Class struggle in rural Maharashtra (India): Towards a new perspective

In the state of Maharashtra, in western India, the rural population can be usefully divided into tribals and non‐tribals, and it is only among tribals that there have been independent and effective movements of the rural poor. Some of the implications of this are examined and an attempt is made to explain why it should be so. Orthodox Marxist explanations have tended to run in terms of tribal characteristics conducive to organisation and the absence of such characterstics among the non‐tribal poor. Explanations of this kind are rejected. Within a political economy framework, in an analysis which is historical, the author, while giving due weight to the economic, assigns to ideology or consciousness more than just a site in the superstructure. Among tribals, the attempt to preserve identity, a consciousness of total distrust of outsiders, and an identification of all outsiders as exploiters are traced and shown to have been important in tribal movements of the rural poor. Among non‐tribals, the role of caste consciousness in relation to peasant strata in preventing the emergence of independent rural poor movements is given prominence, and the primacy of caste intervention in the class struggle posited. Much Marxist analysis of these issues has been rendered sterile by a refusal to contemplate such explanations.     

Class formation and class struggle in la convention,Peru

This paper has as its object the analysis of class formation, class struggle and its effects in the province of La Convention, Peru. The first section of the paper examines this process at the level of the province as a whole during the 1940–68 pre‐agrarian reform period, while the second and third sections focus on the same process in more detail as it relates to one particular rural estate during the period between 1973 and 1975 following the agrarian reform. The fourth section examines the question of political practice arising from the analysis elaborated in the two previous sections.     

Class dynamics and ideological construction in the struggle over fairness: a neo-Gramscian examination of the Fairtrade initiative

This paper develops a neo-Gramscian conceptual framework in order to examine the ideological constructs and political dynamics that frame the day-to-day workings of the certification-based Fairtrade initiative. To accomplish this goal, the paper resorts to the notion of a ‘comprehensive concept of control’, which accounts for the main ideological elements that constitute the Fairtrade vision of the world. The analysis of these imaginaries is complemented with an examination of the concrete ways in which they have been institutionalized in the Fairtrade system and the specific power relations between class fractions they promote. This is followed by an exploration of the way in which Fairtrade articulates the contradictory interests of a variety of class fractions, bringing them together under the shared objective of advancing the situation of small producers and workers in the global South. The paper finishes with a reflection on the main limitations inherent to Fairtrade’s concept of control and the political dynamics it entails.     

Class struggle and the deproletarianisation of agricultural labour in Haryana (India)

This article considers the way in which labour attachment is theorised, both in the 1950s Agricultural Labour Enquiries, and subsequently in the work of Rudra, Bardhan, and Breman. Common to all these texts is a positive conceptualisation of attached labour, and consequently the elimination of its element of unfreedom. Instead, the relation is presented in terms of a materially reciprocal exchange between landholder and worker, a transaction which from the viewpoint of the latter corresponds to a much sought‐after form of job insurance or subsistence guarantee. By contrast, it is suggested here that attachment constitutes de‐proletarianisation undertaken by capital in the course of class struggle, and that in Haryana the agricultural work‐force strongly dislikes this kind of employment.     

Special issue1 on Agrarian movements in Bihar: Comments on a review article

Henningham is taken to task for his misleading review article in The Journal of Peasant Studies (Vol.11, No. 4, July 1984) on the Special Issue on ‘Agrarian Movements in India: Studies on Twentieth Century Bihar’ (Vol.9, No.3, April 1982). It is suggested that Henningham seriously misrepresents the arguments in the Special Issue and uses his ‘review article’ as a vehicle for expounding the views presented in his own book, published in 1982.     

Class rule as patronage: Kinship,local ruling cliques and the state in rural sardinia

It is argued here that much of the literature on patron‐client relations is unsatisfactory because it tends to conceptualise the ruling classes of underdeveloped areas as individualised power brokers or ‘strong men’. Instead, one must identify those specific means of production which mark the class position of patrons, and which ultimately, are the basis of their power. Clientelism therefore not only refers to the economic position of the patrons, but also to a specific form of political power which is defined by the patron's relationship to the state. The paper addresses these questions by analysing the local ruling cliques of several communities in Central Sardinia. The pre‐World War II cliques differ markedly from those after the war, but they all have in common that they monopolise, at the local level, access to the state apparatus, that they are its local representatives, and that they are organised, and organise other classes, on the basis of kinship.     

The agrarian question and class contradictions in South Africa: Some theoretical considerations

The article first considers two dominant approaches to black rural social formations in South Africa, those of neo‐classical populism and radical political economy, examining their ideology and politics as well as their theoretical inadequacies. The major part of the article then provides a general interpretation of the theory and politics of the agrarian question in Marxism, which has strategic implications for the current phase of national democratic struggle in South Africa, as for democratic and socialist struggles elsewhere. This discussion concentrates on issues concerning the land question, the agriculture/industry contradiction and the worker‐peasant alliance, petty commodity production and class differentiation vs. a homogenised rural mass ('the people'), and the centrality of the agrarian question to national democratic struggles and those for socialist transformation.     

Persistence and polarisation in rural Bangladesh: Response to a debate

The authors here respond to the various comments on their original article in Vol.13, No.3 of The Journal of Peasant Studies. Their differences with the more traditional understanding of the process of differentiation of the peasantry are stressed and certain points arising from the comments are clarified. It is stressed that theirs is not an ‘equilibrium analysis’, but, rather, an analysis of the slow dynamics of differentiation, as opposed to the fast dynamics implied in classical Marxist models (including Lenin's).     

Becoming and being urban in Hanoi: Rural-urban migration and relations in Viet Nam

The discourse of the rural-urban migrant is that of a sojourner in the city, a man or a woman who will almost inevitably return to his or her rural roots and re-engage with farming and village living. In this paper we ask whether rural-urban migrants can ‘become’ urban and shed their identification as temporary denizens of the city. We develop a conceptual framework that provides five entry points to explore this process of becoming urban, and then apply the framework drawing on the experiences of migrants to Viet Nam's capital, Hanoi. We argue that even when migrants do return to their homelands they do so with altered priorities and on different terms. The experience of migration was not infrequently transformative and life-changing. While migrants may not ‘become’ urban in the fullest sense, their homeland had become a space of familial origin and emotional identification, not a place where people necessarily sought to reside, work, raise their children and build their lives.     

A response to comments on a review article on agrarian movements in Bihar,India

This rejoinder refutes the assertions made by Dr Sengupta in his comments (The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.12, No. 4, July 1985) on my review article on the Special Issue on ‘Agrarian Movements in Bihar’. It also argues that by failing to address squarely the issues raised in the review article, Dr Sengupta has conceded that the criticisms made are well founded.     

Ordenamento Territorial: Neo-developmentalism and the struggle for territory in the lower Brazilian Amazon

In this paper, I explore the tensions and conflicts arising from the territorial re-organization of western Pará state in the Brazilian Amazon associated with the paving of the Santarém–Cuiaba highway (BR-163). I argue that the set of forces, techniques and devices that constitute Ordenamento Territorial, or Territorial Ordering, re-territorialize the region with the spatialized logic of sustainable development, constituting a ‘green grab’, or a new strategy of governance over not only territory but also territoriality – the ways of life of Amazonia's inhabitants. Analyzing the formation of the Movement in Defense of Life and Culture of the Arapiuns River, I explore how social movements are shifting their strategies in relation to these new technologies of ordering.     

Agrarian contradictions and resistance in Faizabad district of Oudh (India)

The history of the Indian peasantry is a rather unexplored area even today. Hence, as some historians have complained with reference to histories of their own societies, a subject as vital as peasant resistance has received little attention despite a strong tradition of peasant militancy.¹ During the British period peasant resistance was greatly in evidence in the Awadh region. In this paper we examine the pattern and magnitude of peasant resistance in Faizabad, one of the major districts of Awadh, between 18S8 and 1920. This period was marked by the development and sharpening of internal contradictions in the agrarian structure and by resistance by various classes. It was the policies of the British administrators which played a vital role in sharpening the contradictions and strengthening one class at the cost of others. This paper brings out the nature and forms ofresistance; the manner in which it was built up over time; the reasons for its success in some cases and failure in others; and finally the inability of these frequent but isolated cases of resistance to culminate in a mass movement. The above exercise also leads one to question some of the basic assumptions of conventional Indian sociology which tend to assign to kinship and caste a predominant role in containing social tensions, including those emerging from agrarian contradictions. Contrary to the conventional view, membership in a kin or caste group does not necessarily lead to solidarity between members if they belong to different economic groups.     

disowning dependence: single women's collective struggle for independence and land rights in northwestern India

In April 2008 over 2,600 single women marched for three days to Shimla, the state capital of the northwestern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, to demand rights to land, health care and ration cards for single women. The march was organized by a new social movement called Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan, comprising divorced, abandoned, never-married women, widows and wives fleeing domestic violence who are demanding rights from the state in their own names (rather than as wives, daughters or mothers); in so doing they are directly challenging the construct of the ‘dependent woman’ naturalized in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial discourses. The most radical of the demands of this new social movement is the struggle for land rights and the creation of new women-centred family formations. Through an analysis of their collective demands, I argue that the normative, dependent woman is mutually constituted not only at the intersections of gender, kinship and heterosexuality, but also spatially, through denial of rights to land. As single women disown their dependence upon husbands/fathers/brothers and demand land rights, they simultaneously re-imagine gendered selves by envisioning new marital families and re-working the division of labour.