Abstract
This special issue is dedicated to a theme that has been intrinsic to the research agenda of the Agrarian South Network for as long as the land and agrarian questions themselves have, given the manner in which the national question and liberation have influenced our understanding of the research agenda. These concerns derive from the uneven development of the world economy under imperialism and the ideological weight that race has had in the formation of the modern world. In the course of colonial expansion, all social relations and institutions became subject to racialization, including caste, ethnicity, indigeneity, and gender, to establish enduring contradictions in the peripheries of the world economy. National liberation has had to confront the full range of contradictions in its quest for independent statehood, popular sovereignty, and the development of the productive forces.
The legacies of colonialism remain the terrain on which new patterns of accumulation have taken shape. Contemporary imperialism continues to have an uneven impact on different regions and social groups on the basis of prior colonial trajectories of conquest and settlement. It is an unevenness that arises from historical deprivation and is today driven by the changing requirements of accumulation across the peripheries of the world economy. This leads to constant spatial and ecological reconfigurations and to rural–urban and international migrations which affect historically oppressed peoples. Any study of these phenomena should take note, first, that the categories of race, caste, ethnicity, and indigeneity are complex and evolving, with diverse trajectories across countries and continents in accordance with specific colonial legacies.
It is equally important to note that emerging alliances between domestic and translational capital today and the protracted crisis of monopoly capitalism have resulted in important changes within the social structures of peripheral countries. The growth of labor reserves, in particular, has often relied on the intensification of existing social contradictions and institutions. These may carry residues of pre-capitalist formations, but in reality they are being restructured through the changing realities of uneven development and the unfolding crisis. The social categories in question are a product of processes of accumulation in different stages of development, but they remain malleable enough to be mobilized by new strategies of accumulation or, conversely, by the oppressed themselves in struggles of resistance.
Today, there are several forms of discrimination arising out of this long historical process. The first concerns widespread forms of race discrimination structurally entrenched in the distribution of land and resources and in the segmentation of labor, especially in settler societies. Race discrimination became a factor that mediated the formation and changes in the social structure in these societies. Not only were the resources, land, and labor of non-white peoples appropriated by the capitalist interests of the dominant white races, but subject peoples were also exterminated and ghettoized into particular living spaces and occupations as the labor reserves grew. A key feature of racial domination has also been its patriarchal character which has molded women’s paid and unpaid labor into informal labor arrangements accompanied by sexual exploitation and violence.
The second prominent form in question is caste discrimination which is borne out of ideas of purity and impurity that are embedded in patriarchal and Brahmanical power structures. The contemporary debate between class, caste, and gender has some peculiar characteristics, as caste itself was used as a social principle of labor organization in pre-capitalist times. However, this connection between caste and occupation has changed over time, as the segmentation of labor force has been permeated by institutions of caste. Upper caste domination in landholdings and control over farm servants through debt bondage and other means has led to the historical and structural oppression of the lower castes. As in settler societies, such exploitation continued to rely on unequal distribution of land and resources and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the upper castes.
The fourth form of discrimination relates to both race and caste and concerns indigenous people in both settler and non-settler ex-colonies who emphasize their rights on historical homelands, their own systems of control and government, as well as their land and resource use patterns, in the process of also becoming integrated into labor markets. Notwithstanding that indigenous communities are approximately 5% of the global population and 15% of the global poor, they are considered “custodians” of 80% of the planet’s biodiversity. Thus the relevant political questions today concern equality and autonomy as well as the traditional knowledge that supports conservation and reproduction of cultural biodiversity. Although the category of “indigenous” has no universal meaning, there is a broad understanding that, among rural communities in particular, autonomy and way of life must be respected by effective devolution of political power and ecological planning. The idea of the revival of the “indigenous” has come to present a potential critique of capitalist modernity, yet it is also appropriated to serve established interests dressed up in “multicultural” or “ecological” garb.
Ethnicity, for its part, can derive from a number of cultural and institutional sources to find expression in a communal identity that may be mobilized by different social forces. Historically, it has served colonial purposes of divide and rule, among communities and genders, while it has also formed the basis of struggles for equality, autonomy, and national self-determination. The societies that have emerged from colonial rule have been especially confronted with the multi-ethnic challenge and the necessity of obtaining political coherence within larger national or pan-national communities. This is a challenge which has been substantially different from the metropolitan methods of historical state-making via war and imposed homogenization. The politicization of ethnicity, nonetheless, and its mobilization in accumulation and the control over land, resources, and labor have also contributed to violent outcomes and even the disruption of whole societies via state fracture and foreign occupation. Moreover, insofar as ethnicity has been attached to colonial institutions and to notions of subject indigeneity, it has also gained enduring administrative features related precisely to the control of land and labor and to the evolving processes of production and reproduction in the labor reserves.
It remains important to emphasize that current patterns of uneven development are driven by the intensification of the crisis of monopoly capitalism. There is an intense scramble for agricultural land in the countries and regions of the South and a penetration of capital in lands ordinarily held under customary tenures by small producers, thereby fueling conflict and migration. The privatization of forests, water, and other commons, and the competition over energy and mineral resources, have similarly impacted on the security and rights of historically oppressed peoples, as well as the territorial integrity of peripheral countries. The corollary of global integration under neoliberalism continues to be the tendency to national disintegration and mobilization of reactionary forces.
It is notable that, even at the level of international organizations, these processes have been sounding alarm among various agencies, such as the International Labour Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. These have proceeded to produce “guidelines for responsible investments”, conventions for upholding traditional tenures and “informed consent”, and a declaration on the “rights of peasants”. Yet, the protracted crisis of monopoly capitalism has only intensified strategies of primitive accumulation by the known means of financialization and militarization of accumulation. It is no surprise, therefore, that the unresolved national questions have been entering a new phase of polarization and conflict.
In this special issue, we have sought to bring attention to a number of key issues either through conceptual and historical approaches or empirical studies of contemporary experiences. The special issue includes six main articles, a review essay, and a book review, as follows.
Surinder Jodhka, in his article entitled “Agrarian Studies and the Caste Conundrum”, calls for a recognition of caste as a structuring reality of agrarian life in South Asia. Jodhka argues for a simultaneous recognition of the serious problems with the almost universally accepted “idealistic” conceptualizations of caste. He argues that approaching caste as an aspect of land relations and the realities of economic processes would significantly enhance our understanding of its materiality, which makes it persist in contemporary times. A widespread “blindness” towards caste in agrarian studies and, likewise, the imaginations of caste primarily as a “religious” phenomenon, have broader academic and political implications. Bringing them together would thus require a recognition and opening-up of this academic conundrum. A critical engagement with the disciplinary framings of agrarian studies and, perhaps more importantly, of caste studies is thus called for.
Archana Prasad, in “Contested Indigeneities: Adivasi Politics Historically and in Contemporary Times”, focuses on the development and transformations of adivasi political identity and its articulations with indigenous consciousness in India since the advent of colonial capitalism. The apogee of adivasi politics and the “politics of indigeneity” since the 1970s has coincided with the networking amongst indigenous groups within the United Nations. The history of such politics is traced in order to illustrate the forms in which social identities assume over a long historical process. In other words, the changing character of the antagonistic contradictions between the hegemon and different sections of the oppressed are illustrated, including the articulation of “indigeneity” and adivasi consciousness.
Weber Lopes Góes and Deivison M. Faustino, in “Capitalism and Racism in the Longue Durée: An Analysis of their Reflexive Determinations”, trace the genesis and evolution of racism, its specific features, conceptual boundaries, and position within capitalist relations of production. They argue that, although there is no consensus as to what came first, and neither as to what prevails in the complex and relational dynamics of social reproduction, there is general agreement that racism is a multidimensional phenomenon that combines group discrimination and hierarchization, guided by naturalized assumptions and supposedly inherent differences. This study examines the historical features of several racist theories to provide a more accurate view of the reflexive determinations between capitalism and racism as they have evolved, up to the phase of monopoly capitalism.
Walter Chambati and Freedom Mazwi, in “‘The Land Belong to Us’: Ethnic Claims over Land During Zimbabwe’s Land Reforms”, examine Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) implemented from 2000, which diversified the agrarian structure by replacing the few large commercial farms with many smaller-scale farms. The official policy of the FTLRP was to reverse the racial imbalances inherited from settler colonialism and to redistribute land with a “national” perspective. In this context, the authors contribute an empirical study of the influence of ethno-regionalism, or ethnicity, on land access. Utilizing survey data and other sources, the authors examine how ethnic mobilization structured the results of land distribution. Ethno-regionalism was inevitable in the small-scale A1 farms, since it mainly resettled peasants near their Communal Areas of origin. However, in the small capitalist A2 farms, ethnic tensions were perceived through exclusions of the “insiders”, as they were edged out of the allocations by the urban middle classes seeking accumulation opportunities within a context of economic crisis. It is argued that, if the latter trajectory persists, demand for land will continue to rise and fuel future land struggles, which might be colored by grievances of prior marginalization along ethnic lines.
Givânia Maria da Silva and Barbara Oliveira, in “Quilombos in Brazil and the Americas: Black Resistance in Historical Perspective”, provide an historical overview of the struggles and organizational processes of rural black, or Afro-rural, communities in Brazil and the Americas. These communities are variably known in local nomenclatures as quilombos, mocambos, palenques, cumbes, cimarrones, and maroons. The objective is to clarify who these communities are and how they were formed in Brazil and the Americas. The study is based on research with rural black community leaders, their accounts, and experience. It shows that processes of resistance to slavery and oppression induced the formation of Afro-rural communities, leading to their recognition in national constitutions in more recent years.
Gertrude Torvikey, in “Land and Contestations over Autochthony and Local Citizenship in Agrarian Ghana”, examines the re-imagination of communities in an industrial cassava frontier of Ghana, in the wake of a contested land grab supported by state and community institutions. Torvikey utilizes qualitative and survey data to construct the existing social relations in the communities through the lens of earlier processes of agrarian change that have transformed the social base of the communities. Torvikey argues that the expansion of capitalist production systems into agrarian areas has resulted in local citizenship contestations centered on land, and the redefinition and reclassification of people and their access to land. The study highlights the multiple claims and contestations that arose from the land grab and the political reactions from below. The author further argues that differentiated dispossession and class differences determine the strategies used by affected people.
The review essay by Max Ajl, entitled “Land and the US Agrarian South”, summarizes and synthesizes three books on Black and Indigenous agrarian struggles in the modern-day territories of the United States—Monica M. White’s, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement; Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover’s (Eds.), Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health; and Edward Onaci’s, Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State. Ajl discusses how the books recount the centrality of land, national liberation, self-reliant development, food sovereignty, and sustainable forms of agriculture and land management to Black and Indigenous radical struggle. Ajl focuses on the anti-systemic dimensions of national liberation struggles in the core, especially those carried out historically by Black and Indigenous movements, and details how those movements historically looked out beyond the US landmass for solidarity and to build internationalist fronts. Ajl also suggests parallels and divergences between those struggles and those of the contemporary Third World and reflects on their role in destabilizing settler-capitalism in the United States.
Finally, Preksha Mishra provides a review of the book edited by A. Narayanmoorthy, R.V. Bhavani and R. Sujatha in honor of Venkatesh B. Athreya, entitled Whither Rural India? Political Economy of Agrarian Transformation in Contemporary India: A Festschrift for Venkatesh B. Athreya (2019).
We take this opportunity formally to announce in the pages of this journal the awarding of the Samir Amin Young Scholars’ Prize in Political Economy of Development for 2020–2021 (Volumes 9–10), which goes to Fabiano Escher for his article entitled “Class Dynamics of Rural Transformation in Brazil: A Critical Assessment of the Current Agrarian Debate” (Vol. 9, No. 2, 2020). The Samir Amin Prize has been established by the Editorial Board of Agrarian South in honor of Amin’s exemplary scholarship and path-breaking contributions to the study of the capitalist world economy and the challenges faced especially by the peoples of the South. The Prize is awarded every two years to an author whose article has been published in Agrarian South and is either a postgraduate student or received a Doctoral degree within five years of publication of the article.
Escher’s article provides an overview of the agrarian question in Brazil during the neoliberal period. He offers a critique of the current debates by means of an analysis of classes in the countryside, the political forces as they have evolved among unions, associations and movements, and their relationship to the state. Escher argues that the large-scale agribusiness sector became more differentiated under neoliberalism but also more resolute in lobbying the state to scale back support for small-scale and peasant farming in favor of a broader category of “productive” farmers, to include a middle layer. Moreover, the rural unions and social movements representing small farmers of different sizes and capacities were themselves pressured into, or divided by, the “productivist” perspective in lobbying the state for financial support. Thus, Escher argues, when the coup of 2016 occurred with the support of agribusiness lobby, the policy framework for small-scale farmers was effectively dissolved, while the ability to resist among social forces had been eroded. Congratulations to Fabiano for this outstanding work!
Lastly, we also hereby announce that this year, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of our journal, we will be releasing an Editor’s Choice of articles in three online installments. The articles will become available on the website of our journal (https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ags).
Our sincere thanks to our readers and contributors across the globe for engaging with our journal and supporting our efforts to promote tricontinental unity and an autonomous research agenda in the social sciences. With your engagement and support, the journal and network continue to grow and embark on new initiatives. A luta continua!