Socio‐economic differentiation and relations of production among rural‐based petty producers in central Peru, 1880 to 1970.

In an attempt to uncover the complexity of socio‐economic differentiation, detailed evidence is presented of the changing production relations among the Huasicanchinos of Central Peru over a period of ninety years.

It is argued that the process of differentiation can only be understood within the context of a quite specific system of production. An examination of the specificity of the relations of production in a particular period then reveals the complexity of this differentiation process and exposes some of the difficulties involved in a class analysis where capitalist relations have not been generalised throughout the social formation.

The study of this group of Central Peruvian petty producers over ninety years reveals that the differentiation process was a function of specific features of the relations of production in each of three periods; these relations were themselves emergent from the articulation of huasicanchino petty production with the changing form of dominant capitalism in Peru. As a function of differing relations to large capital, petty production units took on a variety of forms. Qualitative differences in the form of small production units in one period then gave rise to quantitative differences in control over resources in a subsequent period. Quantitative differences were in turn expressed in variations in relations of production between controllers and direct producers, and so on.

It is concluded that assumptions about inevitable polarisation should not obscure the complexity of a process which can only be understood by reference to the particular history of a social formation.     

Terror in Japan

Observers of early twenty-first-century Japan commonly note economic, political, and social crisis, on the one hand, and pessimism, lethargy, or helplessness about the possibility of reform, on the other. Yet Japan's civil society was idealistic and energetic in the early postwar decades. What happened? The reform movement that captured much of the vitality of the early postwar decades was either foreclosed, as many were co-opted in the “all-for-growth” economism, consumerism, and the corporation, or crushed in successive waves of repression of dissidence as the cold war order took shape. Political parties sacrificed broad vision and ideals to narrow-interest articulation. While the mass base of the reform movement was discouraged, demoralized, and depoliticized, one minority in the late 1960s turned to violent revolution and another in the late 1980s turned inward to seek spiritual satisfaction. Both paths led to violence. This article looks at the course of the student movement between the late 1940s and the late 1970s, with particular reference to the Japan Red Army, and at the new religious movement Aum Supreme Truth in the 1980s and 1990s. Both adopted “terrorist” tactics, by almost any understanding of that term. However, they were children of their times, reflecting the same deep social, political, and moral problems that Japan as a whole continues to face in the early twenty-first century.     

Journal Publishing, Journal Reputation, and the United Kingdom's Research Assessment Exercise

Many academic lawyers believe that the Research Assessment Exercise has encouraged writing for academic journals, often at the expense of other forms of scholarly discourse. Moreover, it is widely perceived that the reputation of the journal in which research is published affects how that research is assessed in connection with the RAE. In this article, the authors report data gathered from a large-scale study measuring the perceptions of academic lawyers concerning the journal publishing process, how the RAE has affected journal quality generally, and how specific journals rank in terms of academic quality and their perceived importance to the RAE process.