Neoliberalism on the Ground in Rural India: Predatory Growth,Agrarian Crisis,Internal Colonization,and the Intensification of Class Struggle

Focusing on the countryside and rural poor, this article delineates the contours and considers the effects of the Indian state's adoption of neoliberal policies in the early 1990s. It argues that the shift to neoliberalism has produced a pattern of predatory growth that has privileged urban India, entailed a withdrawal of state support for the agrarian sector, and increasingly involved the forcible expropriation of the land and resources of the rural poor. This pattern and the neoliberal policies underpinning it have precipitated an agrarian crisis, while domestic and international capital have been the principal beneficiaries of the ‘internal colonization’ of the poor through dispossession and suppression. At the same time, the shift to neoliberalism has formed the specific context for an intensification of agrarian class conflict that has included the mobilization of rural elites as well as the rural poor.     

Book reviews

During the past two decades agrarian (‘land and farm’) reforms have been widespread in the transition economies of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA), following earlier ones in Asia (China and Vietnam). However, independent family farms did not become the predominant sector in most of Eastern Europe. A new dual (or bi-modal) agrarian structure emerged, consisting of large farm enterprises (with much less social functions than they had before), and very small peasant farms or subsidiary plots. The paper compares five case studies, looking at agrarian actors, property rights, state influence, and rural poverty. These are Russia, Armenia, Moldova and Uzbekistan in the EECCA region, and China's Xinjiang province in Asia. The paper concludes that state influence is still substantial, property rights regimes are quite diverse and rural poverty remains medium to high. State-led agrarian reform, in particular where a redistributive (or restitution-based) land reform was implemented led in some cases to land-based wealth redistribution, but policies and institutions were lacking to support the individual farm sector. More often the outcome was a rapid transfer of land in the hands of corporate farm enterprises, reversing the initial process of ‘re-peasantization’. It seems that the old ‘Soviet dream’ of mega-farm enterprises in the ‘transition to capitalism’ has regained prominence, with huge agro-holdings ‘calling the shots’, providing an insecure future for agricultural workers, peasants and farmers.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Agrarian class structure in Nicaragua in 1980: A new interpretation and some implications

The processing and analysis of a family rural survey which covered more than 50,000 families is used to reinterpret Nicaraguan agrarian class structure in 1980, the starting point of the agrarian reform. The author contrasts his results with those of a prior processing and the conclusions of other analysts. The article concludes by considering the implications of the work for present agrarian class structure and for social and economic policies in agriculture, particularly those affecting the middle peasantry.     

Agrarian reform and the transition to socialism in Chile, 1970–1973

The purpose of this article is to examine Popular Unity's agrarian policy in the light of the failure of the revolutionary forces to capture power and initiate a transition to socialism in Chile. We argue that Popular Unity's agrarian policy reflects the limitations and contradictions of its strategy to power. Although Allende's agrarian reform was extensive, drastic and rapidly executed, it nevertheless limited the peasantry's contribution to the revolutionary struggle for power. In the first part we briefly examine the agrarian legacy left by the Christian Democrat government of Frei to the Popular Unity and present the agrarian programme of Allende's government. We proceed in the second part with an analysis of peasant mobilisation and organisation, focusing on land seizures and peasant councils. In the third part we devote our attention to the organisation and functioning of the expropriated latifundia, which constituted the reformed sector, and examine why socialist relations of production failed to develop. Finally, in the fourth part, we attempt an assessment of Popular Unity's agrarian policy from the viewpoint of the accumulation of revolutionary forces in the rural sector by highlighting some of its contradictions.     

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 politics of private farming in Russia

This article seeks to explore why private farming in Russia has fared so poorly even after private farming was designated the centrepiece of Russian land reform and political capital was invested in its success. The underlying causes for the lack of success extend beyond economic and social factors. While the entire agricultural sector has been adversely affected by reform policies undertaken since 1992, private farmers have been hurt the most because they were more vulnerable. Private farmers have not been successful in defending their interests because they are politically weak, a fact that led them to seek out urban alliances whose interests differ from private farmers, and because of intra‐rural divisions that have weakened the efforts by agrarians to defend their interests.     

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.     

Rural responses to reform in Post-Soviet countries

This review article discusses three books on post-communist agrarian reforms. At the heart of the discussion are questions over the efficacy of market reform and rural responses to reform policies. The article argues that the conception of reform that stemmed from the Washington Consensus was often too narrow and did not always lead to expected results, and indeed, sometimes led to unwanted, unintended results. Nonetheless, the three books are highly suggestive of rural adaptation in most post-communist nations. The nature and degree of adaptation to a new economic environment across several post-communist nations represent a critical mass of rural responses. Instead of seeing rural responses as resistant to change, or victims of change, a more nuanced view of reform appreciates the transformation in social and economic relations engendered by market reform.     

Neo-feudalism in Latin America? Globalisation,agribusiness, and land re-concentration in Chile

This article traces the effects of globalisation on an export-oriented ‘hotspot’ in Chile's non-traditional agricultural export sector. Drawing on evidence from fieldwork carried out in 1994 and in 2004/5, the analysis examines the impact of neoliberal policy over the past two decades. Although the fruit export sector is seen as a key success story of the Chilean economy, and is an area to which small producers are often encouraged to ‘reconvert’, it is argued here that the outcome has been land re-concentration, marginalisation and proletarianisation. Small farmers become increasingly locked into dependent relationships with larger landowners and agribusiness, whilst others form a rural proletariat that serves these concerns. Whilst some commentators have labelled this process ‘semi’ or ‘neo’ feudalism, this article maintains that we are witnessing a deepening fragmentation of the peasantry driven by the continued development of capitalism. The gains of the earlier land reform period are being eroded as rural Chile differentiates and depeasantisation unfolds.     

Chinese state capitalism and neomercantilism in the contemporary food regime: contradictions,continuity and change

ABSTRACT

A significant proportion of critical agri-food literature has, to date, focused on the uneven relations of power between the Global North and the Global South, and the neoliberal characteristics of the corporate food regime. This literature has often overlooked the nuances in varieties of capitalism, particularly in East Asia. China is re-emerging as a powerful state actor in an increasingly multipolar global food system. It is also an important hub of capital, facilitating agribusiness mergers and acquisitions, as well as new East–South and South–South flows of agri-food trade, technology and capital. This paper aims to contribute to understanding state-led capitalism in China and neomercantilist strategies in the agri-food sector. The paper provides a critical analysis of a case study of China's state owned agri-food and chemical companies ‘going global’. It contends that the current food regime is in a period of transition or interregnum – a period of fluidity separating the continuity of successive regimes. Arguably, the analytical contours of a contemporary food regime in transition cannot be adequately comprehended without recognising the incipient importance of state-led capitalism and neomercantilism, and how contemporary socio-political and economic dynamics are reshaping relations of power in the global political economy of food.     

Rural employment and agrarian markets in transition: Nicaragua (1979–89)

The article deals with state intervention in agrarian produce markets and the rural labour market in post‐revolutionary Nicaragua. Basing itself in the debate about the Nicaraguan agrarian class structure, it analyses the development of the internal terms of trade, the rapid integration of the peasantry in the market and its positive response to recent liberalisation measures. The labour market seems to show developments contrary to economic logic. Detailed analysis concludes that labour demand declined more slowly than supply. However, only recently this led to higher real wages after a long period of deterioration. Further income differentiation also seems a possible unwanted outcome.     

Life Cycle,Labour Remuneration,and Gender Inequality in a Chinese Agrarian Collective

Conventional wisdom about gender inequality and labour remuneration on agrarian collectives in rural China has emphasized various discriminatory practices against women. Using a life cycle approach, this article examines instead the way in which men and women possess changing patterns of and opportunities for work at different stages of their lives. Drawing on economic and demographic data from an agrarian collective in East China, gender differentiation is scrutinized in terms of how work assignment, labour remuneration and work attendance rates were transformed over time. A number of other factors – the persistence of pre-revolutionary patriarchal ideology, as well as government policies on population control and work incentives – that influenced the way in which peasant households deployed labour on the agrarian collective during the 1970s also had a gendered impact on work remuneration.     

Murder,cruelty and sexual assaults

As more and more political institutions stress the significance of gender equality policies, it becomes important to investigate the different interpretations and meanings attached to the concept of gender equality in diverse policy contexts. In this article we are interested in problematizing visions of gender equality by studying the challenges that the growing amount of paid domestic work performed within European households poses for gender equality policies and practices in two European countries. The aim is to reveal normative assumptions and silences in relation to gender equality by comparing how “paid domestic work” has been framed in policy debates in Sweden and Spain. As welfare states, Sweden and Spain are generally considered to be very different, and in policies on care for children and the elderly the differences are perhaps most apparent. In both countries, however, paid domestic work in the home has become more and more common in the last two decades. The rise of paid domestic services in European households has been interpreted as due to the limitations or decline of welfare states, the ageing populations, and the increasing numbers of dual-earner families. These services are most often provided by women, predominantly of immigrant background, and involve a wide range of tasks, including care work. The phenomenon of an increasing sector of domestic (care) work poses a theoretical and methodological challenge to gender and welfare studies. This article argues that the analysis of debates surrounding domestic service in private households is a useful starting-point for an intersectional analysis by means of revealing the normative assumptions and marginalization embedded in gender equality policies. It uses a comparative frame analysis in combination with intersectional analysis to assess how interactions between gender, class, race, and sexuality have been articulated in the policy debates on domestic services in Spain and Sweden.     

The Campesino-to-Campesino agroecology movement of ANAP in Cuba: social process methodology in the construction of sustainable peasant agriculture and food sovereignty

Agroecology has played a key role in helping Cuba survive the crisis caused by the collapse of the socialist bloc in Europe and the tightening of the US trade embargo. Cuban peasants have been able to boost food production without scarce and expensive imported agricultural chemicals by first substituting more ecological inputs for the no longer available imports, and then by making a transition to more agroecologically integrated and diverse farming systems. This was possible not so much because appropriate alternatives were made available, but rather because of the Campesino-a-Campesino (CAC) social process methodology that the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) used to build a grassroots agroecology movement. This paper was produced in a 'self-study' process spearheaded by ANAP and La Via Campesina, the international agrarian movement of which ANAP is a member. In it we document and analyze the history of the Campesino-to-Campesino Agroecology Movement (MACAC), and the significantly increased contribution of peasants to national food production in Cuba that was brought about, at least in part, due to this movement. Our key findings are (i) the spread of agroecology was rapid and successful largely due to the social process methodology and social movement dynamics, (ii) farming practices evolved over time and contributed to significantly increased relative and absolute production by the peasant sector, and (iii) those practices resulted in additional benefits including resilience to climate change.     

The Campesino-to-Campesino agroecology movement of ANAP in Cuba: social process methodology in the construction of sustainable peasant agriculture and food sovereignty

Agroecology has played a key role in helping Cuba survive the crisis caused by the collapse of the socialist bloc in Europe and the tightening of the US trade embargo. Cuban peasants have been able to boost food production without scarce and expensive imported agricultural chemicals by first substituting more ecological inputs for the no longer available imports, and then by making a transition to more agroecologically integrated and diverse farming systems. This was possible not so much because appropriate alternatives were made available, but rather because of the Campesino-a-Campesino (CAC) social process methodology that the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) used to build a grassroots agroecology movement. This paper was produced in a ‘self-study’ process spearheaded by ANAP and La Via Campesina, the international agrarian movement of which ANAP is a member. In it we document and analyze the history of the Campesino-to-Campesino Agroecology Movement (MACAC), and the significantly increased contribution of peasants to national food production in Cuba that was brought about, at least in part, due to this movement. Our key findings are (i) the spread of agroecology was rapid and successful largely due to the social process methodology and social movement dynamics, (ii) farming practices evolved over time and contributed to significantly increased relative and absolute production by the peasant sector, and (iii) those practices resulted in additional benefits including resilience to climate change.     

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.