Class dynamics of agrarian change

This art icle was downloaded by: [ RMI T Universit y] On: 14 August 2015, At : 14: 26 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG The Journal of Peasant Studies Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ f j ps20 Class dynamics of agrarian change Michael Wat t s a a Universit y of Calif ornia , Berkeley Published online: 01 Mar 2012. To cite this article: Michael Wat t s (2012) Class dynamics of agrarian change, The Journal of Peasant St udies, 39: 1, 199-204, DOI: 10. 1080/ 03066150. 2012. 656235 To link to this article: ht t p: / / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 03066150. 2012. 656235 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . 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London: Catholic Institute for International Relations and New York: Monthly Review Press. Sen, A. 1981. Poverty and famines: an essay on entitlement and deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. The Journal of Peasant Studies 2012.39:199-204. Class dynamics of agrarian change, by Henry Bernstein, Halifax, Fernwood Publishing, 2010, xii þ 142 pp., CAD$17.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-55266-349-3 There are few people as well positioned to write a book about the class dynamics of agrarian change as Henry Bernstein. For more than three decades he has been a central figure in the ‘peasant studies boom’ that emerged in the wake of the Vietnam war. Not least there is his, dare I say it, entrepreneurial role, along with Terry Byres, in providing a rich and wide-ranging intellectual space for the study of agrarian transitions through The Journal of Peasant Studies (and subsequently the Journal of Agrarian Change), an internationalist forum of the highest rank. In my own case, I recall vividly the intellectual excitement in first reading his now classic piece on commodification and the peasantry entitled ‘Notes on Capital and Peasantry’ – penned in 1977 and published in the Review of African Political Economy – composed in that terse, dense, propositional form as though he were bringing a dose of Wittgenstein to the Third World peasants. Bernstein is acutely aware of the task at hand: the ‘immense variety of types of farming and their social relations’. All of that said, it is nevertheless a slightly mad undertaking to assess ‘the social relations of production and reproduction, property and power in agrarian formations and their processes of change, both historical and contemporary’ in a such a little book – after all, in Marxist terms, which provides the theoretical frame for the book, this would be nothing short of an account of the origins and development of capitalism (and, in principle, of socialist agricultures too). Production and productivity, the origins and development of capitalism, colonialism, local and global agro-food systems, food regimes, neoliberalism, property and livelihood, technology, international markets, capitalist agrarian relations, class formation and political movements (to name some of the key themes) are all covered in a book which checks in at little more than 100 pages. Naturally, the express intention of the book is not to provide a full synthesis or encomium of agrarian studies, but rather a ‘state of the art small book on big issues’ (which is part, incidentally, of an excellent series developed by Jun Borras). Writing a small book of this sort is no easy matter, but the same might be said of reviewing it. Many very big issues are passed over quickly, every generalization is subject to immediate qualification and proviso. We are in any case talking minimally about a sector constituted by at least 20% of the world’s population right now – to say nothing of what it represented in 1700, 1880 or 1945. There are, for example, six short paragraphs on ‘Industrial Capitalism and Modern Imperialism’ (I am reminded here of a colleague who was asked to contribute a 100 word entry on the origins of universe to an on-line encyclopedia). Most The Journal of Peasant Studies 2012.39:199-204. 200 Book reviews frustrating of all is the truncated discussion on topics about which Bernstein is clearly itching to say more and about which any reader would want him to opine at length. Reading between the lines he clearly has much more to say of a quite critical nature on so-called ‘global agrarian resistance’ in Chapter 8 or on ‘global depeasantization’ in Chapter 6. In short, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change is a bit of a taster or a smorgasbord – with, it needs to be said, some very rich and flavorful dishes to choose from. Nevertheless, the experience for the reader is to be alert to the absences: why nothing on agrarian socialisms, why so little on gender or finance capital, why is the retail sector passed over so quickly? It is, in short, hard to resist the temptation to be a little peeved that our own pet topics, books and concepts are not part of the mix (why no reference to the feminist household debate, why so little on the rich literature on peasant revolution and insurgency, why not more on the complex political ecologies of agrarian change?). Bernstein is always attentive to the temporal in his account of agrarian change but much less to space. For all of that, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change is a little gem, and some parts of the book – particularly those speaking to the Bernstein’s strong suits such as agrarian transitions, the agrarian question of labor, and the relations of petty commodity producers to capital – are magisterial in their analytical insight and brevity. Perhaps the way to see this book is as a Marxian haiku on agrarian transformation. Bernstein’s approach to agrarian change is, broadly construed, Marxist – as he puts it, how Marx’s theory of capitalism can make sense of diverse and complex agrarian histories of the modern world (p.9). The primacy of the social relations between capital and labor is understood as a structured totality but one sensitive to what Marx calls ‘the concentration of many determinations’. Bernstein is attentive too to the fact that such a task is ‘challenging’, that the strongest areas of disagreement and debate are often among Marxists themselves, and that there is no suggestion that Marx or Marxism provides ‘everything we need to know’. But all of that said and done, the central conundrum remains: what are Marxism’s limits, or to put it differently what gets included and what is excluded, and can Bernstein’s six themes which provide the red threads running through the book (class and gender, divisions of access and labor, property, colonial legacies, paths of agrarian and market development, and relations of power) be fully or even properly addressed with the toolkit provided. Bernstein commences his journey, not surprisingly, with the linked questions of how we think about agrarian production and productivity, which turns on labor understood as acts of human agency. Productivity can be measured in a variety of ways, of course – Bernstein cites the mildly astonishing figure that the American farmer’s labor productivity is two thousands times that of the modal African farmer – and may indeed be in conflict with one another. He distinguishes between labor quantity and quality, the relations between the energetics of agriculture and what one might call agro-ecological capital (soil fertility, water, germ plasm and so on). The technical conditions of production are naturally to be distinguished from the social conditions of production, which leads Bernstein into an accounting of divisions of labor and co-operation in agriculture (economies of scale, complementation and timing effects) and the social conditions of reproduction. On the latter Bernstein draws on the foundational work of Eric Wolf on peasant ‘funds’ The Journal of Peasant Studies 2012.39:199-204. The Journal of Peasant Studies 201 (consumption, replacement, rent and ceremonial) which provides the occasion for Bernstein to flag the centrality of both gender and the domestic divisions of labor on the one side, and the forms of appropriation of surplus labor (which is to say relations of exploitation and the capacity for accumulation) on the other. [Oddly Bernstein does not refer here to what is surely the path-breaking formalization of this sort of agrarian political economy formulated by Alain de Janvry and Carmen Diana Deere (1979)]. All of this leads to his quartet of key political economic questions: who owns what (property), who does what (social organization of work), who gets what (the distribution of income), and what do they do with it (the social relations of consumption, reproduction and accumulation). In the following two chapters, Bernstein wades into the thickets of capitalism’s origins and early development and the relations between colonialism and capitalism (all in 30 pages, which is no mean defeat of intellectual compression). It is an impossible task to summarise what Bernstein accomplishes here. Suffice to say that he explores the genesis of generalized commodity production, including of labor as a commodity, and the conditions of possibility for pre-capitalist societies to undergo transitions to capitalism (primitive accumulation in short – which of course has been the object of considerable scrutiny of late following the work of The Commoner, Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey). He distinguishes between two ‘origins’: the classic agrarian questions and its various paths (English, Prussian, American and a rather unconvincing, and in my view analytically incoherent, account of East Asian transitions) and ‘the long march of commercial capitalism’ (here he links together some theoretically uncomfortable bedfellows including Jairus Banaji, Giovanni Arrighi and Jason Moore). At base, the distinction between the two turns on (i) a presumption that the English model is uniquely definitive of agrarian capitalism, and (ii) a presumption that capital can take hold of labor through a wide range of social arrangements (i.e. a rejection of a unitary theory of a purportedly pure agrarian capitalism) which, as Bernstein properly notes, has the distinct advantage of seeing agrarian capitalism as a world historical process. Inevitably this leads Bernstein to a series of provocative questions well beyond the perimeter of agriculture per se but rather with the challenges of Marxist analysis tout court: distinctions between capital invested in production versus circulation, which forms of capital are capitalist, is labor power limited to proletarians? One wants, of course, to hear what Bernstein has to say about these things. . .. . .but he has to move on colonialism. In Chapter 3 Bernstein covers ‘the histories of when and how capitalism developed as a world system’ [p. 39] (three phases of accumulation are identified: commercial capitalism in the sixteenth century, slave plantations and merchant’s capital in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and industrial capitalism and modern imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth) and how capital transformed agriculture regionally through different ‘patterns of agrarian change’. He makes excellent use of his own foundational work on labor regimes and concludes with several important ‘qualifications’ (pp. 54–56) pertaining to how we think about full or partial proletarianization, free and unfree labor and forced commercialization (he might also have added here gender, on which he has little to say). He rightly concludes with a short discussion of the complexities of determining whether colonialism was necessary for the emergence of capitalism and whether and how imperial primitive accumulation did or did not make significant contributions The Journal of Peasant Studies 2012.39:199-204. 202 Book reviews economic growth in Europe. It is less clear how these questions and others associated with capitalism’s early history resonate with contemporary debates over agrarian transformations (peasant persistence? the peasant way to development? the existence of pre-capitalist agrarian communities?) in the global south. In the two following chapters Bernstein provides a synoptic account of the rise of a global (and industrial) agriculture, especially after the 1870s. Central to this discussion is the industrial basis of technical change, the formation of global agricultural markets and the centrality of an agrarian sector as an object of national and international policy. This story is, of course, well-trodden territory. It covers the American technical revolution in agriculture (Bernstein makes good use of Cronon’s (1991) Nature’s Metropolis) and the agro-industrial treadmill that was to underwrite the Green Revolution strategies of 1950s and 1960s agricultural modernization, and the rise (and periodization) of serial food regimes (using the well known work of Harriet Friedmann and Phil McMichael). Bernstein properly points to the importance of the post-1945 moment of agricultural modernization in the global south and the intersection of both technical innovation (important but uneven green revolutionary strategies and the commodification of subsistence) and state-centered developmentalist strategies, which simultaneously created captured ‘state peasantries’ and an array of mechanisms for taxing peasants (for purposes of ‘development’, which often meant agrarian surpluses being diverted into political parties and personal accumulation by militaries and the political classes). All of this was blown wide-open, of course, by the neo-liberal ‘counter-revolution’ of the 1980s and thereafter, which Bernstein encapsulates nicely as regards the agro-food sector (what he calls ‘the ongoing and intensifying commodification of subsistence’ (p. 87)) and the collapse of the Second International Food Regime. There is much that could be said here. The food regime literature is used (in my view) in an uncritical way; the Green Revolution entailed a political and geopolitical undercurrent, which is not explored; indeed the Green Revolution itself is a bigger and more complex (and changeable) phenomenon than Bernstein suggests. After all, the recent International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) is a full-frontal assault on the Green Revolution model from within the ranks of the international agricultural establishment. There is no question that neo-liberalism has, and is, transforming the agro-food order – the World Bank’s 2008 report, Agriculture for Development, made this crystal clear – but precisely what sort of ‘order’ it is – other than pointing to its de-regulated and corporate form –remains a challenging question. (Bernstein’s discussion of the ‘end of the peasantry’ and of the diversity of forms and dynamics associated with high value commodities, the revival of ‘traditionals’, the multiplication of contracting, the soy boom and new patterns of bilateral (China-Brazil) and multilateral trade suggests as much.) Whether what we are currently witnessing is a massive series of ‘global enclosures’ (Bernstein cites Araghi’s work, but there is a raft of interest currently in ‘global land grabs’) strikes me as rather dubious. What gets folded into land grab is enormously variegated (sovereign wealth funds, retail capital, large scale infrastructure development, conservation schemes) and while the global climate change-energy/biofuels-food crisis since 2008 is important, it is not at all clear whether this is a purely conjectural phenomena – a result of capital piling into commodity markets (and, more generally, of the transformation of the intersection of finance capital and commodity markets). Yet this is an arena that is hardly mentioned in Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change and barely understood within the field of agrarian political economy. At the very The Journal of Peasant Studies 2012.39:199-204. The Journal of Peasant Studies 203 least, if one wanted to look at agriculture and global land grabs, would we not start with China? You-tien Hsing’s (2010) remarkable new book The Great Urban Transformation suggests that 15% of the cultivable area has been lost to urban growth and the distinctively Chinese dynamics of real estate speculation. The final two chapters – for me the best in the book – address the knotty problems of capitalist and non-capitalist farmers and, relatedly, of class dynamics in the countryside. Bernstein provides a careful and sophisticated analysis of the peasant ‘persistence’ question linking the debate to Chayanov and Kautsky on selfexploitation and the domestic labor process, to what he has called ‘the agrarian question of labor’. He demonstrates convincingly the ways in which family labor can be harnessed under a variety of conditions (from local supermarkets to industrial poultry integrators) but emphasizes the key role played by politics (whether peasant resistance or at the level of class forces) and their contingencies which shape particular outcomes. There is an all too brief discussion of land reforms – again one might have expected reference to Alain de Janvry’s (1981) important theorization of Latin American land reforms in his The Agrarian Question and to the more recent resurgence of land politics – making the point that reformism is a contradictory effort to stabilize small farmers as viable commodity producers (now, of course, draped in the neoliberal discourse of entrepreneurship and market vitality). Bernstein then turns to whether small farmers as commodity producers can be construed as a class or classes of labor. Differentiation within commodity producers is treated in a nuanced way, doing justice to Bernstein’s claim that tendencies to differentiation are rooted in the multiple determinations of the contradictory unity of class places in petty commodity production. Drawing upon Mike Davis’s (2006) brilliant account of the informal working class in the slum world in Planet of the Slums, Bernstein draws provocative parallels with the fluid social boundaries linking on- and off-farm labor and complex combinations of wage and self employment in agriculture in the global south. Bernstein’s concludes with a brief meditation on the complexities of class in the countryside. He wants to assert the importance of the fact that class relations are universal but not excusive determinations and yet retain, or keep in tension, the fact that forms of agrarian mobilization and movement formation are prismatic and often contradictory. It is pity that Bernstein did not have occasion to enter further into the robust literature on peasant revolutions, agrarian insurgencies and rebellion – one thinks of the exciting new work of Paul Richards, Stathis Kalyvas and Jeremy Weinstein (to say nothing of the World Bank’s 2011 Report). Bernstein is, in my view, somewhat skeptical of the grandiose claims made about a global agrarian counter-movement and of a ‘peasant way’, questioning the conceptual foundations of any claims of a purported unity of landed peoples, and problematising how a common political project is constructed from the heterogeneous shards of new farmer movements. His critique, for me, opens up still larger questions about class and politics: not the least of which is what the dominance of finance implies for labor or for class politics more generally. Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change seeks to demonstrate that class is the indispensable starting point for a robust political economy of agriculture. Bernstein has staked out this ground in a sweeping and compelling way. It is evitable that a reader ends the book with more questions than he or she started with – and perhaps with a sense of frustration at what little Bernstein sometimes has to say about the intriguing and challenging questions he poses. But it is a measure of the breadth, 204 Book reviews sophistication and brilliance of Bernstein’s analysis that his theoretical project remains so compelling. Michael Watts University of California, Berkeley Email: [email protected] Ó 2012, Michael Watts The Journal of Peasant Studies 2012.39:199-204. References Bernstein, H. 1977. Notes on capital and peasantry. Review of African Political Economy, 4(10), 60–73. Cronon, W. 1991. Nature’s metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton. Davis, M. 2001. Planet of slums. London: Verso. Deere, C.D. and A. de Janvry. 1979. A conceptual framework for the empirical analysis of peasants. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 61(4), 601–11. Hsing, Y. 2010. The great urban transformation: politics, land, and property in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Janvry, A. 1981. The agrarian question and reformism in Latin America. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. World Bank. 2011. World development report 2011: conflict, security, and development. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. 2007. World development report 2008: agriculture for development. Washington, DC: World Bank. Gender and agrarian reforms, by Susie Jacobs, New York and London, Routledge, 2010, viii þ 256 pp., £70.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-415-37648-8 This comprehensive account of land and agrarian reforms worldwide provides a useful overview at a time when agricultural systems and productivity are coming back in focus with rising food prices, and environmental and social concerns associated with large scale agribusiness. Jacobs did original work in the 1980s in Zimbabwe, giving her first-hand experience with one sort of state-led attempt at equitable reform. This book, however, draws on an extensive review of existing research on reforms around the world in an attempt to provide a macro picture of different models and contexts from which broad trends, trajectories and theoretical implications can be drawn. Jacobs’ particular focus is on the outcomes of reforms for women and gender relations, but this is anchored firmly in a broader discussion of the practical and ideological aims of reforms in various contexts. The book is divided into three parts and nine chapters. Part I engages with theoretical perspectives and debates relating both to agrarian reforms and feminist studies of rural women’s status. Land reforms worldwide are classified as either collective or household/family types of programs, with the former associated mostly with states having undergone socialist or communist revolutions, and the latter both after failed collectivizations, and elsewhere as original models of reform. Debates have centred on issues of productivity and efficiency, optimal sizes of land-holdings and public-vs-private tenure. History has taught clear lessons on some of these issues, for example showing that the Soviet assumption that