The land exclusion dilemma and Sumatra’s agrarian reactionaries

Even as millions of rural workers have organized into agrarian movements, their efforts to benefit from progressive social mobilizations often fail. To understand how agrarian movements can overcome these difficulties, this contribution acknowledges a dilemma: As agrarian movement members create ties to land they necessarily confront new forms of exclusion. We discuss this exclusionary land dilemma, with a focus on Sumatra’s agrarian reactionaries as an elite class possessing a potent exclusionary force that seeks to erase agrarian movement legitimacy and block rural workers’ mobilizations to reclaim and occupy land. We trace these agrarian reactionaries’ public life across a state–corporate–criminal apparatus and their repression of two agrarian movement mobilizations. We find agrarian reactionaries’ actions offer a partial explanation for the still-limited gains of Sumatra’s rural workers’ movements. Agrarian reactionaries legitimize their exclusions with nativist, ethno-territorial ideas that co-opt indigenous rights claims. In response, laborers and agriculturalists are now refining a more inclusive land politics – one of greater unifying influence that does not depend upon claims of indigeneity – to overcome reactionary repression.     

Resistance,class struggle and social movements in Latin America: contemporary dynamics

ABSTRACT

This paper traces out the changing forms of the resistance associated with each advance in the capitalist development of the forces of production over the course of the neoliberal era in Latin America. The central argument is that the resistance to the forces of agrarian change and capitalist development over the past three decades has been mobilised by a succession of social movements, whose dynamics and changing forms can best be understood in terms of Marxist class theory. The central focus of the paper is on the current dynamics of the class struggle on the expanding frontier of extractive capital in South America in the context of what has been described as a ‘progressive cycle’ in Latin American politics – a cycle that to all appearances is coming to an end.     

Weapons of the week,weakness of the weapons: Shifts and stasis in development theory

Over the past half century the theory, practice and politics informing development studies have followed contrasting trajectories, a tangled epistemological pattern displayed inadvertently by some of the contributions to three of the four books reviewed here. This inconsistency has resulted in confusion, not least where current Marxist approaches to the agrarian question are concerned. Unsurprisingly, therefore, misinterpretations of unfree labour plus the jettisoning of class analysis have led to the abandonment of socialism, and its replacement with nationalism and bourgeois democracy as desirable political objectives. By locating rural class formation and agrarian struggle in a global capitalist context, however, one of the four books demonstrates the continuing importance of socialist politics to the study of development.     

First to third nature: the rise of capitalist conservation on Palawan Island,the Philippines

The social relations and agricultural lands that rural peoples in Southeast Asia hold in common are being commodified through the converging pressures of agrarian change, conservation and capitalist development. This paper examines how broader and local processes driving agrarian differentiation have been accelerated through the revaluing of people and nature in market terms to ostensibly finance conservation through development at the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park – the flagship protected area of Palawan Island, the Philippines. Drawing on the notions of ‘first’ and ‘third nature’, I show how the pace and scale of agrarian change between rural peoples has gone ‘fast forward’ with the onset of resource partitioning, objectification, commodification and, ultimately, revaluing through translocal ‘capitalist conservation’, the rise of conservation as capitalist production. I examine how the national park's valuing as a ‘common’ World Heritage has drawn major private sector investments that objectify, commodify and rearticulate the value of nature as capital that finances and merges conservation and development according to the images and ideals of the modern Philippines. The conclusion asserts that while the processes of differentiation and capitalist conservation facilitate the revaluing of nature in market terms, the overall process remains recursive, partial and context dependent.     

Introduction: Rethinking Agrarian Labor in the US South

This special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies seeks to broaden discussion of the history of rural labor in the post-Civil War US South beyond the confines of the cotton plantation, studies of sharecropping, and black-white race relations. This introduction summarizes the contributions to the special issue, highlighting their most significant points. Collectively, five interrelated issues emerge from the essays: the role of the state in mediating agrarian labor relations, the importance of paramilitary or vigilante violence in the reassertion of the social power wielded over rural laborers, the significance of access to land and other resources of rural self-sufficiency, the ongoing struggle over labor mobility, and the recomposition of agrarian households as units of production.     

A tribute to Willem Assies (1954–2010): reflections on his contribution to peasant and indigenous studies

This article discusses the manifold contributions of Willem Assies to the social sciences and Latin American studies. It focuses on his writings on agrarian and peasant studies, social movements, and indigenous peoples. In particular, he made important contributions to our understanding of multicultural citizenship, the multiethnic state, and plurinational democracy. His writings had a major impact on those working on rural and indigenous peoples' issues, although the Dutch academic establishment largely failed to appreciate his exceptional talents. It is argued in this article that he never wavered from his early recognition of the importance of class in social analysis, while acknowledging its limitations. In his view, one of the central challenges facing the indigenous peoples' social movements was how to link indigenous issues to general national problems. To what extent had they met this challenge? His premature death prevented him from exploring this key issue further, but hopefully other scholars will take up the baton and continue to debate his ideas.     

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.     

Women and rural revolt in India

Women's major productive role (outside of the home) in agriculture and the crucial part which women play in peasant revolts have been more or less ignored by social scientists. In this paper an attempt is made to analyse the interconnections between class and sexual oppression, and between women's movements and class struggle, in rural India: with class structure, the nature of society, and the development of social movements looked at from the viewpoint of women themselves. With the use of two key concepts, work participation and mode of production, it is argued that in India, increasingly during the last decade, capitalism has developed in the countryside, and that, with the changing social relations of production, there has emerged a mass‐based and militant women's movement, whose objective basis has been the militancy of women of the rural poor. This is illustrated for a variety of Indian states, but especially for the state of Maharashtra.     

Reworking the metabolic rift: La Vía Campesina,agrarian citizenship,and food sovereignty

Amidst increasing concerns about climate change, food shortages, and widespread environmental degradation, a demand is emerging for ways to resolve longstanding social and ecological contradictions present in contemporary capitalist models of production and social organisation. This paper first discusses how agriculture, as the most intensive historical nexus between society and nature, has played a pivotal role in social and ecological change. I explore how agriculture has been integrally associated with successive metabolic ruptures between society and nature, and then argue that these ruptures have not only led to widespread rural dislocation and environmental degradation, but have also disrupted the practice of agrarian citizenship through a series of interlinked and evolving philosophical, ideological, and material conditions. The first section of the paper thus examines the de-linking of agriculture, citizenship, and nature as a result of ongoing cycles of a metabolic rift, as a ‘crucial law of motion’ and central contradiction of changing socio-ecological relations in the countryside. I then argue that new forms of agrarian resistance, exemplified by the contemporary international peasant movement La Vía Campesina's call for food sovereignty, create a potential to reframe and reconstitute an agrarian citizenship that reworks the metabolic rift between society and nature. A food sovereignty model founded on practices of agrarian citizenship and ecologically sustainable local food production is then analysed for its potential to challenge the dominant model of large-scale, capitalist, and export-based agriculture.     

The end of alternatives? Capitalist transformation,rural activism and the politics of possibility in China†

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the politics of possibility for rural activism in reform era China. By periodizing rural reforms from 1990, we explore the political-economic changes that have coalesced in the reform era, and how these changes condition forms and possibilities of activism. We argue that the current modernization–urbanization drive that emerged around 2008 is foreclosing opportunities for the pro-peasant cooperative forms that New Rural Reconstruction activists imagined earlier in the decade. Instead, as the process of capitalist agrarian change deepens in the countryside, food- and farming-related activism now resembles the state’s focus on markets and consumption, to the detriment of addressing social relations of production. Without a focus on distributional politics and power, this shift has the potential to further entrench existing inequalities within and across rural and urban spaces. The contextual work undertaken in this paper is currently absent from the emerging literature on China’s agrifood transformations.     

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 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.     

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.     

The land question: special economic zones and the political economy of dispossession in India

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have become the epicenters of ‘land wars’ across India, with farmers resisting the state's forcible transfer of their land to capitalists. Based on 18 months of research focused on an SEZ in Rajasthan, this paper illuminates the role of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (ABD) in Indian capitalism today and its consequences for rural India. It argues that the existing theories of land grabs do not adequately explain why dispossession becomes necessary to accumulation at particular times and places, and seeks to reconstruct Harvey's theory of ABD to adequately account for it. It then shows the specific kind of rentier- and IT-driven accumulation that dispossession is making possible in SEZs and the non–labor-absorbing, real-estate–driven agrarian transformation this generates in the surrounding countryside. Land speculation amplifies class and caste inequalities in novel ways, marginalizes women and creates an involutionary dynamic of agrarian change that is ultimately impoverishing for the rural poor. Given the minimal benefits for rural India in this model of development, farmer resistance to land dispossession is likely to continue and pose the most serious obstacle to capitalist growth in India. The agrarian questions of labor and capital are, consequently, now rejoined in ‘the land question.’     

Are Latin American peasant movements still a force for change? Some new paradigms revisited

This article is a critique of structuralist and postmodern approaches to the study of agrarian reform and the viability, nature and significance of peasant and landless movements in Latin America. Contrary to the dominant structuralist view, we argue that peasant and landless workers’ movements in Latin America are not anachronistic but dynamic modern classes, which in many contexts play a major role in opposing the dominant neoliberal agenda. Against postmodern interpretations of such grassroots agrarian movements, we also argue that in terms of action and programme, peasant and landless workers’ movements have raised fundamental class issues, in some instances combining them with ethnic demands. Deploying a reconstituted class analysis, we examine four cases of peasant/landless workers movements currently challenging state power: the Rural Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, the Revolutionary Armed Forces in Colombia, the National Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities in Ecuador, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico. Our conclusion is that in the current context, peasant and landless workers’ movements in Latin America are engaged in a modern form of struggle, combining traditional forms of solidarity not only with the acceptance/adaptation of modern goals and techniques, but also with a strategic understanding of the levers of power in the national and international system.     

Migration in colonial India: The articulation of feudalism and capitalism by the Colonial State

In this article a particular factual model of the way in which imperialism worked with respect to the Indian economy, which is widely accepted, is contested. The model in question assumes that though imperialism acts to transform agriculture—disintegrating and dissolving the traditional village structure—because it also thwarted industrialisation, backwardness in agriculture and dependence were maintained: the transformation of agrarian relations of production is contrasted with the stagnation of industrial growth, and the latter is held to be the causal factor. Against this it is argued that an examination of colonial migration reveals both the specific characteristics of the colonial working class it produced and the continuing existence of feudal ties of dependence in agriculture. The situation is best conceptualised in terms of the existence within the Indian social formation of feudal (agrarian) and proto‐capitalist (mines, plantations, factories) modes of production, articulated in such a way that the main costs of reproduction of labour power that was sold in the capitalist sector were borne in the non‐capitalist agrarian sector. The article concentrates on the period from the 1880s to the 1930s.     

The case for Agrarian capitalism: A response to albritton

Albritton finds Brenner's designation ‘agrarian capitalism’ inappropriate for early English agriculture, as the law of value and the commodification of labour are undeveloped. But Brenner is not theorising a ‘full‐blown’ capitalism. His theory traces a process of transition, by which new rules for social reproduction and a new capitalist logic unfolded gradually. Albritton's evidence, moreover, actually supports Brenner's thesis. Charges of class reductionism misconstrue Brenner's efforts to overcome the tendency to dichotomise society into political and economic spheres. Brenner's theory provides what the bourgeois paradigm does not: a logical explanation of how market dependency and capitalist classes emerged.     

浅析欧洲早期青年工人运动的几个问题

欧洲早期的青年运动并非总是反映在反对资产阶级和帝国主义的斗争中,而是首先体现在反对封建势力及其残余的资产阶级民族民主革命斗争中;另一方面,青年工人运动作为无产阶级反对资产阶级斗争的重要组成部分,是随着无产阶级的成熟发展而发展起来的。     

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.     

Mobilization and state formation on a frontier of Vietnam

Defining mobilization as a powerful tactic and social process enables a critical analysis of state power as well as its spatial configurations and legitimation practices. Mobilization in the site of ?in Biên Ph first appeared during military confrontation (1952–54) and reappeared during land reform (1953–57) and collectivization (1959–60), all of which transformed agrarian community forms, political relations, and economic production – although not always as intended. Analyzing its use, meaning, and contingent effects on a frontier of an emerging Vietnam underlines how mobilization drew on and produced power to regulate relations of rule and production within an emerging nation-state. Drawing on historical sources and in dialog with literatures on social movements and comparative politics, this paper considers a series of mobilizations to represent distinct but inter-related stages in a process of statemaking.