer needed for capital accumulation.     

In defence of Marxology: A reply to Meghnad Desai's review of T. Shanin et al., Late Marx and the Russian road

This note defends T. Shanin et al., Late Marx and the Russian Road against the criticism levelled by Meghnad Desai in a previous issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies. It is argued that the ‘late Marx’ – as represented in Marx's four drafts of his letter to Vera Zasulich of March, 1881 – and Russian populism address issues that are crucial to contemporary socialist politics, both on the ‘periphery’ of capitalism and elsewhere.     

Redefining institutional identity: the YWCA challenge to extraterritoriality in China, 1925–30

This article explores how the May 30th, 1925 Incident forced American Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) Secretaries in China to rethink their relationship with imperialism and governmental power and to redefine, in collaboration with Chinese YWCA Secretaries, the Chinese National YWCA's institutional mission. It examines the American YWCA Secretaries’ efforts to challenge extraterritorial privileges granting foreign nationals immunity from Chinese laws, among a host of other ‘unequal,’ that is, non-reciprocal rights and prerogatives, claimed by the foreign governments and based on treaties signed with the Chinese Government. It restores the American YWCA Secretaries' voices to the historical narrative of the Western response to the May 30th Incident and reveals their agency and subjectivity. Although American YWCA Secretaries failed to achieve the goal that they defined for themselves when the May 30th Incident occurred – to reorder state-to-state relations between the USA and China on a more equitable, just and ‘moral’ basis – they nonetheless achieved some success in injecting their moral discourse into the US China policy debate. Moreover, their response to May 30th produced a significant feminist achievement: they dismantled the unequal and imperialist power relations within their own organization.     

Patterns of agrarian transformation in Ethiopia: State-mediated commercialisation and the ‘land grab’

Much of the literature on the ‘land grab’ has thus far focused on the international drivers of foreign agricultural investment, with far less attention paid to the roles of developing country states and domestic political economy in changing forms of agrarian production. This paper analyses how global and domestic processes combine to produce patterns of agrarian transformation in Ethiopia, one of the main targets of foreign agricultural investment. The paper presents a typology of changes in land use and examines in detail three case studies of investments in Ethiopia drawn from this typology. The paper concludes that the most dramatic changes are taking place in lowland, peripheral regions where large-scale, capital-intensive farms employing wage labour pose a serious risk to pastoralists whose ‘use’ of land is contested by the state. Although the government has been careful to avoid mass displacement of settled smallholders, there are also important changes taking place in highland areas, with the government encouraging investments that combine the resources of investors with the labour and land of smallholders. These investments have resulted in exposure to new forms of market risk.     

Shifting rights,property and authority in the forest frontier: ‘stakes’ for local land users and citizens

Customary land and forests are more embedded in the global economy than ever. With globally significant supplies of land and raw materials and favorable terms for foreign investors, developing countries – particularly in Africa – have become increasingly attractive trade partners and destinations for investors. Increasing competition over land is placing new pressures on vast tracts of forest and woodland, areas often considered ‘under-utilized’ by national governments despite their critical role in supporting local livelihoods. While increased demand for primary agricultural, forest and mining commodities in the context of forest tenure reforms and decentralized decision-making could create unprecedented economic opportunities for forest-dependent communities, increased ‘stakes’ over forest resources and land will undoubtedly heighten governance challenges. This is in no small part due to the political dynamics of property, and to the role of the ‘recursive constitution of property rights and authority’ in the evolution of the modern nation-state. By identifying the social ‘stakes’ associated with different pathways through which sectoral and extra-sectoral commodities shape forests, this paper provides a conceptual framework for analyzing how shifting contours of rights, property and authority in the context of forest-related trade and investment shape human well-being for affected communities and the wider citizenry of host countries. It then illustrates the use of the framework through its application to two brief case studies from southern Africa: tobacco production in Malawi and copper mining in Zambia. It is hoped that this framework will provide a meaningful contribution to growing scholarship on the political dynamics of property, and implications for rights-based approaches to agricultural investment and large-scale land acquisitions.     

The Awkward Class: a foundation for peasant studies

ABSTRACT

Teodor Shanin's The Awkward Class helped to launch two immensely important research directions. First, resistance by Russian peasants to modernizing agricultural policies by both Tsarist and Soviet governments opened new questions about collectivization of agriculture, and made Russian history relevant to the study of ‘developing societies.’ Second, the idea of cyclical mobility of peasant households challenged the then widely held assumption that peasants were destined to disappear. Instead of explaining ‘persistence’ of peasants, Shanin explored distinct logics of peasant households and communities. This helped to define a new inter-disciplinary field called peasant studies.     

Saying all the right things? Gendered discourse in climate-smart agriculture

Amidst debates about the role of ‘climate-smart agriculture’ (CSA), the intersection of concerns about climate change and agriculture offer an opportunity to consider how gender is considered in global policymaking. The latest module in the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, World Bank and International Fund for Agricultural Development Gender and Agriculture Sourcebook – ‘Gender and Climate Smart Agriculture’ – offers an opportunity to reassess how gender factors into these global recommendations. This contribution argues that the module makes strides toward more gender-aware policymaking, but the version of CSA discussed in the module sidesteps the market-led and productivity-oriented practices often associated with CSA. As a result, though the module pushes a more feminist agenda in many respects, it does not fully consider the gendered implications of corporate-led and trade-driven CSA.     

Narratives of progress: cooking and gender equality among Swedish men

Feminist food studies have repeatedly identified a dichotomy of ‘masculine’ self-oriented cooking as leisure and ‘feminine’ other and care-oriented foodwork (meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning up after meals). However, recent research suggests that there is a great deal of variety and contradiction in men’s accounts of their cooking practices. For example, men may find cooking a tedious and stressful responsibility and foodwork a fatherly duty. This article draws on interviews with 31 Swedish men from 22 to 88 years of age, and explores stories about cooking and foodwork as part of their everyday lives and their life transitions and how these relate to broader notions of food and gender equality. The data illuminating the men’s stories can be synthesised into two narratives of progress: a narrative of progress in gender equality in Sweden, where men’s participation in household labour has become taken for granted, and a narrative of culinary progress among Swedish men in general and among some of the interviewed men themselves. We agree with previous scholars who have argued for a reconsideration of the simplistic picture of men’s cooking as only being for the self and for leisure. We further show how the men express foodwork as a self-evident responsibility, regardless of whether the men find it fun or not, and that a desirable masculinity is represented by a man whose cooking skills have progressed beyond the survival level and who is more gender equal than what are perceived to be less-progressive men from previous generations and foreign cultural backgrounds.     

Colonial labour,Tawdenni and ‘L’enfer du sel’: the struggle from slave to free labour in a Saharan salt mine

Abstract

Can we understand the arrival of Capitalism in Africa by tracking labour – from unfree to free, from slave to wage? The question supposes slavery to lie at its heart, yet the conversation between labour and slave studies is in early stages. The sources are problematic: the colonial ‘language of labour’ was often political rhetoric camouflaging ongoing forms of slavery. Then, there was the question of how the metropole-incorporated colonies into its economy: French West Africa’s sun and sand offered few economic resources. One was salt. The Niger Bend economy depended on Tawdenni, a desert salt mine controlled by Saharans and exploited by their slaves. In 1910, it was predicted that the French abolition of slavery would spell the end of Tawdenni: “Never will a man from the South – unless a slave – give himself to this work”; what, therefore, was to be done? The paper challenges the view that engagement with colonial capitalism necessarily led directly or even inevitably from slavery to wage labour by exploring how Tawdenni’s servile labour system responded to French colonial attempts to combine political abolition and economic sustainability.     

New investment,old challenges. Land deals and the water constraint in African agriculture

Foreign investment in agricultural land acquisition in sub-Saharan Africa has been viewed primarily as driven by a set of linked ‘crises’: in financial capital markets, in security of energy and food supply, and in global environmental governance. This paper argues that a focus on the ‘buyers’ of land risks overlooking the dynamics that operate on the side of the land ‘sellers’. Accordingly, the first part of the paper argues that it is important to view the current ‘land grab’ as the latest stage in a longer historical process of competition for control of land and other natural resources by different ‘domestic’ economic and political actors within African countries. While such struggles are often characterised as the ‘state versus the peasantry’, with the state acting on behalf of ‘urban elites’, the paper argues that processes of accumulation and associated enclosure of natural resources need to be examined more critically in specific contexts if the role and impact of foreign capital investment are to be understood. The second part of the paper seeks to identify the ways in which questions of scale (in the sense of greater capital intensity) can be considered to be constraints to the development of African agriculture. Particularly, it considers the extent to which the production models most frequently mentioned in connection with foreign investment (large-scale mechanised farms and small-scale outgrower contract farming) respond to current productivity constraints. The paper argues that current debates about foreign investment in agricultural land underplay the importance of water resources needed to overcome production risks associated with irregular rainfall. Bringing the water dimension of land deals more clearly into focus is necessary if the scope for positive and negative impacts of new investment on existing land users is to be fully understood. The paper concludes by considering the implications of such challenges in the current context of foreign investment in agriculture in Africa.     

Body-Building-Becomings

This paper concerns the conceptual resonances and ‘relays’ between the two contrasting philosophical notions and operational modes of the ‘architect’ and the ‘artisan’, here explored though a feminist philosophical framework and focus on materiality and corporality. There is a particular concentration on the way in which a ‘DIY’ (Do It Yourself) production methodology in architecture complicates Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s invocation of the architect-artisan binary in their collaborative text A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). For them, the architect is a hegemonic figure whose detached operational approach differs from that of the artisan who discovers and responds to ‘real-life’ circumstances as they are directly encountered within project settings. Through reference to writings on the body and space by specific feminist philosophers, this paper draws attention to an artisanal mode of operation associated with architecture in which the body is deliberately enfolded within architectural production and consumption. An explication of my own comportment within the architectural processes of two self-initiated collaborative projects enables the relation between the two modes of operation – architectural and artisanal – to be recast within the very body of the architect herself.     

A farewell to urban/rural bias: peripheral finance capitalism in Mexico

Based on a discussion of the structural transformation of the Mexican economy, this paper investigates the impact of financialization on agriculture’s role in capitalist development. It argues that the peripheral financialized economy is a rural–urban economy. On the one hand, agriculture and industry are bifurcated into a growing export sector and a stagnating local economy, and there are no functional ‘developmental’ links between capitalist agriculture and industry. On the other hand, the economic structures have resulted in the consolidation of a huge mass of rural–urban ‘classes of labour’. Capitalist agriculture and industry are linked through and dependent on cheap labour sustaining the export economy. I argue that the current economic formation is not due to ‘urban bias’, ‘rural bias’ or any misallocation of resources among economic sectors. Rather, it can be explained in relation to ‘finance bias’: the taking over of debt relations as the key driving force of economic activities. A major contradiction in peripheral finance capitalism arises from the financing of cheap labour through debt. This is likely to result in new financial crisis, when the contradictions between increasing levels of (private and public) debt, a stagnating domestic economy, and below-subsistence level wages become too large.     

The contested nature of Afro-descendant quilombo land claims in Brazil

In Brazil, Afro-descendant quilombola communities were for the first time in history recognised as legal rights-holders to land in the 1988 constitution – 100 years after the abolition of slavery. Drawing on fieldwork in the quilombo Bombas in the state of São Paulo, and a review of relevant literature, this contribution explores the historical trajectory of the constitutional quilombo provision and how it has been translated into practice. Combining a discussion of the use of self-identification and the concepts of ‘regulation’, ‘force’, ‘market’ and ‘legitimation’ when analysing the dynamics of access and exclusion, we show how struggles over land are simultaneously enacted in controversies over the meanings of quilombola identity and its implications.     

Immigration and the politics of space allocation in rural Spain: The case of Andalusia

The incorporation of southern European countries into the European Union has transformed the relationship between peasants, the state and the international labour market. In order to illustrate the nature of this change as its affects southern Spain, examined here is its current impact on rural labour and the construction of interethnic ‘difference’ in Andalusia. It is argued that, in order to establish control over migration inland, the Spanish state has allocated to Andalusian peasants a ‘frontline’ role in forging a European identity in opposition to the migrant ‘other’, although this involves what is essentially a class struggle between peasants who – themselves migrants once – are now ‘insiders’ and rural employers, and migrants who are their agricultural workers and the new ‘outsiders’. In the Andalusian village context this takes a specific ideological form: namely, disputes between peasant insider and migrant outsider over such things as their respective occupation of and rights to space in the locality.     

MEMORIAL ACCOUNTS

Under the conditions of narrative construction, young queer men's coming out stories present memorial accounts of ‘always-having-been’ queer; a queer childhood. The ways in which coming out stories operate have developed significantly over the past decade, particularly resulting from the use of online, digital technologies where such narratives proliferate. This article presents some initial theorisation of the role of young men's coming out narrative in the constitution of performative queer identity with a focus on the construction of memory. The article presents an overview of the history of coming out and the ways in which this history has influenced the conventions and genre of the coming out narrative online. It addresses some of the ways in which such memorial accounts are performative acts themselves, seeking to stabilise queer masculine identity, and ends with a discussion as to whether or not online sites such as YouTube continue or disrupt such stabilising narratives.     

Why Unfree Labour is Not ‘So-Called’: The Fictions of Jairus Banaji

In a recent critique of the deproletarianization thesis, which links the reproduction of unfree labour mainly - but not only - in Third World agriculture to class struggle prosecuted by capitalist producers, Banaji maintains in effect that there is no such thing as unfree labour. Equating the latter with nineteenth-century liberal ideas about freedom as consent, he conceptualizes all historical working arrangements simply as ‘disguised’ wage-labour that is free, a theoretically problematic claim first made during the Indian mode of production debate. Such a view, it is argued here, ignores the fact that unfree workers get paid and also appear in the labour market, but not as sellers of their own commodity. Moreover, by abolishing the free/unfree labour distinction, and adopting instead the view that all rural workers are simply ‘disguised’ hired labourers who are contractually ‘free’, Banaji aligns himself with anti-Marxist theory in general, and neoclassical economic historiography in particular.     

A victor's history: a comparative analysis of the labour historiography of Indonesia's New Order

Some observers have identified a common pattern in developing countries whereby unions are transformed from a political force valued for their contribution to the struggle for independence to a state-sponsored ‘tool of development’. A less well-explored question concerns the harnessing of labour historiography to justify such transitions. As this article shows, Suharto's New Order (1966–98) undertook a conscious and purposeful rewriting of Indonesian labour history in support of a single vehicle of labour representation organized around a narrative of the dangers of political unionism and designed to control and harness the industrial workforce in the name of economic development.