Editorial

This issue brings together articles with some distinct sets of concerns. The first two articles address the dynamics of rural–urban and international migration by means of diverse research questions and approaches. Mausumi Mahapatro explores migration in two villages in south- eastern Bangladesh via a field resurvey and demonstrates that migration is closely related to rural differentiation. This relation, however, is not straightforward as migration can reinforce simple commodity production in certain contexts, while also leading to permanent rural exodus whereby migrants opt for selling their landholdings to finance their migration. Christoph Scherrer addresses, more generally, the passage from agrarian-rural to industrial-urban societies to demonstrate that, today, most people who leave agriculture do not find gainful employment in the cities and that, in fact, this prospect is only worsening by the premature de-industrialization of late industrializers. A comparison is offered between the conditions prevalent among the early industrializers and present-day latecomers to industry and advanced services, while highlighting a number of factors that constrain the transition in the South.

The next two articles are even more convergent in their concerns, both focusing on the political issues by food sovereignty movements in Argentina and Ecuador. We thus devote a special section to the ‘Politics of Food Sovereignty in South America’, so as to stimulate a more concerted debate if not also extend a further invitation to engage with the theme of our most recent special issue on Social Movement in the Global South (Vol. 7, No. 2, 2018). Efe Can Gürcan explores the conceptual ambiguities of food sovereignty and identifies five challenges that underlie these ambiguities. On this basis, it is proposed that food sovereignty is re-envisioned as a social mobilization outcome in the process of agrarian class formation and demonstrates the ambiguities and complexities of class formation in the case of Argentina. Alexandra Martinez Flores, Guido Ruivenkamp and Joost Jongerden, turn to the referendum for a national constituent assembly in Ecuador, where one of the concerns of the Assembly was to translate into law a food sovereignty proposal put forward by social movements. In this case, in the process of becoming law, the food sovereignty proposal was altered substantially, falling far short of the original proposals of the food sovereignty movement. The authors attribute this to the bureaucratization of peasant participation and the downgrading of land reform. Both the experiences of Argentina and Ecuador provide rich insights into both the strengths and weaknesses of food sovereignty movements.

In this issue, we also publish a new edition of our recently launched section on ‘Third World Legacies’, whose explicit purpose is to recuperate and advance the intellectual traditions of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. This section includes two articles. The first is by Prabhat Patnaik on the legacy of renowned Indian economist, Ashok Mitra, who passed away in May of 2018. Patnaik resumes and elucidates Mitra’s contribution, who had a keen interest in the relationship between economics and politics. For Mitra, class struggle in society at large underlays every aspect of economic life, including the determination of economic variables. Mitra focused his analytical sights on distributional dynamics, specifically on the relative shares of the different classes in national income and the role of the state. He took the issue with, and went beyond, Kalecki’s theory of ‘degree of monopoly’, which he did not take as given, but as determined by factors that included the real wage rate. He also advanced beyond the main approaches to the issue of the terms of trade, including that of Prebisch, by illuminating the class differentiation within the sectors, especially agriculture, and the political clout of the rural rich. Mitra was also passionate about economic decentralization, at a time when the Third World was in a special, early post-war and post-colonial, conjuncture which bestowed upon a higher degree of manoeuvre for state intervention and policy-making. Mitra will be remembered, Patnaik argues, as a theorist of the dirigiste phase of the Third World development.

The second article of the section is by Issa G. Shivji on the ‘metamorphosis’ of the revolutionary intellectual in the Third World. This article was delivered as the Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, on 19 October 2017. Shivji argues that different types of intellectuals have existed over time, including organic, revolutionary and ‘public’. He defines revolutionary intellectuals as organic intellectuals of the dominated classes who are committed to the transformation of society. Yet, in the South, organic intellectuals have had difficulty becoming ‘public’ intellectuals, given the exceptionally repressive conditions prevailing in peripheral societies seeking liberation, democratization and revolutionary transformation. In this context, Shivji explains how revolutionary intellectuals can undergo metamorphosis over time by means of co-optation by NGOs, state bureaucracies or universities.

Finally, we carry out two book reviews. The first is by Pradip Shinde on James Young’s Union Power: The United Electrical Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania, published in 2017, in New York, by Monthly Review Press. The second is by Apoena Cosenza on Lorgio Orellana Aillón’s Resurgimiento y Caída de la Gente Decente: Un Sendero en la Formación de una Clase-Etnia Dominante en Bolivia, 1940–2003 (Rise and Fall of the Decent People: The Path to the Formation of a Dominant Class-Ethnicity in Bolivia, 1940–2003), published in 2016, in La Paz, by Instituto de Estudios Sociales y Económicos.