Abstract
Traced here is the way peasant economy/culture has been reconceptualized in academic studies over the past three decades. The pre-war image of innate family farmers as embodiments of national identity, a populist discourse mobilized by the political right in Europe and Asia, was replaced by modernization theory during the post-war era. The object was to promote economic development, thereby challenging populist images of unchanging and unchangeable rural ‘otherness’. With the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s, however, there has been an academic resurgence of agrarian populist interpretations and a consequent return to pre-war concepts of peasant economy/culture.
Despite periodic attempts to deny this, academic study of petty commodity production still centres on what are essentially two rival interpretations: Marxism and agrarian populism. It is with the latter that anthropology has – with few exceptions – tended to side (e.g. Apffel-Marglin, 1998; Cancian, 1989; Maclachlan, 1987; Mencher, 1983; Netting, 1993; Sahlins, 1972) in debate about whether or not peasant family farming is declining or economically viable. The significance of this is that, as a consequence anthropology has moved to the forefront of current academic discussion regarding the fate of the peasantry. Unlike 1960s modernization theory opposed to the marginalization of petty commodity producers, attempting to rectify this by incorporating them within the wider polity, from the 1980s onwards a resurgent academic populism has sought to reverse this, declaring once again that peasant economy/culture is immutable, thereby sanctifying its kind of ‘difference’. Where anthropology and anthropologists stand on this issue, therefore, is a matter of some political importance.
The debate about peasant economy, and whether and why it should be maintained, took off towards the end of the 19th century, when industrialization spread to new areas (Russia, America). During this period agrarian populism – a plebeian pro-rural politics and philosophy which argued that farmers and peasants were the economic and cultural backbone of the nation – became important in both these contexts (Solomon, 1977). Much the same was true of Austria and Germany, where conservatives insisted that smallholding agriculture should be protected by the State. These same issues informed subsequent debate about the role of peasant economy/culture in Third World development.
In all these discussions, Marxist theory – particularly that of Kautsky (1988) and Lenin (1964) – took a very different view. It insisted that in the course of capitalist development the peasantry was differentiated along class lines, its top stratum (= rich peasants) consolidating means of production and becoming small capitalists, while its increasingly landless bottom stratum (= poor peasants) joined the ranks of the proletariat. For this reason, to regard peasants as a uniform category – as did populism – was mistaken, since these distinct rural strata possessed economic and political interests that were not just different but antagonistic. Instead of private property – the individualist smallholding economy – supported/advocated by populists, a Marxist programme of agrarian reform was based on collective agriculture, where rural property was owned/controlled by the State. Among the reasons for this was that the latter approach facilitated central planning.
Historically – and currently – populism has sought a very different kind of resolution: neither a modern going beyond capitalism to socialism, nor the capture/control of the State, but rather a process of State ‘avoidance’ combined with a return to a ‘natural’ village-level social order that preceded capitalism. Restored thereby is smallholding agriculture based on individual peasant proprietorship that capitalism or socialism had threatened to erode or destroy, the object of populist resistance (effected in the context of ‘new’ social movements) being simply to re-established the ‘eternal’ family farming system as envisaged by Chayanov (1966).
Accordingly, and in contrast to Marxist theory, populism maintained both that undifferentiated peasant economy was an innate organizational form, and that it would continue to exist despite ‘external’ systemic transformations (from feudalism to capitalism and from the latter to socialism). For agrarian populism, therefore, de-essentialization of peasant culture/economy corresponds to alienation from an ‘authentic’ selfhood and thus estrangement from a ‘natural’ and ancient identity by a combination of ‘foreign’ others: finance capital, socialism and/or colonialism. Since ‘peasant-ness’ is in this discourse equated not just with smallholding agriculture but also with culture and national identity, depeasantization becomes synonymous with deculturalization and the erosion (or loss) of national identity.
Of the five sections which follow, the first examines the historical impact of a discourse equating peasants with Nature and nation, while the second considers the brief post-war interlude during which smallholding agriculture became the object of development strategy and modernization. How the latter approach was then reversed, the peasantry being doubly reconstituted in academic studies, first as a cultural identity and now as economically viable, is outlined in the third, fourth and fifth sections.
Embodying the nation
As both critics of populism (Brass, 2000: Ch. 1) and those sympathetic to it (Mitrany, 1951: 139; Sorokin and Zimmerman, 1939: 407ff.) agree, historically populism has adhered to a common ideology which equates an undifferentiated peasantry with the nation. A culturally ancient and innate ‘peasant-ness’ is said not only to symbolize the nation itself, but also protects the latter against a multiplicity of intruding ‘othernesses’ accompanying modernity. These consist of the urban, its proletariat and thus also its socialism and finance capital, all regarded as ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’ impositions that undermine the peasantry, its culture and thus the nation.
Prior to the 1939–45 war, most peasant parties throughout Europe and Asia were strongly nationalist, and agrarian populist organizations generated much rural grassroots support for right wing (as in the United States, India, Bulgaria and France) or fascist movements (as in Japan, Spain, Italy, Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and Romania). 1 Many of these European peasant parties were also members of the Green International, the forerunner of the present-day Vía Campesina, espousing a similar agrarian populist ideology and advocating much the same kind of political and economic policies. 2 This was because for populism a ‘pure’ (or middle) peasantry engaged in smallholding cultivation within the context of an equally ‘pure’ village community (i.e. unsullied by an external capitalism or socialism) was presented as embodying all the culturally specific attributes – timeless/sacred ‘natural’ and ancient bonds such as ethnicity, language, religion, customs, dress, songs, traditions – that were constitutive of a ‘pure’ national identity.
Populist discourse equating peasant with Nature and nation was not confined to Europe and Asia. During the pre-war era, an ideologically powerful form – conceptualizing the smallholder as ethnically/culturally/economically ‘other’ (indigenismo) – was applied to the Central and Latin American peasantry. One variant of indigenismo discourse, emanating mainly from North American cultural anthropology (Redfield, 1930) and British social anthropology, cast rural inhabitants in many Latin American countries as economically undifferentiated, homogeneous subsistence-oriented smallholders. A crucial factor contributing to the ideological reproduction of indigenismo discourse, not just in Mexico but throughout the sub-continent, has been the importation by foreign academics and intellectuals of paradigms from domestic or imperial domains elsewhere. Thus, for example, analyses by anthropologists (Redfield, 1956; Redfield and Rojas, 1934; Tax, 1952) from Chicago of rural society in Mexico from the 1930s onwards were influenced by concepts of ‘community’ then being applied in the United States itself (Stein, 1964: 230ff.). From this stemmed, in part, the tendency by US anthropology to portray the indigenous community in Mexico generally, and especially in Chiapas, as an a-historical ‘cultural isolate’.
In much the same vein, the interpretation on the part of British social anthropology (Malinowski and de la Fuente, 1982: 178) of market behaviour in 1940s Mexico as ‘non-rational’ and guided by the ‘lazy native’ syndrome drew on functionalist theory about ‘primitive culture’ in other parts of Empire. 3 What all these frameworks shared was an idealized perception of rural community as composed of subsistence-oriented cultivators who were culturally pristine, territorially ‘ancient’, politically egalitarian and economically self-sufficient. For British and North American anthropology, therefore, those living and working in rural Latin America were autochthonous, the ‘noble savages’ of myth whose organizational modalities were perceived as innate and unchanging. Unaffected by class divisions (a characteristic, it was claimed, only of urban society), members of the indigenous community inhabited what has been described (Murra, 1972) as an Andean ecosystem enabling them to reproduce themselves economically on a continuous basis as petty commodity producers.
Another variant consisted of the endorsement by Latin American writers, intellectuals and politicians (Alegría, 1942; Icaza, 1973; Lara, 1965) of the same indigenismo discourse, but with one crucial difference. Unlike the North American and European populist arguments applied to rural Mexico, therefore, the discourse constructed by Latin Americans placed a central emphasis on the indigenous community as the repository of an authentic non- (or pre-) colonial identity. This positive perception of pre-Hispanic indigenous community as ‘natural’, almost part of Nature itself, was reinforced by it having ‘survived’ and ‘resisted’ colonialism. The latter aspect in turn conferred on the indigenous community an heroic status in past conflicts against European domination, and consequently propelled it to the forefront of national struggle, where it has remained. Because of this origin and history, therefore, the epistemology characterizing this particular discourse about indigenismo overlaps with a politically far more potent ideology: the foundation myth at the centre of nationalist ideology. In this particular guise, indigenismo invokes ‘the other’ deployed over time in political and – more importantly – ideological battles waged not just against colonialism (of the Spanish and Portuguese), but also against neo-colonialism (of the United States) and imperialism (of international capitalism).
Encountering modernity
In an important sense the fate of concepts such as ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ signal just how far social science discourse has shifted politically since the 1960s development decade. At the latter conjuncture, the main concern of development theory (Marxist and non-Marxist alike) was to end rural socio-economic marginality in the so-called Third World, by bringing peasants and agricultural workers into the wider society. As participants both in the process of economic growth and the political system, the rural poor would then be able to secure better pay/conditions leading to increased living standards. Linked to existing poverty, illiteracy and oppression, therefore, rural marginality was perceived negatively, as an indicator of backwardness and underdevelopment, and thus as a problem to be solved.
Throughout the 1960s development decade, therefore, modernization theory associated with the work of Gabriel Almond, Edward Shils and Samuel Huntingdon formulated an alternative to socialist politics in the Third World (Leys, 1996: 9–11). 4 Modernization theory assumed a positive correlation between democracy and economic growth: in what was a political equivalent of the ‘trickle down’ theory, the supposition was that economic development would automatically reinforce political democracy, since a State apparatus which delivered higher living standards to the masses would no longer have anything to fear from them in terms of their political parties, the franchise and the secret ballot. In such circumstances, participatory decision-making would present no threat to capitalist property relations.
This paradigm structured the analysis by Rogers (1969) of the way in which Colombian peasants underwent a transition from tradition to modernity. As provider of material inputs contributing to development in rural areas, the State was cast by him in a positive role. For exponents of modernization theory at that conjuncture, therefore, democracy exercised in the context of a benign State apparatus, nationalism was a politically progressive concept. This despite the fact that nationalist discourses invoked cultural identities that were rural, subsistence oriented, traditional and backwards looking: or the very ones to which modernization theory was in principle opposed.
The irony is unmissable: the construction by modernization theorists (Almond and Verba, 1989; Lerner, 1958) of a development strategy so as to avoid the rightwing mobilizations of the pre-war era nevertheless failed to challenge the very discourse – the enduring cultural link between peasant/nation/Nature – which underwrote those reactionary politics. A corollary was an acceptance that existing grassroots cultural practices and/or ideology would not just continue as before but were henceforth to be regarded as an indicator of the ‘adaptive’ success of the modernization process. In his lengthy and hugely over-optimistic account of democratic ‘stability’ in India following decolonization, therefore, Weiner (1967: 482ff.) commended the Indian National Congress for its capacity not to transform but to ‘adapt’ to existing cultural practices.
Where the study of agrarian transformation was concerned, and in particular how this involved peasants and workers in the Third World, this difficulty – becoming (politically) ‘modern’ while remaining (culturally) ‘ancient’ – had two important outcomes. First, it left unchallenged a discourse about peasant/nation/Nature that historically has been the domain of conservatives and the political right. And second, much of this same discourse was subsequently taken over wholesale by many of those considered to be on the political left.
Back to the (global) village
The steady economic breakdown of traditional agrarian structures by capitalist development from the 1960s onwards – and especially during the 1980s and 1990s – has been accompanied by a resurgence of the national question, for a long time perceived as a redundant historical legacy of national liberation and colonialism in the Third World. In contrast to the view that, with decolonization, Third World nationalism ceased to be a political issue, neoliberal free market policies have given it a new lease of life. From around the 1980s, modernization was not merely abandoned but actually reversed. Henceforth marginality was recast as a form of empowerment, a revision that coincided with and was effected by the rise both of neoliberal economics and of the ‘new’ populist postmodernism (on which see Brass, 2000, 2003, 2014a). Peasant/ethnic identity was re-essentialized and reaffirmed theoretically as an ‘authentic’ form of selfhood that was eternal due to its culturally indissoluble ‘natural’ character. Customs, traditions and practices as these already existed at the rural grassroots were now celebrated/endorsed by the ‘new’ populist postmodernism as forms of cultural ‘difference’, to be cherished as such.
To effect this reversal, the same populist discourse simultaneously challenged the theoretical approach linked to the 1960s development framework. Declaring the latter a tainted foundational/Eurocentric meta-narrative, the ‘new’ populist postmodernism dismissed concepts such as class, modernity, development and progress as inappropriate for an understanding of the rural Third World. Pivotal to this epistemological volte face was a specific form of agency, the object of which was no longer the revolutionary capture and control of the state. Just such a non-revolutionary mobilization was provided by Scott (1976, 1985, 1990), in the form of his notion of ‘everyday-forms-of-resistance’, whereby quotidian/small-scale agency undertaken by peasants is said to block every attempt by the state to effect all its ‘alien’ policies/processes designed to transform the status quo.
What has emerged, therefore, is an anti-capitalist ideology belonging to the same agrarian populist lineage as before the second world war, promoting a supposedly novel (= postmodern) demand by smallholding peasants for a return to traditional culture and community authority, and with it the recuperation of an eternal identity emblematic of an authentic process of ‘belonging’ as embodied in indigenous selfhood. Henceforth cultivators were to be discussed in terms of non-class agency, that of new social movements. The latter, argued those such as Burbach (1994), Hardt and Negri (2005), Holloway (2002) and Guha (1982–89), were no longer about the desirability of economic development leading to socialism, nor were they aimed at the capture and exercise of State power.
The desiderata had changed substantially, securing democracy within the context of capitalism being the sole political objective. Agrarian mobilization was now guided by human rights legislation and the teachings of the church, was more inclusive (particularly of rural women) and based on the valorization of indigenous ‘otherness’. Unlike earlier peasant movements – in Mexico itself, as well as in Latin America and elsewhere – these new social movements questioned the desirability of further economic development, not least because of their awareness of environmental issues. This ‘new’ kind of peasant agency (= anti-capitalist but not socialist) is invariably categorized as a form of subaltern resistance.
The end of development?
In part, this populist re-essentialization of peasant economy/culture was not just accompanied but also reinforced by changes in academia. For a long time, the received wisdom on the political left has been that by gaining a foothold in academia, socialists and socialism would at last be in a position to influence if not public opinion then that segment of it which would go on to occupy posts in society enabling them to put into practice the ideas learned as students. Palpably this has not happened, and it is necessary to ask why. What was not fully appreciated was the way academia as an institution would exercise a corrupting impact on leftist politics.
It can be argued that a large factor contributing to the dilution and/or deradicalization of development theory – certainly in the UK – was the post-1968 entry into academic jobs of many who thought of themselves as socialists (Brass, 2009). In the intervening years there has been a wholesale shedding of leftist political views in academia, as those whose employment/promotion prospects increasingly depended on not holding such opinions. This unravelling of leftism from within is not how the issue is usually depicted, which tends to attribute it simply to an attack from without (which has certainly taken place), and not to an abandonment of political beliefs by those within academia.
Critiques of capitalism entailing a socialist transition were replaced by endorsements of populism, a form of anti-capitalism which did not promote systemic transcendence, and was thus politically less threatening. Henceforth it was possible within academia to celebrate peasant economy/culture not merely as innate but as an empowering form of ‘otherness’, despite ‘traditional’ or ‘authentic’ identity frequently masking rural poverty. What currently passes for development studies programmes carried out in universities is akin to the collection of rent on the misery of impoverished others inhabiting the so-called Third World.
An important reason why poverty has vanished from the development agenda is, quite simply, that it has been redefined. Rather than being categorized as a problem, which is what Marxism and much modernization theory did in the 1960s and 1970s, rural poverty has been redefined by postmodernism as part of culture, and thus empowering for its grassroots subjects. Postmodernism has been able to do this because many of those who regard themselves as leftists have forgotten what socialist theory actually teaches. They have as a result espoused theoretical positions (peasant essentialism, the innateness of nationalism, the desirability of grassroots ethnic empowerment, rural tradition as mobilizing discourse) that are no different from those advocated historically by populism.
What is at stake, therefore, is not just the form to be taken by economic growth in rural areas of the so-called Third World, but the very fact of development itself. Accordingly, the debate about petty commodity production has to some extent sidetracked down a cul-de-sac, where the focus of what remained an economic argument was one about whether or not peasant economy was an obstacle to the development of a capitalist agriculture. In doing so, many in the academy overlooked both the fact and the political significance of a merging discourse in defence of the peasantry, whereby smallholding as a form of cultural empowerment has now been joined once again by claims about its economic viability. In other words, the return of an agrarian populist agenda and with it the epistemological recuperation of peasant essentialism. The politically exclusionary project informing this analytical re-essentialization by the ‘new’ populism of peasant culture/economy is difficult to miss.
The ‘new’ p(l)easantries?
Populism has now established itself in academic journals dealing specifically with agrarian issues, where advocates of pro-farmer and food-first concerns proclaim the virtues of smallholding agriculture and rural mobilizations like the Vía Campesina. This trajectory can be illustrated with reference to the way its components – discourse, politics – combine and alter over the recent history of one social science publication concerned specifically with these issues: The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS). In the case of the latter, the political shift towards a populist agenda coincides largely with an editorial change effected by the publisher in 2008 and the installation of a new and very different editorial regime in 2009. The causes and political impact of this transformation is considered in more detail below.
The degree to which the post-2008 JPS has espoused a populist approach is evident from the way ‘land grabbing’ and ‘food sovereignty’ are privileged. The period following 2009 has been marked by the publication of many articles dealing sympathetically with these issues, and the reason for this emphasis is clear from the introduction to a Forum on the subjects (Borras et al., 2011). The latter categorizes ‘land grabbing’ as a continuation of imperialism and colonialism, as such a threat to ‘rural communities’ where those with ‘non-traditional land titles’ are expelled from their holdings. To oppose this process, the journal editors announce a study agenda ‘exploring practical and policy alternatives to current patterns of land deals’, to be based on ‘political ecology and political sociology…centred on food, biofuels, minerals, and conservation’. Its declared object is to incorporate and complement ‘a range of policy-oriented donor and NGO-led reviews, as well as more activist political work’, thereby championing on the one hand ‘alternative visions’ (= ‘food sovereignty’, ‘land sovereignty’) to corporate land appropriation, and on the other agency involving ‘grabbing back’ peasant holdings.
Among the ideas commended are those advocating ‘the cause of small family farms…from a human rights perspective’, and the agency of NGOs, transnational agrarian movements such as the Via Campesina. No mention is made of socialism, either as a desired objective or as a central emplacement of long-standing historical debate about agrarian change and the role in this of rural producers. The inference is simply that depeasantization is in itself bad, rather than part of a much wider dynamic licensing and leading to systemic transition. A token reference (Borras et al., 2011: 211) to the need to be aware of ‘naïve populisms’ notwithstanding, this post-2008 JPS agenda is one that all exponents of agrarian populism – contemporary and historical – would recognize and approve. Together with calls for peasant ‘autonomy’, concepts such as ‘land grabbing’, ‘land sovereignty’ and ‘food sovereignty’ reinstate populist discourse about peasant = Nature = ‘natural’, to be contrasted as such against a category of ‘others’ which one populist categorizes as ‘artificial people’ covering all those who – unlike peasants – cannot be said to be ‘natural’ (Patel, 2009a: 165).
Resurgent populist analyses encountered in the post-2008 JPS include those by Jan Douwe van der Ploeg and Henry Bernstein. 5 ‘My own position’, accepts Bernstein (2013: 163), ‘is that small farmers today have to be seen and studied aspetty commodity producers’. Elsewhere (Bernstein, 1990: 72) these same words have been followed by others conceding that ‘[t]his is also the position of more sophisticated populists’. 6 That he remains a populist sympathizer is evident from other admissions (Bernstein, 2013: 170): ‘In certain conditions populist movements can have progressive elements…[they] are an important reality of contemporary politics…One can identify more progressive tendencies that we can encourage…I have no problem with relatively small-scale farming as part of the future’.
Another post-2008 JPS contributor, Raj Patel, similarly endorses a populist approach and fails to address critiques of this. 7 Although he accepts that ‘not all farmers are equal, and neither are their social organizations’, therefore, Patel (2007: 16, 322 n.20) nevertheless evades its implications for his argument, observing that ‘this isn’t a book that can cover them’. A result is his uncritical endorsement of the new farmers’ movements in India simply because the object of their struggle is the State, an approach which ignores both the fact and the impact of class differences within such mobilizations (see below). A similarly evasive approach is evident in another post-2008 JPS contribution (Edelman and James, 2011: 82), where from the outset the reader is informed that the ‘class character of the peasantry [is] a discussion that is beyond the scope of this article’.
The political difference between the pre- and post-2009 JPS can be illustrated with reference to the contrasting approaches to new social movements, many of which are represented in the umbrella organization the Vía Campesina. An earlier JPS analysis of new social movements in rural India (see the contributions in Brass, 1995) underlined their class character and ideology, reflecting the economic interests of rich peasants and commercial farmers agitating for lower input prices and higher crop prices. In the post-2008 JPS, however, this has been replaced by a more enthusiastic and less critical approach (e.g. Patel, 2009a: 119ff.), one that endorses the Via Campesina as a politically inclusive grassroots agency which, because it is anti-capitalist, must therefore be an authentically progressive mobilization. Overlooked or downplayed is the fact that now such agrarian movements frequently involve a struggle between capitalist producers competing in a laissez faire global market. In this kind of conflict, not only is ‘anti-capitalism’ an ideological defence by small or medium commercial farmers against larger rival producers, but in furtherance of this terms like ‘land grabbing’, ‘land sovereignty’ and ‘food sovereignty’ form a crucial part of a populist discourse invoking an ancient and ‘natural’ sectional (rural-not-urban) identity.
Endorsing a claim advanced by ‘new’ populist postmodern theorists (Alvarez, Escobar), therefore, one contribution about the Via Campesina in the post-2008 JPS (Mártinez-Torres and Rosset, 2010: 150, 151) maintains implausibly both that class differences ‘are no longer the barrier they once were’, and that ‘[t]he neoliberal model forced a restructuring of state–society relations, and it was in this space that new forms of social movements that are more autonomous, horizontal, and more based on collective identities rather than just social class began to flourish’. Another and subsequent contribution on the same theme (Rosset, 2013: 753, 772) insists that what it terms ‘a new correlation of forces’ now pits big business against peasants, adding that new social movements are consequently ‘cross-class’.
Significantly, among the member organizations of the Via Campesina are two Indian farmers’ movements: the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) from Uttar Pradesh and the Karnataka Rajya Ryota Sangha (KRRS). Earlier analyses published in the pre-2009 JPS and elsewhere (Assadi, 1995, 1997; Gill, 1995; Hasan, 1995) showed that each of these regionally specific mobilizations was led by and reflected the interests of better-off components of the rural population. Further, in the case of the BKU, that many of its supporters also voted for the Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
That not much has changed in this regard is evident from the fact that the earlier demand by farmers’ movements for better returns (= ‘remunerative prices’) continues into the present, albeit dressed-up in more acceptable language stressing eco-friendly ‘sustainability’, ‘food security’ and ‘land sovereignty’. Hence the objectives pursued by the Via Campesina (Patel, 2009b: 693, 695) stipulate not just attracting investment, thereby ‘strengthening the small-scale farm sector’ by creating ‘payment incentive programmes’, but also establishing local/regional/global market conditions ‘that meet the needs of small-scale farmers’. The latter is to be achieved in turn both by providing ‘Southern countries with preferential access to Northern markets’ and by simultaneously implementing policies designed to ‘minimise dislocations from trade liberalization’.
As before, what the farmers’ movement objects to is not capitalism per se, but rather the market advantage currently enjoyed by large agribusiness enterprises. Again, as before, this agenda reflects the economic interests of actual or aspiring small capitalist producers, rich peasants and commercial farmers. Not only is socialism as a desirable end wholly absent from this Via Campesina programme, therefore, but by asserting a right to individual property ownership so as to continue the cultivation/sale of food crops, in furtherance of which they are pursuing a realignment of market conditions in their favour, its members seek merely to establish for themselves a better competitive position within the existing capitalist system.
Where the earlier critical approach to ‘new’ social movements is concerned, the exclusionary pattern on the part of those connected to the post-2008 JPS is hard to disguise. Thus, for example, a JPS article on Chiapas by Calleros-Rodríguez (2014) makes no reference to the earlier special issue in the same journal on this very subject edited by Washbrook (2005), where the question of class differences within the ranks of the EZLN movement was foregrounded. 8 References to the critical approach published in the pre-2009 JPS to this kind of rural agency are similarly absent from two recent books about peasants. Despite a lengthy description in his book of the new farmers’ movements in India, Bernstein (2010: 121–22) makes no mention of the earlier JPS special issue on this subject. References to the presence and effect of class differences within rural social movements generally are also missing from a book by Hall (2013: Ch. 6), another post-2008 JPS contributor. 9
In effect, a previous and more radical history is either denied or dismissed as wanting by what is now a populist agenda. Thus, a recent account of JPS history by another member of the post-2008 editorial (Edelman, 2014) uses the current high impact factor in terms of anthropology both to throw doubt on the pre-2009 scholarly record and also to justify the change in editorial regime. 10 Repeating an earlier claim posted on the Institute of Development Studies website (one of the new editorial group was at IDS), to the effect that in 2009 ‘the Journal has been re-energised and re-launched’, not only is the pre-2009 JPS described as ‘languishing in relative obscurity’ but the inference is that – unlike the present editorial regime – it did not manage to publish ‘high-quality research’ by ‘prominent scholars’, nor did it operate ‘an openness’ when it came to theoretical orientation. However, the scholarly record of the pre-2009 JPS is very different.
In the period when it is said to have been ‘languishing in relative obscurity’, the JPS had many achievements to its name. 11 These included widely acclaimed special issues on Latin American Peasants, on Chiapas, on China, on Russia and on the State, to which many distinguished scholars contributed the results of their high-quality research. A reviewer of the book version of a special issue observed that ‘[t]his is one of the most important [collections] to be published on the Latin American peasantry since the neoliberal turn of the 1980s…It is my belief that [it] will come to stand alongside [the classic texts on the subject]’, concluding that it ‘should be read by all those who are concerned with the fate of the Latin American peasantry in the new millennium’.
Accordingly, the subsequent change of editorial regime was unconnected with ‘relative obscurity’, the absence of ‘high-quality research’ by ‘prominent scholars’ or the lack of theoretical ‘openness’. A more plausible explanation is that criticism in the pre-2009 JPS of the semi-feudal thesis, agrarian populism, the cultural turn and ‘reinterpretations’ of the unfreedom/capitalism generated complaints from what the publisher called the ‘development community’. In 2008 the publisher sacked the JPS editor, the reviews editors and the whole editorial advisory board, because of protests about the tone and politics of articles. Many of the latter were contributions to debates about agrarian transition, critical to be sure, but part of what the journal had done (influentially and successfully) ever since its foundation in 1973.
Some of those whose populist approach to rural issues was criticized in the pages of the pre-2009 JPS have joined and/or published in the post-2008 journal. One recently admitted that the reason for the editorial change was that journal articles had been too ‘polemical’. This objection to a specific politics – itself a mistaken claim – is ironic, given that the post-2008 JPS makes no secret of its own campaigning political agenda (Borras et al., 2011: 210ff.) on behalf of those affected by ‘land-grabbing’.
Of interest is that complaints from the ‘development community’ that led to the replacement of the pre-2009 JPS editorial group not only eliminated the radical critique of agrarian populism but also had commercial advantages. Academic publishers tend to follow prevailing orthodoxy, since it is this that delivers them a paying readership. When socialism was academically fashionable, as it has been in the past, commercial publishers were more than willing to produce texts embodying such views. As soon as these views cease to be academically fashionable, however, and are replaced with others, publishers quickly follow suit.
Conclusion
Historically in many parts of Europe, Asia and Latin America, peasant family farming has been equated symbolically with ‘the nation’, its foundation, protection and culture. This kind of multiple association (peasants = Nature = nation) operates regardless of what turn out to be regionally specific cultures. It is perhaps because this peasant/Nature/nation link has been privileged ideologically over time that the ‘otherness’ of peasant economy/culture has a discursive potency denied to most other mobilizing idioms. Now as in the past, therefore, the dehumanizing and in an economic sense objectifying forces of capitalism have generated a reaction that should be familiar, in the form of a retreat into the agrarian myth. This currently takes the form of a reassertion of traditional rural identity, an historically ancient and thus (it is claimed) authentic grassroots selfhood threatened by neoliberalism.
Such calls for re-essentialization, it is argued here, have reconstituted the peasantry as a unitary category, thereby reinserting it once more into the domain of populist discourse. Like its predecessor the Green International, the Vía Campesina currently includes farmer movements containing small/medium capitalist producers, whose economic/political interests are different from those of poor peasants and agricultural labourers. Conceptualizing the peasantry as in the main undifferentiated, however, downplays or denies the presence and effect of class differences and struggle; much rather, conflict is said by populism to be between peasants and the State. Once more, therefore, the process of capital accumulation has been banished from smallholding agriculture.
The principal way the identity of rural inhabitants in Central and South America has been constructed by anthropologists over time coincides with and reinforces populist discourse about indigenismo. Like the indigenous community, peasant economy in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America was essentialized and said to be capable of reproducing itself independently regardless of the systemic conditions (feudalism, capitalism, socialism) obtaining in the wider society. The sole exception to this was a brief period after the second world war, when for some 20 years during and after the 1960s (the ‘development decade’) the indigenous subject/community was in effect re-problematized, mainly by academics outside Latin America, as an issue of economic backwardness (= underdevelopment). For a relatively short time, and to a limited degree, peasant ‘otherness’ was de-exoticized, and subordinated to the idea of social and economic progress (= development) as desirable objectives in rural areas of the Third World. Where touched upon, therefore, traditional culture was reconstituted as an obstacle to development.
By contrast, as envisaged by the ‘new’ populist postmodernism from the 1980s onwards, smallholders were seen as the ‘other’ of the State, an approach which doubly relocates the process of grassroots empowerment: in a specific locality outside and against the State, but leaving the apparatus of national government and its class structure intact. Both conceptually and politically, this latter notion of an innate rural economy/culture as a refuge within the wider capitalist system that contains in embryo an alternative organizational and institutional system is not merely wrong but – unsurprisingly – shares many of the characteristics attributed by earlier populists to rural community and peasant society.
The reason for this shift is linked to the rise at that conjuncture of neo-liberalism, when the reproduction of capitalism ceased to depend on the consuming power of peasants in the so-called Third World. No longer the object of development programmes/projects designed to eliminate rural poverty, peasants were in effect reconstituted by much social science discourse as once again ‘other’. An important outcome is that, rather than being categorized as an economic problem, which is what Marxism and much modernization theory did in the 1960s and 1970s, rural poverty has been redefined by postmodernism as part of culture, and thus empowering for its grassroots subjects. Most recently, an economic dimension has been added to this agrarian populist discourse, maintaining that petty commodity production is viable even where capitalism has become global in scope.
These shifts are themselves reflected in the changed political emphasis of The Journal of Peasant Studies, an academic publication concerned with the transformation of rural societies and their inhabitants. Although its anthropological impact factor has certainly increased, this has been achieved at the expense of its original critical focus. Its post-2008 orientation favours a more conservative agrarian populist approach, combining pro-farmer and food-first concerns. The earlier focus was on class differences within the peasantry, and how these affected the process of systemic transition, both historical and actual. The survival of peasant economy was questioned, and socialism as an objective was always in there somewhere. Rural social movements in India and Latin America were analysed in terms of the opposing class elements they contained, and consequently the irreconcilable (and sometimes reactionary) political interests they exhibited.
Nowadays, however, there is a discernible tendency to overlook or downplay the presence of socio-economic differentiation and the contradictions arising from this. Currently, therefore, a transcendence of capitalism has vanished from the political agenda. Instead, the focus seems to be mainly on better deals for rural producers within the existing capitalist system, regardless of whether these consist of smallholders or large farmers, and peasant economy is regarded as a positive good. Combined with the turn to agrarian populism, the resulting abandonment of the earlier critical approach is, of course, very much in keeping with the present conservative political climate.