Peasant essentialism and the Agrarian question in the Colombian Andes

Our Daily Bread: The Peasant Question and Family Farming in the Colombian Andes, by Nola Reinhardt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Pp.xv + 308. US$35.

This review article considers a number of problems which arise from an incorrect theorisation of the agrarian question. Instead of a transformation in which some peasants become small capitalists and others de facto workers, rural change is said to involve an absolute opposition: in economic terms the whole peasantry either dissolves or persists. Since the former is clearly not the case, the continued existence of peasants in Colombia is attributed by the book under review to their economic efficiency. Its essentialist framework therefore conceptualises all peasants as a uniform body of commodity producers, rather than as internally differentiated strata incorporating disparate class elements. In contrast to this neo‐populist approach, it is suggested here that capitalist peasants and de facto proletarians are indeed present — but not recognised as such ‐ in the context studied.     

Merchants and peasants in the Nazareth region, 1922 – 47

In Nazareth, the wholesale merchants of agricultural commodities made every effort to acquire crops during harvest time, when commodity prices were at their lowest, and to sell them a few months later when demand (and prices) had increased. To facilitate this, merchants established close economic ties with peasant proprietors, in particular by providing them with a ‘safety net’ in lean years in the form of loans at comparatively attractive rates. An unwritten part of this arrangement was that a peasant in such a relationship with a merchant would market most of the surplus of his cash crops at harvest time. A contract in the credit market was thus simultaneously a contract in the goods market, ensuring that merchants would receive payment in crops, while peasants were paid in advance for their produce. It was also the custom that in cases of default, the merchant became the owner of the mortgaged land and the former landowner became the tenant. In such circumstances, the new tenancy agreement was usually interlinked with other agreements, especially in regard to animal husbandry.     

How agrarian cooperatives fail: Lessons from 1970s Peru

Given current interest in the agrarian cooperative as an egalitarian institutional form to counter the economic effects of neoliberalism, considered here is how class divisions/distinctions operated inside one such unit in the 1970s. Of particular interest is the way idioms and forms of struggle used by bureaucrats, peasants and agricultural labourers in a Peruvian agrarian cooperative during that decade challenge one of the enduring myths of development theory. The latter invokes a familiar dichotomy to explain the failure of rural cooperatives: a powerful state bureaucracy imposing inappropriate policy on an undifferentiated and uniformly powerless peasantry. The case study presented here suggests that, on a number of crucial issues (privatization of co-owned means of production, the employment of labour-power that was unfree), it was much rather better-off peasants who overruled bureaucrats and imposed their own accumulation project.     

Protestantism and capitalism revisited,in the rural highlands of Ecuador

The central concern of this paper is to examine some of the consequences of the penetration of capitalism among a‐ group of Ecuadorian Indian peasants, recently converted to Protestantism. Particular attention is given to the role played by certain ideological practices in the extraction and appropriation of the peasants’ surplus. It is argued that, in addition to the analysis of the economic aspects of the interdependence between capitalist and non‐capitalist modes of production, the concept of ‘ideological articulation’ is particularly useful in the understanding of those social formations which have suffered successive colonialisms. The problem of Protestantism is analyzed in the context of the changing social relations of production, and in relation to the ideologies of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationalism’. The paper concludes with some remarks on the redefinition of ‘tradition’, and on the development of political consciousness among Indian peasants.     

Gandhi and India's peasants, 1917–22

The general problem raised here is peasant involvement in Afro‐Asian nationalist movements. As a case study the focus is M. K. Gandhi's attitude to and activities among Indian peasants from 1917 to 1922 and their response, firstly to his broad span of rural work for social reform and the rectification of particular peasant grievances, and then to his India‐wide passive resistance campaigns on continental issues which had no specifically rural appeal. This analysis underlines the fact that ‘India's peasants’ were no monolithic group. They differed from area to area in economic and social position and were further fragmented by the ties of religion, tribe and caste. Consequently the nature and range of their wider public awareness varied, and their relationships with Gandhi were diverse and complicated. In certain areas he attracted wide support, even adulation, particularly where he campaigned on local grievances. But peasant response to his all‐India calls for passive resistance was geographically restricted, and often dependent on a very garbled understanding of the issues at stake and the expected pay‐offs of the movement. Peasant activists were often outside Gandhi's control; and this threat to cohesion and discipline made him very ambivalent towards wide rural participation. His relationship with India's peasantry illustrated the problems any continental leader or organisation faced in trying to accommodate ‘national’ appeals and tactics to the diverse and often specifically local needs of rural groups — an accommodation which was difficult, dangerous yet essential in some degree if nationalist movements were to be broadly based.     

农村人力资本投资的影响因素分析

农村人力资本投资不但受到经济发展水平与风险因素的影响,还会受到政府投资政策与投资体制的影响。总得来看,由于政府财力有限以及在投资过程中的城市化倾向、农民收入增长缓慢和人力资本流动造成的风险使得农村人力资本投资水平比较低。     

Clash of resource use regimes in Colonial Assam: A nineteenth‐century puzzle revisited

In the nineteenth‐century the British colonial government in Assam tried to change the land titles of Assamese peasants from annual leases to decennial leases. But Assamese peasants mostly abandoned their claim to their land after a single harvest. The peasants’ behaviour gives a clue to the impact of the colonial land settlement project whose major effect was to eliminate the access of shifting cultivators and hunter‐gatherers of the Brahmaputra Valley and the surrounding hills to most natural resources. The major beneficiary of land settlement were the tea planters. The behaviour of the Assamese peasant reflected the habits formed by the old resource use regime.     

Peasants and labourers in Southern Spain,Cuba, and Highland Peru

This paper discusses some of the differences and similarities between a peasantry and an agricultural proletariat and considers the economic relations between peasants or labourers and landowners. The examples are drawn mainly from studies of Southern Spain, Cuba and Peru. The paper de‐emphasises the specificity of ‘peasant society’ as an object of study both from the economic and the socio‐political point of view.     

Nostalgia for Pearl Buck's ‘the good earth’∗

Until the Chinese peasants made their revolution in 1949 they were known to the Western world almost exclusively as the product of Pearl Buck's (1892–1973) prose. The influence of The Good Earth was even more widespread than that of Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China. We are only now beginning to understand the peculiarities of that influence and the fictitious half‐world in which China's peasants were placed. Rural reality is only recently beginning to cut away at the historical fiction that has governed much of our thinking about China. In this little reminiscence, Imabori Seiji, himself once seduced by the humanitarian fantasies of The Good Earth, recalls how he first began the search for real peasants out there in the villages of north China. [H. L. Kahn]     

土地关联:家园依托与社会保障——新型工资劳动者角色规定及价值选择的基本条件

新型工资劳动者的身份具有二重性 ,其职业是工人 ,社会身份仍是农民。农民的“家园意识”以及他们承包的土地所具有的保险意义规定了他们的社会角色 ,并对他们的价值选择发生重要影响。割断新型工资劳动者同家园与土地的联系是必然的趋势 ,其根本途径是继续深化改革。     

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.     

经济转型中的农民工身份认同差异与不平等待遇

随着社会化大生产的发展,大量农民必然要转变为工人阶级是一个普遍规律,在转变过程中世界各国都普遍存在一个过渡期,存在身份认同差异和不平等待遇。而中国农民在向工人的转变过程中,不仅具有世界各国在经济转型期的普遍现象,而且具有自身的特殊性,即产生了"农民工"这一特殊群体,致使中国农民在向工人转变的过程中,身份认同差异和不平等现象更加突出。     

Reflections on Peasant Adaptation in Rural Russia at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: The Stolypin Agrarian Reforms

The Stolypin reforms in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century are usually understood as a revolutionary attempt to destroy the peasantry and peasant culture through legal coercion; in fact, they were a more moderate attempt to encourage change through voluntary procedures. In terms of both the numbers of peasants embracing them and their social impact, the reforms were also more successful than has traditionally been acknowledged. A key reason for their success was the synergistic relationship between the reform process and the deepening marketization of rural and urban economic environments in conjunction with the peasants' increasing willingness to adapt to and take advantage of the new opportunities these processes created. The reforms' positive outcomes contrast sharply with the results of current reforms in Russia and highlight the critical role of market supporting institutions in creating a supportive environment.     

Land reform in Iran a case study in the political economy of social engineering

This paper is a study of the Persian land reform between 1962 and 1972. It examines the genesis of the reform, its implementation and its effects, with reference to the specific features of the historical development of the Iranian society. It shows that land reform has not improved the socio‐economic status of the peasantry as a whole, while it has affected a large proportion of the peasants adversely. It offers theoretico‐empirical evidence that instead of creating an independent peasantry and a more autonomous urban bourgeoisie, the reform has led to the further consolidation of the traditional socio‐economic power of the state over all social classes.     

Popular culture,symbolism and rural radicalism in nineteenth‐century France

This article explores the relationship between the modernisation of economic life, collective protest and politics and the centuries‐old pattern of popular festivals and rituals. The rise of social‐democratic republicanism among the small peasants of Mediterranean France in the mid‐nineteenth century did not occur at the expense of popular culture. The reconciliation of these two mainsprings of collective life was facilitated by the use of symbolic modes of public behaviour, investing politics and popular culture with mutually reinforcing potency. Only in later decades did socio‐economic and political developments decay this culture.     

Indigenous Struggles for Land and Culture in Cauca,Colombia

This article examines the multiple and interrelated struggles of the indigenous population - composed in the main of smallholding peasants - of Cauca in Colombia. The article discusses not only their struggles against economic exploitation, political and cultural oppression, and military violence, therefore, but their role in a revolutionary process that seeks to build a society based on social justice and respect for human rights. Through a peaceful and persistent collective action, they have recovered a large part of their ancestral territories, elevated the level of literacy and conscientization, and revived many aspects of indigenous culture. However, the intensification in militarization and repression that has accompanied neo-liberal economic policies imposed 'from above' has in effect undermined the formal recognition by the Colombian Constitution of their territorial and cultural rights. It is argued here that current mobilization undertaken by indigenous communities is characterized by two interrelated challenges: resistance that is peaceful, plus a failure to transcend locality and to ally with other non-rural anti-systemic movements.     

Peasants,grapes and corporations: The growth of contract farming in a Chilean community

This article examines the social implications of contract farming promoted in smallholding areas. It is argued that rather than resulting in overall proletarianisation of the local peasantry, contract farming may accelerate its differentiation and disintegration by converting rich peasants into peasant capitalists. The argument is supported by a historical analysis of socio‐economic and organisational processes in a Chilean smallholding community which experienced two consecutive waves of agribusiness expansion: a tobacco boom in the 1950s and a fruit export expansion in the 1970s and 1980s.     

The calculus of profit and labour‐time in Sudanese peasant agriculture

In this article I argue that discourse on peasants and social change has tended to rest on unwarranted evolutionist assumptions embedded in oppositional models of past and present. Through an examination of recent changes in Sudanese peasant agriculture, I seek to show that these changes cannot adequately be grasped in terms of transitions from domestic to commodity production or pre‐capitalist to capitalist modes of production. Rather, these changes have been internal to capitalism and reflect changes in the dynamics of capital accumulation in Sudan and the ways in which peasants have responded to the intrusive logic of capitalist calculation.