In Conversation with Sam

Introduction

In this article, I intend to raise some agrarian issues, as debating points, which were very close to Sam and for which he was passionate. ¹ We often discussed these issues, but never exhaustively. I raise them, somewhat tentatively, to contribute to the ongoing debate. All are, in a sense, classical questions, very commonly debated among Marxists, but we have to address them in a new, concrete situation. First is the much discussed, yet elusive, category of ‘the peasant’, in both its dimensions, analytical and empirical. Is ‘peasant’ a useful category of analysis? Do peasants exist as a social group? Second, linked to the peasant question is the national question. The third, in my view a central question, is the form and character of accumulation in the agrarian sector. The fourth relates to social agency for transformation and forms of its organization. All these issues are evident in Sam’s writings spread all over his numerous chapters in edited books.

The Peasant Question

For Sam, if I understood him correctly, the agrarian question in Africa is a combination of the peasant and land question. And, of course, for historical reasons both of these issues manifested themselves vividly in Zimbabwe, the terrain of his work and study. He had no doubt in his mind on the need and the necessity for land reform in the classical sense of confiscating land from the landlord and redistributing it to the peasant, whether through state policies from the top or grassroots struggles from the bottom. In real life, there is no Chinese wall between the two. Top-down and bottom-up may be interlinked, as indeed it happened in Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, it was the struggle of the war veterans from below which forced Mugabe to accelerate land reform from above (Moyo, 2001; Moyo & Yeros, 2005). While Sam thought redistribution would be the correct approach to the resolution of the land question, at least in the former settler colonies, it could not be generalized to other situations. In Tanzania, for example, where you have a small peasantry, I argue that land reform really means land tenure reform which would address the question of insecurity of tenure of the small producer, both peasant and pastoralist. Sam probably agreed with me on this, but we never managed to tease out all the nuances of land reform in Africa and much less theorize it.

In regard to the peasant question, the debate that exercised Sam’s mind a lot is the position taken by some agrarian experts from the North arguing that both the peasant and the land question are passé and what really exists is the labour question (Bernstein, 2002; Bryceson, 2000). First, they argued that the peasant no longer exists; rather, the rural sector has been de-peasantized and diversified, whereby livelihoods depend on multiple sources and not only on land. Hence, the second point followed, which was that the issue of the producer in rural setting could be best conceptualized as the labour question, rather than the land/peasant question. I may have slightly oversimplified this position, but I think it does capture the essentials of the argument of the ‘labour-question’ theorists. Sam felt that this position, which in his view was erroneous, was gaining currency because it had access to international mainstream journals like the Journal of Peasant Studies, where African writers did not have the same access. This is what led Sam and other like-minded scholars from the South to found the journal Agrarian South.

Sam worked on land reform in Zimbabwe where he advocated land redistribution, which would, in fact, lead to re-peasantization, or re-constitution of the peasantry, rather than de-peasantization. Understandably, therefore, Sam could not accept the argument of de-peasantization. The question, however, still remains as to what would be the future trajectory of the re-constituted peasantry. This is precisely the issue that we have been discussing in our summer schools. I think he, together with some of us, believed that there are two possible paths on which the peasantry could go: either in the direction of coming together in some kind of co-operative structures—the desirable path; or it would fall under imperialism and be subjected to exploitation through various forms of primitive accumulation, which characterizes the current fate of the peasantry in much of Africa—obviously an undesirable path. Sometimes Sam and Paris used the term ‘semi-proletarian’ to describe the later type of peasantry. I think the concept of semi-proletarian in this context is not sufficiently theorized. We need to discuss it further. As I said, I am only flagging the issue which we need to discuss and debate in greater depth.

The National Question

The second question that was very close to Sam is the national question which obviously is linked to the agrarian question. For him, the core of the national question, the core of the anti-imperialist question, if you like, lay in the agrarian question, and unless you confront the agrarian question, you cannot confront the national question. Maybe they do not both stand and fall together, maybe equating them was somewhat stretching the truth, but occasionally it is permissible to exaggerate the truth to drive home the point. And I believe that if you read Sam carefully, this is the message you get, the way he links the national question and the agrarian question. Once we talk of the national question, inevitably we have to deal with the issue of who would be its carrier in the actually existing conditions of Africa today. In the 1980s, we had intense debates on both the existence of the national bourgeoisie in Africa and, even if it did exist, its capacity to address and resolve the national question, which per force is an anti-imperialist question. Admittedly, we were wedded to the Fanonist idea of the bankruptcy of the ‘national bourgeoisie’.

Developments since, at least in Africa, have proved him right. In a capitalist-commodity economy, to be sure, bourgeois elements are born all the time, but get quickly compradorized under imperialist globality, as I argued in my 1987 article (Shivji, 1987). On this, I think Sam and I did not quite see eye to eye. I felt that Sam and Paris exaggerated the national bourgeois character of the Mugabe regime. They described the Zimbabwean state a ‘radicalized state’, which itself I found problematic as an analytical category. They identified the whole of the black bourgeoisie as part of the pro-land reform ‘nationalist block’. In my view, this was too sweeping a statement and arose from the failure to make a clear distinction between a national and a comprador bourgeoisie. There was perhaps also a conflating of the historical moment with a longer term tendency. Sam rightly felt that we need to debate this question concretely in the context of a particular historical conjuncture, as we cannot simply generalize it.

There is also the more fundamental question of imperialism. At particular historical moments, some elements of the bourgeoisie may exhibit nationalist tendencies, but these usually do not congeal into a national bourgeoisie, because they do not have a consistent antiimperialist position. I know that the issue of imperialism does not feature these days in the dominant left discourse, yet for some of us from Africa, imperialism remains at the centre of understanding our conditions.

The Question of Accumulation

The third question around which our debates were centred was that of accumulation. I think this is one issue that we need to investigate and theorize. The character and form of accumulation under neo-liberalism in the agrarian South would help us to understand better the agrarian question. I have been arguing for some time now that the dominant tendency of accumulation is primitive accumulation, as opposed to the accumulation by expanded production. Both tendencies exist side by side, and the tension between the two helps us to historicize the development and trajectory of social struggles. I submit that the differentia specifica of primitive accumulation is that accumulation or exploitation cuts into the necessary consumption of the producer. This is another debate that we need to take further.

In my talks and lectures and writings, I found David Harvey’s analysis quite handy, and I often quoted it. I think Sam was not always comfortable with this. He believed that Harvey was too Eurocentric and failed to integrate centre/periphery relation into his analysis. I think Sam was probably right. David Harvey has no doubt revisited Rosa Luxemburg’s thesis in a refreshing way, and I think that is useful. But his writings do not fully take account of imperialism in the South, in particular in Africa. We need to debate very specifically forms of accumulation at particular historical moments and tease out all the nuances. Nonetheless, in my view, we have not done enough work to theorize sufficiently the question of accumulation. Unless we do that, we cannot really get to the heart of the agrarian question.

The Question of Social Agency and Organization

Finally, we debated the question of agency and organization. Of course, Sam was no armchair intellectual; he saw his work as a theoretical praxis. Therefore, for him, issues of social struggles and organization became predominant. I know he did not theorize a lot on this issue in his writings. However, in his talks and conversations he was extremely sympathetic and was attracted by the landless movement and social movements that deal with land and peasants. You can notice this in some of his writings, in his visits particularly to Brazil, and his great solidarity with the landless movements of Brazil and South Africa. Some of the first people to express their great shock, sorrow and sadness when Sam passed on were the activists of the landless movement in South Africa.

On the question of social agency I have been suggesting for a while that the category of ‘working people’, rather than working class, as the harbinger of fundamental transformation would serve us well; working people assimilating the peasantry, the proletariat, however small, and the precariat of various kinds which exist in our countries in the so-called ‘informal sector’. In our discussions, we touched on this, but there were doubts. Again that is something that we need to theorize vigorously, the question of social agency and organization.

As I said in the beginning, I am only flagging these issues. I hope we can have more discussions in the summer schools and in the pages of this journal, as we pay tribute to Sam for his great scholarship and social commitment to the liberation of African peoples.