Critical Agrarian Studies as Populist Land-Grab

In the Academic Salon

As is so often the case, problems emerge right from the start. The introductory chapter (Akram-Lodhi, Dietz, Engels and McKay, 1–7) traces the origins of what it terms critical agrarian studies (CAS) to the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) and the Journal of Agrarian Change (JOAC), the two journals most closely associated with research into, debates about, and the conceptualization of ‘the rural’ in its broadest sense. Part of critical development studies, CAS is described as critical ‘in the sense that it seeks to challenge dominant frameworks and ideas in order to reveal and challenge power structures and thus open up possibilities for change’. Retaining aspects of Marxist political economy, including class, CAS ‘newness’ is attributed by Akram-Lodhi, Dietz, Engels and McKay to breaking with earlier approaches characterizing peasant studies. Unlike the latter, therefore, the ‘newness’ of CAS takes the form of combining micro- and macro-level analysis, and paying attention to previously unaddressed ‘socio-cultural dimensions’. Described as ‘a highly diverse and emerging interdisciplinary field’, CAS is said by Akram-Lodhi, Dietz, Engels and McKay to embody a new ‘pluralism’.

As to what CAS is against, the ‘dominant paradigm’ to be challenged is, we are told, 1950s modernization theory which argued that economic development would depeasantize smallholders by converting them either into ‘entrepreneurs’ or wage labour. ‘Scholars from [CAS]’, observe Akram-Lodhi, Dietz, Engels and McKay, ‘do not accept this paradigm’. Accordingly, over the past quarter of a century, there has been a shift from peasant studies to CAS; along with ‘classical analysis of the agrarian question’, Marxist political economy has diminished in importance, as a result of being displaced by ‘social science orthodoxies’. It was this ‘unravelling’ which led to the ‘emergence of [CAS] as a field of study’. Unfortunately, the account in the Introduction about what CAS claims to be, and why it is different from what went before, is wrong in every respect.

Deprivileging Marxism

To the claim that what makes CAS novel is its critical approach, a departure from previous development theory, one is tempted to reply: when has the latter not been informed by a critical approach? Such hyperbole deployed merely to justify the specificity of CAS faces a number of difficulties. To begin with, it overlooks the fact that most – if not all – development theory hitherto has involved critiques of one sort or another. Furthermore, the combined micro- and macro-structural methodology plus ‘socio-cultural dimensions’ deemed absent earlier long predate CAS, as a glance at the topics covered by the two JPS Indexes (volumes 1–31, spanning 1973–2004) would reveal. The assertion that CAS is opposed simply to 1950s modernization theory hides the fact that the latter includes Marxism, the development approach of which – like non-Marxist variants – also embraced the idea of modernization. Indeed, this very point is conceded in the Foreword (Li, xxiii), which similarly objects to a ‘persistent modernisation narrative’, noting, however, that CAS ‘begins from a different premise [and] is critical of versions of modernization and Marxian theory which endlessly rehearse transition narratives’ (emphasis added). In other words, the Foreword gives the game away by revealing that Marxism forms part of the modernization framework to which CAS is opposed. For this reason, the insistence that CAS is sympathetic towards – and thus still incorporates – a Marxist framework is open to question. Much evidence, both in the Handbook and elsewhere, underlines the extent to which the relationship between CAS and Marxism is an antagonistic one. ⁴ And last, it fails to identify the real element of difference, a political one, informing the ‘newness’ of CAS: a deprivileging of Marxism combined with a reprivileging of agrarian populism.

This deprivileging/reprivileging is the key to the way debate on the agrarian question is framed by CAS. Marxists perceive class struggle as leading to depeasantization, the formation of a proletariat and a transcendence of capitalism that takes the form of a socialist transition; agrarian populists by contrast see the political task in hand as being repeasantization, the establishment and protection of smallholding agriculture, licensing either a return to a pre-capitalist social order or to a ‘nicer’ sort of capitalism. Given the populist tone of the Handbook, it comes as no surprise that the chapter on peasants is by van der Ploeg (109–119), a strong advocate of just such an approach. He commends the resistance theory of Scott (‘weapons of the weak’), a central element of populist discourse, arguing (van der Ploeg, 112, 113) that ‘new representations’ of rural smallholders include ‘the capacity of the peasantry to articulate itself as a “class for itself”. This claim – much criticized by Marxists, including this reviewer – not only reproduces two populist tropes – equating peasants with a class, whose agency is consequently a form of class struggle – but then incorrectly situates them within a Marxist framework. ⁵

The extent of misunderstanding what is – and what is not – Marxist theory can be gauged from the chapter on class (Berry, 70), where it is stated that ‘people are exploited by the political, economic and social world they live in as well as by members of a particular class’, attributing to ‘the world’ an all-embracing capacity to exploit. That the class differentiation of the peasantry, the model associated with the Marxist interpretation of Lenin, is ‘integral’ to CAS (van der Ploeg, 109ff.) is similarly debateable. The same difficulties arise in the case of the debate about the way production relations change, and why. Unfree labour, which Marxism defines in opposition to its free equivalent, is instead relegated by Pattenden (93) to a problematic bit-part category on an employment ‘continuum’, in the process failing to note – as does Harriss (412, 413) – the contradictory pronouncements by Breman on the connection between capitalism and debt bondage. A better account of the same capitalism/unfreedom relationship, however, is provided by Gerber (549), the only contributor who refers to the Marxist concept of deproletarianization.

Although CAS likes to present itself as a radical alternative to and departure from orthodoxy, its populism is nevertheless an accurate reflection of the drift towards post-1980 mainstream academic conformity. ⁶ This populist agenda is itself represented in the chapter titles, indicating opposition towards the process of depeasantization (land grabs). The latter, however, is based not on a materialist analysis to do with historically specific kinds of class formation/consciousness/struggle, aimed at systemic transcendence and establishing collective ownership of property, as in the case of Marxism. Instead, CAS populism is based simply on vague non-systemic/ahistorical moral/ethical concepts (the right to food, agrarian justice, human rights) deployed in support of individual private property ownership, peasant economy and subsistence-oriented cultivation (‘food regimes’, ‘food sovereignty’, ‘food security’). Current Marxist critiques of this approach, many published in the pre-2009 JPS, receive scant attention (see below): lacking, therefore, is a sustained consideration (and frequently even a mention) of negative appraisals featuring agrarian myth discourse, the ‘new’ populist postmodernism, and the subaltern studies project. ⁷ At most, there are brief and undefined references to ‘subalternity’ and ‘subaltern actors’ (Oliveira and McKay, 321; Dietz, 606), accompanied by uncritical endorsements of ‘post-colonial’ theory. In what is a laudatory account of postmodernism, Leinius (610–617) celebrates its overlap with CAS, declaring enthusiastically that postmodernism can ‘only strengthen the critical impetus and work of critical agrarian studies’.

‘Marxist’ Questions

Problems with interpretations of what is and what is not Marxist theory surface prominently in the Handbook chapter (Watts, 53–67) specifically on the agrarian question. Having designated his chosen texts (Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, Chayanov, Preobrashensky) as ‘canonical’, Watts then not only attempts to portray Kautsky as a prefigurative ecologist but also counterposes him to Lenin. According to Watts, therefore, Kautsky is an adherent of the same position as that held by the neopopulist Chayanov – that peasant economy is able to reproduce itself even where the agrarian sector is penetrated by capitalism – as against the view of Lenin that capitalism necessarily differentiates rural petty commodity producers along class lines. ⁸ Observing that for Kautsky ‘the smallholder commanded centre stage’ due to an ‘ability to resist competition’, Watts maintains that the Marxist theorist responsible for the 1899 Agrarfrage departed from the peasant differentiation/vanishing model, in effect negating the case made by Lenin at the same conjuncture. In the opinion of Watts (55), ‘Kautsky’s intervention proved to be brilliantly prescient and a sort of theoretical and political challenge to Marxist orthodoxy’.

That the agrarian question formulated by Kautsky was in essence no different from that of Chayanov, whose interpretation it upheld against that of Lenin, is quite simply wrong. Overlooked is the reason given by Kautsky for ‘peasant persistence’: not, as Watts supposes, an ‘ability to resist competition’ – the populist claim about the efficiency of peasant economy – but due to an entirely different cause. Smallholdings were not expropriated since they were the source of cheap (and often unfree) labour-power required by large estates or agribusiness enterprises, drawn by the latter from the peasant household and/or resident kin. It was this, and not any innate economic viability, that determined the survival of smallholdings, and why such units are never wholly displaced by large commercial producers.

Furthermore, this was an explanation that met with strong approval from Lenin himself, who perceived no contradiction between his own view and that of Kautsky. In a review of Die Agrarfrage Lenin endorsed the analysis of Kautsky, noting that ‘it would not even be advantageous for the big landowners to force out small proprietors completely [since] the latter provide them with hand! For this reason the landowners and capitalists frequently pass laws that artificially maintain the small peasantry’. ⁹ Pace Watts, who attributes ‘peasant persistence’ to smallholder ‘ability to resist competition’, for Lenin – as for Kautsky – the opposite held true: ‘Petty farming becomes stable when it ceases to compete with large-scale farming, when it is turned into a supplier of labour-power for the latter’.

Similar difficulties arise as to notable Marxist contributions to the agrarian question missing from the list of those Watts regards as forming the ‘canon’. No mention is made of Trotsky, despite the centrality of peasant agency to his theory of permanent revolution, an interpretation he formulated as an alternative to Stalin’s two stages model of agrarian and systemic transition. ¹⁰ Because rural smallholders were seen by those hostile to socialism both as upholders of private property, and as bearers of national identity and traditional culture, Trotsky warned against the political objective of promoting yet more capitalism in the countryside, since it was already there. ¹¹ His view was that struggle ought instead to be for a direct transition to socialism based on the dictatorship of the proletariat – not an intervening bourgeois democratic stage – on the grounds that, once they obtained land, rich and middle peasants would oppose further socialization of the means of production aimed at converting all private holdings – not just those confiscated from a landowning class – into state property. ¹²

These problems are linked in turn to the populist sympathies displayed by Watts himself. Hence the manner in which he describes Marxist critiques, along the lines of ‘purported weaknesses, romanticism or untenable natures of peasant populism’ (Watts, 58), in which the revealing term ‘purported’ hints at disagreement. In arguing that ‘the diversity and dynamism of agrarian questions . . . seem as vital as ever [since] the agrarian question is very much alive and kicking in the 21^st century’, Watts (61, 62) appears to disagree with Bernstein. Nevertheless, the reason for this is because he misreads Bernstein, maintaining the latter argues that as smallholders ‘are in effect no longer peasants or petty commodity producers’ they have to be seen as ‘semi-proletarianised’, the inference being that as a result the smallholder must be seen as a worker rather than a peasant. Watts appears to suggest that in deprivileging ‘peasantness’, Bernstein’s interpretation is akin to that of Lenin. The perception of Bernstein, however, is exactly the opposite: ‘The starting point must be to view peasants today as agrarian petty commodity producers within capitalism’, adding that ‘[t]his is also the position of more sophisticated populists’. ¹³ Like Akram-Lodhi and Kay (26), Watts (59) also refers to the work of Gibbon and Neocosmos without noticing that it is highly critical of Bernstein’s agrarian populism.

‘Marxist’ Answers

If the CAS interpretation of the classical agrarian question (Lenin, Kautsky) is flawed, then its reconceptualization by contemporary exponents is no better. Many contributions to the Handbook (e.g. Friedmann, 15ff.; Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 26; Ali Jan and Harriss-White, 171; Greco, 251; Jha and Yeros, 335ff.; McKay and Veltmeyer, 504ff.) tend to frame current discussion on the agrarian question simply in terms of arguments put forward by Byres and Bernstein, and subsequently by Borras. With few exceptions, their take on the issue is endorsed unquestioningly, despite the existence of critiques that fundamentally challenge such explanations. Not mentioned, therefore, are the political and theoretical problems that arise as a result. Unlike the teleology structuring the ‘classical’ agrarian question, which in the case of Marxist theory involved historical processes, political conditions and social forces that prefigure socialism, this kind of transition – the systemic transcendence of capitalism leading to socialism – has vanished from the agrarian question as conceived by Byres, Bernstein and Borras. Difficult to miss are the problems which accrue from this failure to question such interpretations.

An exponent of the semi-feudal thesis, Byres restricts the agrarian question to capitalist development within a given national context. ¹⁴ Unless labour-power employed there is free, capitalism is deemed by him to be absent or insufficiently developed, a view which discounts accumulation by international corporations using unfree workers to restructure the labour process. Since unfree labour is misinterpreted by the semi-feudal thesis as a ‘pre-capitalist’ relation, its presence signals wrongly that a transition is to be to yet more efficient capitalism, not socialism. Confining the agrarian question to national contexts, therefore, allows capitalism off the hook, banishes socialism from the political agenda, and permits the myth of a ‘progressive’ national bourgeoisie to flourish. This reformist – not to say conservative – approach of Byres is the problematic way in which the agrarian question is resolved in his semi-feudal analysis.

As in the case of Byres, the final stage of political transition has also vanished from the agrarian question as seen by Bernstein, who expels from the development agenda both a socialist project and its subject, the working class. In an attempt to re-invent the classic Marxist analyses of Lenin and Kautsky, Bernstein maintains implausibly that there are not one but two agrarian questions: that of capital (= modernization), and that of what he terms ‘labour’. ¹⁵ His view is that the former has been completed, while the latter has not, and is now a question of ‘classes of labour’. Rejecting the Marxist approach that differentiates the peasantry along class lines, Bernstein pronounces Lenin mistaken, and instead argues for the replacement of Marxist concepts such as ‘proletariat’/‘proletarianization’ with his own term ‘classes of labour’, a category which includes undifferentiated peasants. ¹⁶

Eliminating modernization from the agrarian question in this manner, and substituting ‘classes of labour’ for proletarianization, suggests the possibility that what Bernstein terms ‘labour’ may possess interests/objectives that transcend history rather than being determined by it. This is what populism argues with regard to the peasantry, the characteristics of which are perceived as immanent and unchanging, regardless of the economic system in which smallholders are located. The suspicion remains, therefore, that lurking behind the term ‘labour’ purged of modernization is actually peasant economy, and that the object of dividing the agrarian question in two is to retain within development discourse something akin to a Chayanovian model. Why these Marxist concepts and processes are discarded, and why smallholding is retained within his all-inclusive sociological category (‘classes of labour’), is not difficult to explain: it is because Bernstein is himself an agrarian populist, not a Marxist.

These difficulties notwithstanding, contributions to the Handbook are generally supportive of such interpretations, for the most part, unexamined by contributors. Among the ‘major interventions’ in the agrarian question debates of the 1970s/1980s, described by Watts (59–60) as characterized by ‘richness, diversity and comparative scope’ making a ‘profound impact’ on the the debate, therefore, is the work of Byres, whose ideas about paths of transition informing discourse on the agrarian question are said to display ‘a deep historical sensibility’. In keeping with such encomia, Bernstein is credited by Akram-Lodhi, Dietz, Engels and McKay (4) with establishing ‘more open and pluralist lines of enquiry’, by van der Ploeg (109) with an ‘excellent’ interpretation of the agrarian question, and by Pattenden (94) for his ‘politically significant’ interpretation. ¹⁷ Yeros (337) is critical of Bernstein, scathingly describing his attempted reinterpretation of the agrarian question as one that ‘almost negates the rich heritage of Marxist scholarship at one stroke’, a welcome break with his own previous uncritical endorsement of Bernstein’s views. Nevertheless, arguing incorrectly that Marxist theory is simply about smallholder ‘liberation’ and ‘autonomy’ suggests that Yeros (338) – like van der Ploeg (114) who uses the same concept – appears to see the agrarian question through populist lens.

Reprivileging Agrarian Populism

Significantly, when reviewing another and similar Handbook, Bernstein himself observes that ‘[t]he benefits of such pluralism, especially for teaching and learning, are that students can decide for themselves between alternative ‘theorization(s) and normative positioning(s)’ if they are presented with a substantial degree of coherence and lucidity, which this Handbook does not provide’. ¹⁸ With this assessment one can wholeheartedly agree. Ironically, and advocacy by Bernstein of pluralism notwithstanding, it is precisely this kind of ‘alternative theorization(s) and normative positioning(s)’, involving Marxist critiques both of his own concepts (‘classes of labour’) and of his agrarian populism, that are largely absent from the CAS Handbook. Most revealing, therefore, is the disparity that emerges simply as a result of the number of times an author is cited in the Handbook, as indicated by a quick count.

On the one hand, there are those (in the ‘heroic’ category) who feature prominently: Bernstein is cited 91 times, Akram-Lodhi 89, Borras 85, Edelman 66, Watts 40, James Scott 38, Byres 36, Scoones 29 and Desmarais 28. On the other hand, are those (in the ‘marginal’ category) whose work merits scarcely a mention: Petras is cited only 10 times, Brass a mere 6, Curwen and Meera Nanda 2 and Raju Das not at all. This already large gap is compounded by the way ideas are themselves discussed. Hence, those in the former category, cited anyway in large numbers, also have their views considered at length. By contrast, those in the marginal category, barely referenced in terms of citation, appear solely as names in lists featuring others, with little or no space given to the views held. The unfortunate impression conveyed by this differing emphasis is hard to avoid. One could be forgiven for thinking, therefore, that apart from the ideas and interpretations of those in the heroic category, nothing else of much relevance to the field of agrarian studies is worth reading, and certainly not anything produced by those in the marginal category. ¹⁹

An immediate and obvious difference between these same categories is that those in the marginal group are largely associated with the pre-2009 JPS, while most of those in the heroic group are on the editorial board either of JOAC or of the post-2008 JPS. This divide is crucial, since it marks a political disjuncture, whereby the central role allocated hitherto to Marxist approaches was replaced by emphasis given to agrarian populist ones. ²⁰ The same difference in emphasis is found in the Handbook, where positive references to agrarian populist interpretations by those of heroic status constitute endorsements, while the paucity or non-existent references to critiques by those deemed marginal suggest an absence of the necessity for endorsements.

Hence, the differences which structure the heroic/marginal divide are ones that are politically significant. Whereas most of those in the heroic category (Bernstein, Borras, Edelman, Scott, Desmarais, Scoones) regard agrarian populism as empowering, progressive and positive, those in the marginal category (Petras, Brass, Das, Nanda) are for the most part critics of agrarian populism, regarded by them as negative, conservative (or reactionary) and disempowering of class struggle. It comes as no surprise that the same gulf arises in the case of positive/negative interpretations about the viability of peasant economy and its desirability. Unlike the approach of the marginal category, for whom smallholders are differentiated by class, the heroic category tends to see the peasantry as undifferentiated in terms of class.

An additional and relevant question concerns the extent to which the same imbalance between supporters and opponents of agrarian populism is reflected in the way the history of the two main journals associated with CAS is recounted, both in the Handbook itself and in the journals. ²¹ Hence, the problematic narrative contained in the introductory chapter of the Handbook, whereby those editing the JPS moves seamlessly from Byres (1973–2000) and Bernstein (1985–2000) to Borras (2009-), omitting to mention Brass (1990–2008), the same partial version appearing elsewhere in the Handbook (Akram-Lodhi, Dietz, Engels, and McKay, 4; Friedmann, 20; Veltmeyer, 596). Missing from this history, therefore, is the presence of the person who – after Byres – happens to be the next longest serving editor of the JPS. ²² In part, such absences can be explained by events at the JPS in the period 1996–2008, involving changes to its editorship, to its editorial board, and to its political direction. ²³