The politics of the agrarian question in turkey: Review of a debate

This article is a review of the major contributions to a debate between left‐wing Turkish intellectuals and political activists during 1969–71 over the character of Turkish agriculture and rural class structure and over the appropriate political strategy for the left. The crux of the disagreement, as in similar debates taking place at the same period in Latin America and India, was the extent to which feudal’ or ‘capitalist’ relations predominated in the countryside, and the implications for the class struggle ‐ in particular for the strategy of class alliances. On the one hand were those who supported a strategy for a ‘national democratic revolution ‘involving cooperation between peasants and workers and the progressive elements of the bourgeoisie to eliminate feudal relations and structures; on the other were those who argued that the Turkish countryside could in no sense be characterized as predominantly feudal, that the mass of rural producers were subject to essentially capitalist forms of exploitation and that any political strategy for socialists must recognize the predominance of capitalism in contemporary Turkey.     

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.     

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.     

Race,immigration and the agrarian question: farmworkers becoming farmers in the United States*

As White farmers in the United States retire en masse, the racial and ethnic demographics of US farming are shifting to now include a significant number of Latino farm owner-operators. Yet this population of new farmers, contributing specific technical expertise and knowledge, is not represented in current discussions concerning agrarian transitions. This paper draws on interview-based research conducted in the states of California, Maryland, New York, Minnesota and Washington, with first-generation Latino immigrant farmworkers who have transitioned to farm ownership. The majority are practicing small-scale and diverse crop production, with limited synthetic inputs and mostly family labor, as this form of farming allows them to reclaim control over their own labor and livelihoods, while also earning a cash income. The farmers included in this study, and their rationale for farming despite race- and citizenship-based challenges, cannot be understood simply through a lens of class transition. This contribution provides evidence that Latino immigrants’ ascendancy to farm ownership is instead a result of their struggle to redefine their relationship to land and labor in a country where their race and citizenship status have relegated them to the working poor.     

Surveying the agrarian question (part 1): unearthing foundations,exploring diversity

This two-part article surveys the origin, development, and current meaning of the ‘agrarian question’. Part one of the survey explores the history of the agrarian question, elaborating its origin in the work of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin, and its development in the work of Preobrazhensky, Dobb, Brenner, and others. Part two of the survey identifies seven current variants of the agrarian question and critically interrogates these variants in order to understand whether, and if so, how, the location of small-scale petty commodity food and farm production within contemporary capitalism has been reconfigured during the era of neoliberal globalisation. Together, the two parts of the survey argue that the agrarian question continues to offer a rigorously flexible framework by which to undertake a historically-informed and country-specific analysis of the material conditions governing rural production, reproduction, and the process of agrarian accumulation or its lack thereof, a process that can now be located within the law of value and market imperatives that operate on a world scale.     

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.     

Authoritarian populism and neo-extractivism in Bolivia and Ecuador: the unresolved agrarian question and the prospects for food sovereignty as counter-hegemony

ABSTRACT

The new economic flows ushered in across the South by the rise of China in particular have permitted some to circumvent the imperial debt trap, notably the ‘pink tide’ states of Latin America. These states, exploiting this window of opportunity, have sought to revisit developmentalism by means of ‘neo-extractivism’. The populist, but now increasingly authoritarian, regimes in Bolivia and Ecuador are exemplars of this trend and have swept to power on the back of anti-neoliberal sentiment. These populist regimes in Bolivia and Ecuador articulate a sub-hegemonic discourse of national developmentalism, whilst forging alliances with counter-hegemonic groups, united by a rhetoric of anti-imperialism, indigenous revival, and livelihood principles such as buen vivir. But this rhetorical ‘master frame’ hides the class divisions and real motivations underlying populism: that of favouring neo-extractivism, principally via sub-imperial capital, to fund the ‘compensatory state’, supporting small scale commercial farmers through reformism whilst largely neglecting the counter-hegemonic aims, and reproductive crisis, of the middle/lower peasantry, and lowland indigenous groups, and their calls for food sovereignty as radical social relational change. These tensions are reflected in the marked shift from populism to authoritarian populism, as neo-extractivism accelerates to fund ‘neo-developmentalism’ whilst simultaneously eroding the livelihoods of subaltern groups, generating intensified political unrest. This paper analyses this transition to authoritarian populism particularly from the perspective of the unresolved agrarian question and the demand by subaltern groups for a radical, or counter-hegemonic, approach to food sovereignty. It speculates whether neo-extractivism’s intensifying political and ecological contradictions can foment a resurgence of counter-hegemonic mobilization towards this end.     

No hay ganancia en la milpa: the agrarian question,food sovereignty,and the on-farm conservation of agrobiodiversity in the Guatemalan highlands

Although they receive little recognition for their contribution, peasant farmers in the global South play a fundamental role in securing the long-term global food supply. Via their self-sufficient agricultural practices, they cultivate the crop genetic diversity that enables food crops to adapt to changing environmental conditions. In this paper I draw upon empirical data from the Guatemalan center of agricultural biodiversity to investigate the concern that market expansion will displace peasant agriculture and undermine a cornerstone of the global food supply. I find that even though peasants' livelihoods involve multiple forms of market provisioning, they also engage in a Polanyian ‘double movement’ to protect their subsistence-oriented agricultural practices from the potentially deleterious effects of markets. I also investigate the so-called ‘agrarian question’ about the effects of market expansion on the viability of peasant agriculture, finding that although new forms of market provisioning are likely exacerbating rural inequality, the income from market activities actually enables rural Guatemalans to reproduce the conditions for peasant agriculture. Ultimately, I observe that the conservation of agricultural biodiversity and, consequently, global food security are contingent upon the ‘food sovereignty’ of peasant farmers.     

German agrarian institutions at the beginning of the sixteenth century: Upper Swabia as an example

This paper deals with three dynamic factors leading to rural social change in the years before 1525. The rise of population changed man/land ratios, brought alterations in inheritance customs, and helped create a class of landless agricultural labourers. Alterations in the nature of market relationships changed the balance between city and country and introduced new wage relationships in the countryside with the putting out system. Increasing articulation of state institutions led to attempts to rationalise armed force, brought taxation to pay for larger and more complex armies, and changed the relationships between central authority and subjects. The effects of these changes should be investigated regionally before generalisations about all of Central Europe are made, and the paper shows how one such regional study might be done.     

Persistence and polarisation: A study in the dynamics of agrarian contradiction

Backward agrarian economies like that of contemporary Bangladesh are generally held to be strongly subject to a process of polarisation between those with increasing ownership of land and those who become landless with nothing but their labour‐power to sell. Empirical evidence has often been at variance with such unilinear prognosis. Using data from south‐eastern Bangladesh, this study examines the complexity of the dynamics of backward agriculture. It is shown that the very process of polarisation itself generates a contradictory process of stabilisation of the small peasantry through the creation of supplementary income opportunities. It is the resultant dynamic which often manifests itself in the persistence of a large number of small‐owner farms amidst the process of polarisation.     

The peasantry in the feudal mode of production: Towards an economic model

Over the last thirty years a substantial body of historical writing has evolved which deals in one way or another with the nature and tendencies of feudal economy. From the shorter conjuncture‐studies published in Annales, the regional monographs sponsored in France, the monographic estate‐studies popular in England, to the more concentrated historical synopses based on them, this literature¹ covers a vast field, geographically and chronologically—sufficiently broad, in fact, to stimulate the recent tendency of historical writing to explore the character of feudal economy at a deeper level of abstraction. Kula's study [1970] stands today as the major forerunner of this tendency. Based largely on Kula's book, this short essay sketches a framework within which it becomes possible to explore more concretely the connections between commodity‐economy and feudal production, and the specific historical relationships between the enterprises of feudal production and the peasantry.²     

Land rights issues in Africa: the contribution of agrarian systems research in Burkina Faso

The standard approach to land issues is to consider that private property rights are more efficient because they encourage investment. Therefore, it is imperative to institute modern land rights to meet agricultural challenges in sub-Saharan Africa. Other authors stress the importance of the social role of customary law in farming communities. Establishing modern property rights would have exclusive discriminatory effects, especially on the poorest. This contribution attempts to clarify the links between land rights, technological change and social disparity using the agrarian system approach. Both the above-mentioned theories are put to the test here. The emergence of private property appears to be not the cause but the consequence of technical changes that arose as a specific result of the maintenance of customary rights. However, these same customary rights also paved the way for growing social disparity within farming communities.     

Soft budgets and elastic debt: farm liabilities in the agrarian political economy of post-Soviet Tajikistan

ABSTRACT

Since Tajikistan’s independence, market reforms and pressure from international donors have brought changes to the state’s role in the economy. The official narrative holds that the post-socialist state reduced its control over agriculture, but there are still various mechanisms through which it exerts control over farming. In this paper, I examine Tajikistan’s post-socialist agrarian change through the prism of farm debt. Farm debt used to be an accounting nuisance in Soviet agriculture as a result of so-called soft-budget constraints. In the political economy of post-socialist transformation, farm cotton debt has been transformed into indebted land. I classify this debt ‘elastic’ for its ambiguous nature. It ties farmers to land and makes farmers’ independence illusory. With an in-depth analysis based on original ethnographic insights, I aim to provide a theoretical contribution to the way in which debt is conceptualised and politicised in post-Soviet Tajikistan.     

Power and property: commercialization,enclosures, and the transformation of agrarian relations in Ethiopia

The transnational agrarian social movement Vía Campesina is campaigning to have the United Nations negotiate and implement a Declaration, and eventually an International Convention, on Peasants' Rights. This article analyzes the origins and demands of the campaign and the place of the claimed rights in international law. Peasant organizations hope to follow in the footsteps of indigenous peoples' movements that participated in the negotiations preceding the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The peasants' rights campaign has succeeded in linking its demands to discussions of the right to food in the United Nations, where concern is growing over the approach of the 2015 target for realizing the Millennium Development Goals, in particular the halving of the numbers of people suffering from hunger. The campaign is likely to face stiff resistance from powerful UN member states, but could achieve substantial advances even if the path to a convention is difficult or never completed.     

The land of no taboo: agrarian politics of neglect and care in Madagascar

ABSTRACT

In considering the complex relationships between taboo, culture and landscapes, it is productive to examine not only how people bestow taboos onto places, but also how they take them away. In this contribution, I use as a case study a 35-hectare parcel of agricultural land in Madagascar, where members of an extended family are debating whether or not to continue to follow their ancestral taboos while farming. Analyzing the debate, alternative historical, cultural and political narratives of land relationships emerge, including a fraught colonial history, ongoing battles over land tenure, shifting community demographics, and intergenerational conflicts. Overall, this stretch of land illustrates that agricultural landscapes may be rendered without taboo not because they lack meaning, but because they contain an excess of overlapping – and highly contentious – meanings.     

The coloniality of US agricultural policy: articulating agrarian (in)justice

Drawing on participatory action research with La Via Campesina’s US member groups, this paper traces the coloniality of US agricultural policy – and the uses of this analytic lens. The framework of coloniality conjures history, contextualizing US Department of Agriculture (USDA) racism within long legacies of subjugation, while paying homage to historical resistance. It raises the stakes regarding the neo-imperialism of agribusiness monopolies, while highlighting divide-and-conquer strategies and the colonialist mentalities that linger on despite reform. Assertions of coloniality, however, risk nostalgia for 18^th century pastorals, or may jeopardize hard-fought-for relationships of trust with USDA personnel. Deployment demands self-reflexivity, on the part of academia, which like the USDA is neo-colonial, yet not monolithic. Most importantly however, the discursive impact of coloniality builds upon existing, grassroots articulations of the need to decolonize agricultural policy. Calling out the coloniality of US agricultural policy echoes global revalorizations of peasant agriculture, while overcoming the constraints of the term ‘peasant’ in US-English-speaking contexts. Accordingly, it could facilitate dialogue among grassroots agrarian alliances within the US and, internationally, with international advocacy for peasants’ rights.