| Abstract: | 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. |
