Abstract
The book is an interesting collective effort about the agrarian question today, from the classic thought about how capital developed in agriculture since the XIX century to today’s neoliberal globalization. It is a remarkable attempt to clarify and analyze the “new agrarian question,” especially but not exclusively in the South. The debate exposed in this book is of relevance today, when the world is facing an unseen economic crisis. In order to find solutions to food, ecology, energy, and social problems, we have to look again to land, food production, and the main actors of agrarian change: peasants, together with the emergence of new and powerful social actors, such as agrofood corporations and social movements. Among its many virtues, the book carefully follows a contemporary debate that considers a re-reading of the classic agrarian question authors: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Kautsky, and promotes a debate about their present validity. The authors also propose new ideas, a “new agrarian question.” In many of the contributions there is a concern about rural poverty and ecological damage as a consequence of neoliberal globalization and a discussion about peasant production and its traits, which may offer solutions to these problems. This issue is closely related to a new discussion about land tenure and agrarian reform. In this sense, there is also an interesting analysis of rural politics in different countries and a debate about the transformative power of new global peasant movements, such as La Via Campesina, especially in Latin America.
It is remarkable that all the authors have read and consider the different chapters, and they discuss each others’ ideas. The editors have made a detailed analysis to summarize, classify, and think about the different approaches written in the book. For these reasons I highly recommend this book, and continue with a brief summary of its contents.
In chapter one the editors expose the book’s objective: to analyze peasants’ fate in today’s world. They state that there is a need for new concepts which can explain peasants’ subordination in a globalized world and thus elaborate theory that builds on the classics. The main issue poses the question: is the destruction of the peasantry necessary with the emergence of the capital-labor relationship?
Whether the emergence of this relationship necessarily occasions the destruction of the peasantry is crucial. The editors remind us how Lenin and Kautsky establish differences on peasant farms related to the extent to which markets governed their behavior. Kay and Akram-Lodhi explain that the first part of the book is concerned with historical questions.
The second part of the book is dedicated to the explanation of different perspectives of the contemporary agrarian question. Regarding the agrarian question and globalization, 6 positions are examined in the book:
AQ1: The “path-dependence agrarian question,” critically assessed in the contribution of Ray Kiely, argues that colonialism, by introducing capitalist relations of production, unleashed a dynamic process of labor commodification that is ongoing everywhere.
AQ2: The “global reserve army of labor agrarian question” is represented in the volume by Farshad Araghi and shows some overlap with AQ1. It argues that the original debate has led to a teleological representation. Thus, globalization is a direct continuation of global imperialism and the creation of wage labor is not its main transformation. Rather, globalization is creating a massive reserve army of migratory labor. The agrarian question here is about the terms and conditions by which agrarian labor reproduces itself.
AQ3: Kay and Akram-Lodhi label this the “class forces agrarian question” discussed by Ellen Meiksins Wood, Amiya Kumar, Terence Byres, Akram-Lodhi, and Saturnino Borras. This holds that the transformations in agrarian production systems and the production forces are shaped by, and shape, relations between class forces. This means that colonialism did introduce capitalist relations of production and labor commodification in the rural economies of the developing world, but “this introduction was by no means universal” (23), but quite limited. In some cases, colonialism reinforced precapitalist class relations in order to obtain surplus appropriation.
AQ4: This question, posed by Henry Bernstein, is labelled by the editors the “decoupled agrarian question of labor.” It challenges the current relevance of the agrarian question for capital. Bernstein suggests that AQ1, AQ2, and AQ3 fail to recognize the global contemporary character of capitalism, where agriculture is organized in global commodity chains that integrate agrarian classes unevenly.
AQ5: The editors phrase this as the “gendered agrarian question,” discussed by Bridget O’Laughlin, who considers that gender is a relation of production that encompasses both contradiction and cooperation. She considers that theorists of the agrarian question have failed to analytically include the contribution of non-commodified work to accumulation and that the agrarian question does not incorporate the character of gender relations.
AQ6: Philip McMichael argues that the agrarian question continues to be about capital and labor relations. He questions the problematic of the agrarian question as it is formulated in AQ1, AQ3, and AQ4, arguing that the agrarian question cannot be reduced to the terms of capital theory itself. Instead of narrowly focusing on the political consequences of proletarianization, it is necessary to politicize the economic relations. He identifies a second mistake within AQ1, AQ3, and AQ4 as the failure to recognize that the historical conditions governing the process of accumulation are not equivalent to the theoretical conditions of accumulation. He reframes the agrarian question as problematic in two ways. “First, it is necessary to define it within and through the new historical conjuncture of financialization, neoliberalism and the establishment of a global corporate food regime. Second, it is necessary to take capital as the point of analytical departure, but capital as a relation of production and circulation, wherein the politicization of the economic can be seen” (27). This leads him to define the problematic not in terms of capital or labor, but rather as a contemporary agrarian question of food.
Chapters 2 and 3 deal with a historical question: if capitalism’s origin is in feudal agriculture, was it due to trade or internal contradictions of production relations between landlords and peasants, as Wood stresses, or due to peasant differentiation, as it is in Byres?
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 elaborate a good analysis of colonization’s effects on agriculture and the peasantry in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. They propose the new peasant movements, especially in Latin America, as a new kind of land struggle.
In chapter 7 Kiely questions the “warrenite thesis” about the desirability of capitalist contradictions intensifying process. He doubts that the peasants’ disappearance and their proletarianization were good for them, giving some data illustrating negative effects of globalization on all continents.
In chapter 8 Bridget O’Laughlin begins by recognizing that the agrarian question authors have considered class, politics, and accumulation, but not gender. She analyzes women’s land property rights in Southern Africa and concludes that formalizing individual land rights is not the solution to rural poverty; this needs “major economic restructuring and very substantial distribution of wealth” and these objectives are not present in regional macroeconomic policies.
In chapter 9 Akram-Lodhi, Kay, and Borras find similarities in neoliberal policies’ effects in developing and transition countries’ agricultures. They call this project, led by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund interventions, “neoliberal agrarian restructuring.” Their argument is that these similarities have led to the realignment and deepening of “a bifurcated agrarian structure,” with an export-oriented agrarian subsector and a peasant producer subsector. The relations between both sectors are diverse in different countries and of relevance to the way they can reach development.
Chapter 10’s author is Henry Bernstein, who stresses 7 theses concerning the contemporary agrarian question: 1 to 5 suggest that nothing is gained and much is obscured by characterizing Southern societies today as “peasant”; 6 and 7 remind us that in the global neoliberal era there is an increasing power of agrofood transnational corporations, which now determine much of the food, agriculture, and farming in the world, with a protagonic role of the U.S. agricultural model. Concerning the new agrarian question, Bernstein proposes the term “classes of labor,” that observes the increasing scarcityof wage employment and the rise of all kinds of informal activities, among them small-scale farming. He discusses new struggles for land in Latin America as a contradictory process, which does not express the interests of some unambiguous and unitary class subjects.
Watts’s main issue in chapter 11 is how the agrarian question of labor is constituted creating new frontiers of agrarian labor, determined by new phenomena such as biofuels, environmental services, massive constraints around access to water, global climate change, and the next wave of GMOs as well as corporate integration and the fair trade movement.
In chapter 12 Philip McMichael insists that the agrarian question needs reframing today and addresses changing political-economic conditions and problems such as land, land-urban, ecology, peasants, production, circulation, and reproduction. He proposes the food sovereignty concept and global peasant movements such as La Via Campesina as main issues to elaborate a new agrarian question. For him, the food sovereignty movement spotlights the relation between corporate agriculture and the crisis of social reproduction. “An agrarian question of food is a key to unlocking the fetishism of accumulation and addressing its damaging socioecological consequences” (308).
Finally, chapter 13 is written by the editors, Cristobal Kay and A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi. They summarize briefly the book’s content and the 6 agrarian question proposals. Then they describe the change in agrarian policies for Africa, Asia, and Latin America, from a Keynesian approach in the ‘60s and ‘70s, with emphasis on home market, to neoliberal policies oriented to export-led agriculture. When approaching poverty and inequality, both authors stress that neoliberal agriculture restructuring fosters inequality. In all the countries analyzed here, inequality has grown and rural poverty has increased. An important variable is the linkages between agriculture export and peasant subsectors. The importance of today’s agrarian question remains even as the agrarian question becomes transnational. In recent peasant movements, such as MST, cocaleros, and Chiapas, the struggle against neoliberal globalization is foremost and is a “force for radical, progressive and sustainable transformation change” (331).
Akram-Lodhi and Kay conclude:
“In short, in an era of neoliberal globalization — the importance of understanding agrarian change has become, paradoxically, even more context-specific than before” (326). Context must be located within the international conjuncture. In this sense, the book seeks to continue and deepen the agrarian question today.