Abstracts of articles in Issue 30.3&4

Regional Differences in Chinese Agriculture: Results from the 1997 First National Agricultural Census by Roberto Fanfani and Cristina Brasili

The knowledge of agriculture and rural areas in China was incomplete and fragmented until recently. The First National Agricultural Census in China overcame the lack of information. In this article, we first underline the wide differences that exist in farms typologies (households and non-households) after the extensive application of agrarian reform. In the second part of the article we will apply cluster analysis to Census data at the province and county level in order to redefine the geography of Chinese agriculture. The new reality of agriculture often differs from the economic and geographic regions previously utilized for the representation of Chinese economy.

Rethinking the Peasant Burden: Evidence from a Chinese Village by Li Xiande

In the past years, the 'peasant burden' has become a very serious problem in the Chinese countryside, with farmers paying heavy taxes and levies. The government took many measures and regulations to tackle this issue. But, based on a village survey, this article shows that these regulations are largely ineffective. Most of the taxes, especially the various levies and funds paid to the local governmental agencies, escape the controls. The author argues that the dysfunction of local administrations is, among others, the main cause of the peasant burden. The problem is not a new one in China and reflects still the subordinate status of the peasantry. Therefore, any solution should imply active participation of the farmers in the management of public affairs and the implementation of democracy at grassroots level.

How Not to Industrialize: Observations from a Village in Sichuan by Jacob Eyferth

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, township and village enterprises (TVEs) were the main motor of development in rural China. This article looks at the mechanisms of industrial expansion in a single village and examines its associated costs. It finds that industrialization was narrowly conceived as a concerted mobilization effort in the pursuit of 'projects' that were not embedded in the local economy, produced few benefits for the local population, and burdened the village with crippling debts. Alternative pathways to industrialization, in the form of well-established handicrafts, were not explored. TVE privatization since 1998 has not fundamentally altered the mobilizational approach to industrialization.

Determinants of Income from Wages in Rural Wuxi and Baoding: A Survey of 22 Villages by Eduard B. Vermeer

Opportunities and propensity to work for wages differ greatly between villages in China, depending on administrative position, urban proximity, economic development and cultural factors. A 1998 survey of over 3,000 households in 22 villages in two regions highlights the varying importance of personal attributes such as gender, age, education and political affiliation. Both in Wuxi in the rich, industrialized lower Yangtze delta and in agricultural Baoding on the North China Plain gender and education are critical factors for wage income, but differently so for younger and older generations. Political affiliation, if corrected for other factors, has less effect. Individual attributes appear to be important determinants of wage labour decisions, and socio-economic change has had different effects on the income position of households and individuals.

The Wasteland Auction Policy in Northwest China: Solving Environmental Degradation and Rural Poverty? by Peter Ho

In order to relieve rural poverty and solve the problem of soil and water erosion on marginal land, various provinces and regions throughout China proclaimed a new policy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This 'Four Wastelands Auction Policy' attempts to boost the development of land of low economic value through the auction of land leases, not only to the rural but also to the non-rural population. In this sense, the policy forms a double break with the past. First, it was initiated at the grassroots and thus signifies a larger manoeuvring space for local cadres to launch new - sensitive - policies. Second, access to rural (marginal) land is no longer restricted to farmers but has also become available to officials, urban entrepreneurs and citizens. By relying on concepts of institution building, two village case studies provide a detailed overview of the implementation of the wasteland auction policy in the Ningxia Hui Muslim autonomous region in northwest China, and its implications for poverty alleviation and soil and water conservation.

Ningxia's Third Road to Rural Development: Resettlement Schemes as a Last Means to Poverty Reduction? by Rita Merkle

From the perspective of policy effectiveness and economic performance, this article evaluates government-directed resettlement projects in rural Ningxia, which had begun already in 1983. This will make it possible to reassess China's main approach to poverty reduction after the year 2000. The different policies are described and poverty indices are discussed. The article particularly examines the case of one cross-county resettlement project that was based on voluntary participation, illustrating its implementation characteristics and its outcomes. Finally, the findings are put into the broader context again and implications for policy-making are pointed out.

A Comparative Study of Projection Models on China's Food Economy by Zhang Xiaoyong

During the last two decades, China's food supply and demand has been a hot topic for both politicians and academics given China's rapid economic development and its sheer market size. Accordingly, researchers are trying to project the future development of China's food economy. This article reviews several influential projection models and compares their model structure, major assumptions and projection results. In addition, author tries to pinpoint the most significant factors that could influence the projection results. Several emerging issues, such as the projection validity, livestock structure changes and data reliability are discussed at the end.

Social Welfare in Rural China by Jutta Hebel

Post-Mao China has seen a rapid restructuring of social welfare. In contrast to urban residents, China's rural population never received much state support. Rural welfare in China is best understood as a 'welfare mix', in which different actors - state agencies, intermediate organizations, and the market - supply goods and services to rural households, which are the ultimate producers of welfare and well-being. To understand how welfare works in rural China, we need to move away from a narrow focus on insurance schemes to a broader perspective that includes the everyday production of welfare in the household and the complex interaction between various institutional actors.

Gender Difference in Inheritance Rights: Observations from a Chinese Village by Heather Xiaoquan Zhang

This article analyses inheritance in Chinese village society within a broad notion of welfare and social policy research. Its central concern is with the gendered dimension of inheritance. Based on fieldwork, the study reveals a significant gap between legislation and reality with daughters losing their statutory rights to their brothers in rural households and the village community despite the legal recognition of equal rights between women and men in property and inheritance. The article argues that while pluralist welfare provision is emphasized in promoting well-being in rural China, the problem of unequal entitlements and rights of men and women calls for more effective government actions in the form of social policy-making to combat gender discrimination and gendered exclusion, and to ensure more gender-equitable welfare outcomes.

Local State Corporatism and Private Business by Maria Edin

This article examines the role of the local state in promoting the development of private business in China, and the political institutions behind local state-led development. It argues that political incentives are more important than fiscal incentives to understand why local leaders have assisted the growth of rural industry. It also shows that local cadres not only promote collective enterprises, but also the private sector whose profits they are able to control to a much lesser extent, which reinforces the finding that political incentives guide cadre behaviour. The study applies the notion of local state corporatism but also asks what relevance the model, so dominant in the 1990s, holds for China rural studies in the coming years.

Abstracts of articles in Issue 30.2

Rural Perceptions of State Legitimacy in Burma/Myanmar by Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung

This article examines four different agricultural policies that have been implemented under the Burmese military regime, with particular reference to the varying reactions by rice farmers to the ways in which these agricultural programmes were implemented. The purpose is to challenge conventional studies of Burma/Myanmar that focus on the behaviour and practices of the military elite in Rangoon, and treat the military regime as a unitary actor. By contrast, the state is disaggregated analytically into different levels (local, national), the object being how the varying interactions between the Burmese rice farmers and agricultural policy implementers result in correspondingly distinct farmer perceptions of the government. Existing scholarly debates on political legitimacy are considered, with particular regard to Third World authoritarian countries. This is followed by a brief analysis of four different agricultural policies that have been implemented under the military regime, together with Burmese farmers' attitudes towards each of them. The way these policies are implemented is linked in turn to the popularity or unpopularity of the military elite in the capital and/or the local authorities in the provincial areas. Finally, the broader implications of the Burmese case study regarding the more complicated basis and status of political legitimacy are extended to other authoritarian regimes.

Food Regimes and the Production of Value: Some Methodological Issues by Farshad Araghi

In critically re-examining the concept of food regime this article argues for an alternative formulation that posits the concept on the foundation of the theory of value, rather than the developmentalist framework of the regulation theory within which it was originally posed. This is possible because while the insights of food regime analysis were rooted in a world historical perspective on global value relations, its presentation always subordinated the latter to the more abstract stage theory of the regulation school. Disentangled from regulationism, the concept of food regime is central for a labour-oriented perspective on imperialism as a relation of production embedded in global value relations. This is part of a broader methodological critique that locates the problematic of development (and consumption, in the post-developmentalist era) within the discourses of bourgeois modernity (and postmodernity) and seeks to differentiate these from the problematic of labour and labour emancipation. The article addresses the problem of a conflation of theory and history in connection with a developmentalist/positivist reading of Marx, and suggests 'global value relations', 'global working day', 'global worker', as world historically informed concepts that capture the 'unity of the diverse'. Global value relations include the politics of state relations, the world market, colonization and imperialism, and the (often geographically segregated) labour regimes of production of relative and absolute surplus value. The latter is posed as a contemporary relation of neo-liberal capitalism involving (postmodern) over-consumption on the one hand and (still modern) forced under-consumption on the other hand. 'World hunger amidst global plenty' is an expression of these relations.

Towards a Feminization of Agricultural Labour in Northwest Syria by Malika A. Martini, Patricia Goldey, Gwyn E. Jones and Elizabeth Bailey

Smallholdings in the rural areas of northwest Syria are a result of land fragmentation that is due to inheritance. Because of rapid population growth combined with land fragmentation, these smallholdings are increasing and cannot sustain the rural households whose sizes and needs are also increasing rapidly. This situation has led to increasing numbers of males migrating to urban areas in Syria and to neighbouring countries looking for work opportunities. In addition, recent agricultural intensification trends seem to have led to the emergence of a waged labour force which, in the absence of male workers owing to significant rates of migration, is now predominantly female. Agricultural labour use depends upon household characteristics and resources (type of labour used, gender of labour, waged/exchanged/familial). The article attempts to present a comprehensive analysis of household labour use in distinctive farming systems in one region of Syria that has undergone great change in recent decades, and examines the changes in the composition of the agricultural labour force. Secondary information, rapid rural appraisalsand formal farm surveys were used to gather information on the households in a study area where different farming systems coexist. The results show that the decrease in landholding size, the resulting male migration, and land intensification have resulted in the expansion of female labour in agricultural production, which has been termed in this research a 'feminization of agricultural labour'. This suggests that agricultural research and extension services will have to work more with women farmers and farm workers, seek their wisdom and involve them in technology and transfer. This is not easy in conservative societies but requires research and extension institutions to take this reality into consideration in their programmes.

Beyond Cold War Pipedreams: What the West Was Not by Scott William Hoefle

In much of the debate about the current role of frontier development (settlement, colonization) in many so-called Third World countries, frontiers in the latter are invariably compared negatively with the late nineteenth-century experience of the US frontier, held up as a paradigmatic example that others should attempt to follow. Recent approaches to the history of the US frontier, however, have questioned the Jeffersonian and/or Turnerist ideal of an egalitarian democracy of small farmers who managed to construct an harmonious and viable frontier in the New World. Rather than contributing positive cultural and political attributes and characteristics to American society, as was claimed by many US historians during the Cold War era, the US frontier involved genocide, demographic collapse, ecological devastation, economic exploitation and dependency, widespread inter-ethnic violence, social polarization, political corruption, disempowerment and ideological intolerance. The US frontier experience did not represent an agrarian reform favouring small farmers, nor was it one of equal opportunity: it should not, therefore, be held up as a model for the rest of the world to imitate if at all possible.

Editorial Note: Against Forgetting (Our) History: Karl Kautsky and Rodney Hilton by Tom Brass

Rodney Hilton and the Peasant Road to 'Capitalism' in England by Ricardo Duschesne

Arguing that Rodney Hilton was an original thinker among British Marxists, this article examines his historiographical approach to the English medieval peasantry, and in particular his contribution to the transition debate. As a consequence of their focus either on landlord enclosure or on the role of merchant capital, Marxists such as Dobb and Tawney maintained that the prosperous peasants who emerged towards the end of the fifteenth century became the capitalist farmers of the sixteenth. Opposed to both class and market determinism, however, Hilton insisted that the distinctiveness of the medieval peasantry lay in the possession of its own means of subsistence and access to community property. From the latter stemmed peasant resistance against feudal lords, based on peasants' self-perception as free producers with ancient rights, because of which landlords had to use military and political power to extract surplus labour. For Hilton, the agrarian conflict that culminated in the 1381 rebellion was a struggle between seigneurial power and peasant market power.

Karl Kautsky on Capitalism in the Ancient World by Daniel Gaido

This translation of the 1912 preface by Karl Kautsky to Salvioli's book about capitalism in the ancient world confirms the centrality to his interest of the way in which economic history informs the present and maps out the future. It reveals a concern not only with pre-capitalist and capitalist systemic transition but also how economic development in turn prefigures socialism. Accordingly, Kautsky's focus is on the connections between yet the distinctiveness of historically specific modes of production, their forms of property and propertylessness, and the links between production for consumption and for exchange, plus the resulting patterns both of the social relations and the forces of production and of surplus appropriation licensed thereby. For Kautsky, therefore, the value of understanding the economic conditions preceding capitalism is that it highlights both the historical specificity of capitalism itself, and thus also the reasons for its transcendence.

Peasants Speak: Bhojpuri Songs, Women's Work and Social Control in Northern India by Smita Tewari Jassal

This analysis is concerned with the construction and reproduction of gender identity in women's work songs, specifically songs of the millstone, or jatsaars, in the Bhojpuri-speaking region. Sung as accompaniment to the daily grinding of grain and spices, the songs, rich in narrative content, cover a range of women's concerns including caste and patriarchal anxieties. As the songs also serve a pedagogical purpose whereby societal values are transmitted from older to younger women, they serve to warn and prepare women for the hardships of married life, also spelling out the limits of transgression, the nature of punishments, and the rewards for compliance. Through the delineation of family relationships which might be potentially threatening and antagonistic, and by outlining approved codes of honour and conduct in such contexts, the songs indicate the extent to which women are complicit in their own oppression. While the jatsaar cuts across caste lines, the songs presented below are collected from women belonging to a range of castes and classes, and thus can be said to represent an authentic female voice. The main issue concerns the extent to which lessons learnt through the jatsaar have a bearing on female subordination in the sphere of agricultural production, particularly in relations with the employer in the field. Hence the question: is singing about oppression in itself empowering, or is it rather a reflection of the acceptance by women of gender disempowerment?

Book Reviews

Abstracts of articles in Issue 30.1

Winners and Losers in Russian Agrarian Reform by Stephen K. Wegren, David J. O'Brien and Valeri V. Patsiorkovski

More than ten years after Russian agrarian reform was begun, it is appropriate to reflect upon winners and losers. Using survey data from 800 households in five Russian regions, this article is interested in the effect of reform within the rural sphere. The analysis focuses on four groups of rural actors within the food production sphere: private farmers, farm managers, specialists employed on state and collective farms and their juridical successors, and farm workers employed on state and collective farms and their juridical successors The first part of the article examines winners and losers using the following variables: self-perceptions about winners and losers, monthly household income, job security, and ownership of certain durable goods. We conclude that private farmers have fared best relative to other occupational groups. On large farms, managers have fared best. The second part of the article analyses why winners win by considering structural and behavioural factors. We conclude that winners win because they take advantage of reform opportunities and engage in market-based activities.

Social Movements and Marginalized Rural Youth in Brazil, Egypt and Nepal by K.B. Ghimire

This article seeks to highlight the evolving trends in the roles of youth in rural social movements, noting that such movements are critical if authorities and more dominant classes in society are to listen to powerless and propertyless rural population groups. It has been argued that the phenomenon of youth participation in rural social movements has passed largely unnoticed by development theory in general and social movements theory in particular. This lacuna is deleterious, not least because the main victims of globalization are the young of impoverished rural families, for whom the choice to remain in agriculture, either as petty commodity producers or as landless labourers, is in terms of economic livelihood becoming increasingly fraught. Indeed, uprooted in large numbers, rural youth may provoke a significant disintegration of the peasantry while adding to the multiplication of social problems in urban areas. Fortunately, the increasing socio-economic marginality of young people in rural areas manifests itself in contemporary social movements struggling for political rights and a secure livelihood base. The article is based, in large part, on case studies in Brazil, Egypt and Nepal.

The Reconstruction of a Modern Mexican Peasantry by David Barkin

This analysis of maize in Mexico reveals how technocratic prejudices and modernizing ideologies have had a devastating impact. The tenacity with which the peasantry continues to support traditional social and productive organizations with their own resources is evidence of the currency of their unique vision of society. This vision is leading them to inject new vigour into rural society by diversifying their productive strategies, an approach that has always been a central part of rural survival, but whose significance has been underestimated by social scientists who have largely focused on their productivity in the fields.

Caste, Class and Peasant Agency in Subaltern Studies Discourse: Revisionist Historiography, Elite Ideology by Hira Singh

On the basis of empirical evidence from the princely states of Rajasthan, it is argued here that Subaltern Studies discourse about peasants and peasant movements in colonial India is seriously flawed, mainly due to its symptomatic underestimation of the significance of land relations. A close scrutiny of its epistemological assumptions reveals that Subaltern Studies is elite (Brahmanical-bourgeois) ideology and revisionist historiography (anticipated by contemporary conservative historians of the French Revolution). Its claim to reconcile epistemologically irreconciliable positions is intellectually unsustainable.

Land Reform in El Salvador and the Chapultepec Peace Accord by Samuel A. McReynolds

The focus of this article is on the land transfer programme (PTT) carried out in El Salvador over the past decade as a result of the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accord. Building on the agrarian reforms of the 1980s, the PTT beneficiaries were smallholders created by the state and drawn from ex-combatants on both sides (the FMLN, the military) in the war. Among the issues considered are the forms of tenure that resulted, and the agrarian debt incurred. Also examined is the socio-economic profile of the PTT beneficiaries, together with their assessment of the positive/negative impact on their lives of the reform programme. Finally, the achievements and failures of the PTT are evaluated in terms of the wider national/international context, and the resulting contradiction between the objectives of the agrarian reform and the determinants of the global market considered.

Book Reviews

Abstracts of articles in Issue 29.3&4

Latin American Peasants - New Paradigms for Old? by Tom Brass

Comparing two of the main paradigms utilized in the study of Latin American peasants, this introduction considers the way each interprets grassroots rural identity/agency, as embodied in their respective approaches to the reproduction and survival of peasant economy, the empowering/disempowering nature of specific kinds of agrarian mobilization and labour regime, together with their perception of the role/form of the State. The first of these paradigms is the one used by the 'new' postmodern populists, who - together with neo-liberals - theorize rural agency as based on innate peasant/ethnic identity, the aim of which is not to transcend capitalism but to survive within it. This approach to the peasantry in Latin America contrasts with that of the agrarian question, an 'old' paradigm in which rural agency based on class identity is designed to capture and exercise state power, with the political object of transcending capitalism. Their relative merits are examined, and evaluated in terms of the case studies presented in this volume.

The Peasantry and the State in Latin America: A Troubled Past, an Uncertain Future by James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer

The article provides a retrospective overview of peasant/state relations in Latin America. First we assess the adequacy of alternative explanations regarding the dynamics of these relations, and then we review the actual history of peasant/state relations in Latin America, analysing the forces involved in change and struggle. Also examined is the process of regression, displacement and revolution. The analysis concludes with an examination of the kinds of power which structure of peasant/state relations, with particular reference to the social forces involved, and to the outcomes of peasant mobilization.

From Rubber Estate to Simple Commodity Production: Agrarian Struggles in the Northern Bolivian Amazon by Willem Assies

Rural unrest has been spreading in recent years in different regions in Bolivia, which suggests that the agrarian and forestry legislation introduced in 1996 has failed to solve the problems that it was meant to address. This article examines the background to rural conflict in a specific region, the northern Bolivian Amazon. It reviews the rise and decline of the rubber trade and the subsequent emergence of the Brazil nut economy in the region. In this way it shows how free communities emerged alongside the estate system and compete for access to land and forest resources. This involves a discussion of the evolution of forms of labour recruitment and debt-peonage that takes issue with the neo-institutional economics perspective recently adopted by various authors and students of the region. It is argued that debt-peonage in the Amazon area can be viewed as a specific form of 'captive' simple commodity production, and that this sheds light on the struggle for autonomy of the rubber tappers. The article concludes by analysing the 1996 agrarian and forestry legislation, and shows how its landlord-biased implementation made manifest the latent conflict between free communities and estate owners.

The Impact of Neo-liberal Economies on Peruvian Peasant Agriculture in the 1990s by John Crabtree

The adoption of neo-liberal economic policies by the Fujimori government in the 1990s had major implications for peasant agriculture, as for other sectors. Twelve years after their initial implementation, these policies appear to have brought more losers than winners. Hit in particular by slack urban demand for food and a sharp increase in imports, low agricultural prices undercut peasant incomes. Those most affected were those producing primarily for the market, who were either forced back into subsistence farming or into seeking work in other areas. Rural poverty levels increased over this period, as did inequality in the agrarian sector.

Whither O Campesinato? Historical Peasantries of Brazilian Amazonia by Stephen Nugent

Brazilian Amazonian peasantries have attracted relatively little scholarly attention, and even with the opening up of Amazonia via the TransAmazon Highway (c.1970) and a significant expansion of social science research in the region, recent frontier colonists and environmental crises have been the major foci. This article examines some of the factors contributing to the relative invisibility of historical peasantries in the region and tries to show the relevance of such peasantries to debates concerning agrarian structure, economic transformation and state-led modernization efforts. A key feature in the portrayal of Amazonian peasantries (and Amerindians) has been the unique role attributed to the neo-humid tropical landscape in restricting the possibilities for an elaborated social landscape. Drawing on anthropological, archaeological and historical studies, the article advances the notion that these simplifying assumptions are unwarranted and are impediments not only to a more accurate understanding of the legacy of colonial society in Amazonia, but also to efforts to mitigate social conflict and environmental depredation.

From Dependency to Reform and Back Again: The Chilean Peasantry During the Twentieth Century by Warwick E. Murray

This article is concerned with the impact of neo-liberal economic theory and resultant policy on peasant farmers in Latin America. In particular, it explores the relationship between agri-business and the peasantry in Chile and traces the evolution of the parcelero sector in response to the forces of globalization over the last 30 years. In order to place recent trends in context, the historical evolution of Chile's peasantry, particularly during the last century, is analysed in some depth. To illustrate the impacts of neo-liberalism, two fieldwork-based case studies in areas (El Paqui and East Curic) where land reform has taken place and fruit export booms have occurred are presented. Although local transformations are varied, it is contended that the application of a 'free' market policy has increased the dependency of the peasantry, creating disguised, semi- and full proletarianization. The latter process has reversed the various agrarian reforms which took place in the 1960s and 1970s, and returned the Chilean peasantry to the subordinate position it occupied previously. It is argued that the failure of peasant economy is a political effect rather than the outcome of inevitable 'global' economic forces.

Globalization and the Reinvention of Amazonian Tradition: The Politics of Community and Ethnicity in Highland Bolivia by John McNeish

This article examines the complex ways in which a peasant community in the Bolivian Highlands mediates present political conditions through an internal discourse and conflict over personal and historical memories. Highlighted is the way in which existing disputes are used by local people to take advantage of the new economic resources made available by recent government reforms aimed at democratization and decentralization, and how the latter in turn create a space for traditional indigenous authorities to reassert their political power. It is argued that whilst globalization is responsible for an increase in the spread and economic diversification of local communities, peasants in Bolivia are able to negotiate the limits and significance of these changes.

Devil Pact Narratives in Rural Central America: Class, Gender and 'Resistance' by Kees Jansen and Esther Roquas

The Faustian bargain, or 'pact with the devil', made by a person who exchanges human souls in order to obtain unattainable riches and power, is a widespread peasant narrative in Central and South America. The narrative expresses various overlapping meanings, of which a sudden increase in wealth and a concomitant shift in social relationships is a central theme. In the case examined, peasants invoke the devil pact narrative and the realm of the supernatural to explain wealth and poverty in order to avoid tensions that socio-economic accounts would provoke. By not referring to the history of deceit, force, robbery, consent and complicity that has led to an unequal distribution of local resources, peasants make new forms of accumulation ideologically manageable. The Faustian narrative offers an ideologically acceptable explanation, and thus provides them with a way of handling the inequality between villagers created as a result of accumulation. It is therefore best seen as an adaptive mechanism in the face of contradictions generated by a modernizing agrarian capitalism, rather than - as in Taussig's interpretation - as a form of resistance by the gift economy against unfolding capitalism, or - as in Edelman's interpretation - as an everyday form of resistance against sexual domination.

Representing the Peasantry? Struggles for/about Land in Brazil by Jos de Souza Martins

Arguing that the economic development in Brazil of a commercial latifundist agriculture has depended historically on access to and control over labour-power, the crisis resulting from slave emancipation in the second half of the nineteenth century was met by immigration and settlement of European workers plus internal migration. Usufruct rights in export agriculture (coffee, sugar and rubber) meant the emergence of dual identity, whereby smallholding was combined with working for others. Capitalist expansion in the twentieth century resulted in casualization and/or dispossession of the agrarian workforce in commercial agriculture, undermining the peasant economy. The reproduction of the latter, however, has remained a focus of agrarian struggles, not least because of the ideological role played by non-peasant 'mediating groups' (the church, political parties), a process culminating in the emergence of what is now termed a 'new' rural subject. Such a designation, it is argued, fails to capture both the socio-economic diversity of the rural workforce and also the way in which the 'voice from below' conceptualizes agrarian reform.

On Which Side of What Barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere by Tom Brass

Following in the footsteps of their South Asian counterparts, exponents of the Latin American subaltern framework are currently engaged in a quest for evidence of an authentic and thus empowering rural consciousness/agency, as manifested in ancient/indigenous nationhood, the carnivalesque, and literary accounts projecting the 'voice from below'. The consequent essentialization of peasant economy/culture (= subaltern identity) and agency (= subaltern resistance), however, reproduces a specifically plebeian form of conservative discourse, a pro-peasant ideology that has deep roots in Latin American history. This epistemological fusion is attributed here to a failure on the part of the subaltern approach to differentiate the peasantry in terms of class, as well as to decouple Marxism from populism, populism from fascism, and the latter from feudalism.

Abstracts of articles in Issue 29/2

The American Path of Bourgeois Development by Daniel Gaido

The peculiarities of American political, social and intellectual development have been determined by the fact that, economically speaking, the United States was a colonial country during the first three centuries of its existence, and that, towards the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, it effected an almost direct transition from a colonial to an imperialist economy. The aim of this article is to analyse, from the point of view of the labour theory of value, the way in which the American regime of landed property (the so-called 'frontier') influenced the development of capitalism during what should properly be called, adopting as our taxonomic criterion the prevailing social relations of production, the colonial period of American history.

The Miser's Store: Property and Traditional Law in the Governance of the 'Native' Economy by Albert Schrauwers

Recent studies of 'liberal governmentality' have examined how state actions regulate the ideally self-regulating economic sphere [Burchell, 1991]; this article highlights the particular dilemmas of liberal governmentality in a colonial arena where not one, but two types of economy were posited. By analysing the system of traditional property law implemented by the Dutch in two locations in central Sulawesi, Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), I show that property is only an indifferent marker of class, and that the limits of surplus extraction are set by control of other means of production. By arguing that both 'traditional' and 'capitalist' economies are embedded in the same local legal culture, I hope to demonstrate that a shift from the one to the other cannot of itself offer the promised benefits of modernity.

From Rice to Prawns: Economic Transformation and Agrarian Structure in Rural Bangladesh by Sanae Ito

This article investigates the changes in agrarian structure brought about by the development of export-oriented freshwater prawn cultivation in south-western Bangladesh. Prawn farming in this particular context has spread among agricultural producers so rapidly within the last decade that many of the agrarian institutions have been carried over or been adapted to the new production regime. Thus the institutions governing landholdings and contractual labour arrangements involved in prawn farming have many things in common with those involved in rice production. While landholders generally have benefited from the new prawn economy, it is difficult to say whether the position of landless men and women from poor households has improved on a sustainable basis. Thus the employment gains of local male workers are currently under threat from cheaper migrants, while new jobs for women from poor households are highly intensive, potentially hazardous, and poorly paid.

The Impact of the Black Death on Peasant Economy in England, 1350-1500 by Harry Kitsikopoulos

This article provides an abstract model that compares the financial position of peasant economy in England during the post-plague period with the conditions faced by its counterparts prior to the great epidemic. The model presents a detailed discussion of the likely sources of income and a breakdown of the various types of expenditure, and concludes that, despite the stagnation of prices in product markets and the inflationary pressures in factor markets, peasant economy in the post-plague era was characterized by substantial improvements in its standard of living. The reductions in the size of peasant families and of seigneurial burdens are identified as the primary causes of this improvement.

PEASANTS SPEAK - The Va Campesina: Consolidating an International Peasant and Farm Movement by Annette-Aurlie Desmarais

Concerted attempts to exclude farming people from policy development and decision-making have been accompanied by the formation of an international peasant and farm movement, the Va Campesina, which emerged in 1993. This article examines the response of peasant and farm organizations to the increased globalization of an industrialized and liberalized model of agriculture by analyzing the formation, consolidation and functioning of the Va Campesina. The Va Campesina is using three traditional weapons of the weak - organization, cooperation and community - to redefine rural development and to build an alternative model, one that is based on social justice, gender and ethnic equality, economic equity and environmental sustainability.

DEBATE - Theory and History in Thinking the Transition to Capitalism: A Reply to Zmolek by Robert Albritton

Zmolek's condensed summary of the development of 'agrarian capitalism' is good as far as it goes, but it needs to be supplemented with how this development interacted with manufacturing, with the development of money, with the kinds and degrees of commodification of labour-power and land, with various kinds of commodity markets both internal and external, with the kinds and degrees of productivity increase in various sector, and finally with the unprecedented expansion of putting-out manufacturing in the eighteenth century. Methodologically his account suffers from anachronism, structuralism, teleology and undialectical or either-or thinking. Ironically, these are all things he says he wants to avoid. A key difference between us is the importance of putting-out manufacturing as the first historical manifestation of dynamic capital accumulation. Zmolek seems oblivious to the difficulties in referring to a period of transition to capitalism as already capitalist as in 'agrarian capitalism'.

REVIEW ARTICLE - A Rose by Any Other Name? The Fragrance of Imperialism by James Petras

This review considers yet another over-optimistic postmodern analysis of the capitalist world economy, from which imperialism, economic crisis, the state, class and class struggle have all been purged. According to the authors of this book, as a result of new science and technology global capitalism now functions as an autonomous 'empire', ruled only by the market and the multinational corporation. Against this celebratory interpretation, this review maintains both that the role of the imperial state in capitalist reproduction has been underestimated, and, conversely, that the economic impact of innovation, science and technology on capitalist productivity have been overestimated. Not only is the imperial state still important to an understanding of imperialism, therefore, but the latter is also central to the study of agrarian transformation and the role of peasants and workers in this process.

Authors: HARDT, MICHAEL and NEGRI, ANTONIO; Empire

Book Reviews

Author: PARTHASARATHI, PRASANNAN; The Transition To A Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720-1800; Reviewer: Hira Singh; Author: BARUAH, SANJIB; India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality; Reviewer: B.G. Karlsson; Author: BIANCO, LUCIEN; Peasants Without the Party: Grass-roots Movements in Twentieth-Century China; Reviewer: Xiaolin Guo; Author: SINGH, RAJENDRA; Social Movements, Old and New: A Postmodernist Critique; Reviewer: Meera Nanda; Author: BAYLY, SUSAN; Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age; Reviewer: Arun Kumar

Abstracts of articles in Issue 29.1

Proto-Industrialization, Sharecropping, and Outmigration in Nineteenth-Century Rural Westphalia by Timothy G Anderson

This article examines proto-industralization and the social relations of production in a rural parish in eastern Westphalia that experienced large-scale outmigration to the American Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century. Relying on local and individual-level Prussian tax and emigration records, the study identifies and analyses the socio-economic background of the migrant cohort in terms of proto-industrial activity and peasant economy. Preceded by the downfall of domestic textile industries due to British industrial competition, outmigration was highly selective, drawing individuals from specific socio-economic niches. Landless sharecroppers - linked by debt and labour obligations to better-off peasants and landlords - were underrepresented in the migration, while smallholding peasants and day-labourers - 'free' to commodify their labour power through the sale of home-produced textile products or seasonal migratory labour - were overrepresented. The findings of the study have implications for an understanding of the localized nature of the relations of production in proto-industrial regions, the historical nature of German emigration, and the dynamics of the German translation to industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century.

The Unfinished Narodnik Agenda: Chayanov, Marzism and Marginalism Revisited by S S Sivakumar

This article reviews some of the salient aspects of the controversy over capitalism and the fate of Russian peasantry, among the Russian Marxists and the narodniks immediately prior to and after the Bolshevik revolution. At issue was the characterization of peasant economies. The narodniks believed that neither marginalism nor Marxism fully captured the nuances of peasant agriculture and economic system/systems that evolved out of it; neither the market model nor class analysis adequently described the allocative and distributive processes in such economies. While nineteenth-century narodniks stressed the role of institutions based in the village community, Chayanov's twentieth-century populism stressed the organizational dynamic of peasant households within an institutional framework. Accordingly, the economics of the Chayanvian interpretation are examined from an institutional and organizational perspective. Such an exercise, it is argued, lends more credibility not only to the narodnik agenda, but also to the peasantist model of development.

The State, Race, and 'Wage Slavery' in the Forest Sector of the Pacific North-West United States by Geoff Mann

'Wage slavery' is sometimes used by workers and their representatives to describe the position of the labour force - low-wage, mobile, seasonal and almost entirely Latino - in the timber services sector of the US Pacific North-West. This article examines the political economy of this labour market in light of the differing utility, specificity and history of the concept of 'wage slavery' to Latino and white forest workers. The focus is on the articulation and intersection of racial and class-based identities, and also on the role of the state in the reproduction of labour market segmentation by race.

Everyday Resistance or Routine Repression? Exaggeration as Stratagem in Agrarian Conflict by Dipankar Gupta

In a deeply stratified rural society a good stratagem on the part of those in power is to exaggerate the shortcomings of the lower classes. Such exaggerations justify domination over, and the curtailment of respect for, the rural poor. James Scott misunderstands the disempowering nature of this stratagem and believes the exaggerated tales related by the rich about the poor. This is what leads Scott to romanticize these stories as 'everyday forms of resistance' by an empowered rural poor, and thus to ignore what such tales what such tales really are: sources of routine repression by the rich. Drawing on fieldwork in rural Uttar Pradesh, this article deomonstrates how propertied classes systematically exaggerate the failings of poor peasants in order to justify the routine repression exercised over them.

'It's All a Matter of Hats': Rural Urbanization in South-West China by Xiaolin Guo

Like many developing countries, rural China has been undergoing rapid urbanization. This article addresses the political and economic constraints that have come to shape the pattern of rural urbanization in the south-west of the country. As a means primarily to enhance the political career of local leadership, urbanization has been achieved at the expense of peasant livelihood. Fieldwork results show that prosperity and modernization in the urbanized areas are overshadowed by loss of farmland, environmental degradation and escalating financial burdens encountered by the village residents. The outcome illustrates how politics determines the path of economic development in the locality, and who is the real beneficiary of urbanization.

Debate: Further Thoughts on Agrarian Capitalism: A Reply to Abritton by Mike Zmolek

In response to Albritton (2000), who asserts that the central dynamic of capitalism's genesis was putting-out manufacturing, I provide a sketch of the processes of agrarian capitalism. The elaboration of the common law in the Middle Ages enabled widespread conversion to leaseholds after the plague. An increasingly privatized system of land ownership resulted from the enclosure movement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the upheavals of the seventeenth century represented the triumph of the enclosers. The rise of cottage industry in the eighteenth century was supported by a systematic effort at improving agricultural productivity. By the Industrial Revolution, the principle of individual control over production had long been established.

Review Article: Class, Capitalism and Agrarian Transitition: A Critical Review of Some recent Arguments by Raju Das

This article shows the salience of class anaysis through a critical review of some recent books on agrarian conditions in India. It discusses how extant class relations and class struggle affect, directly and/or through state mediation, the emergence of new class alliances and the development of the productive forces, topics which have been an integral part of the debate about agrarian transition. The theoretical parameters of this debate, however, need to be expanded in order epistemologically to accommodate the current impact of imperialism on Third World agriculture. This requires that debates about imperialism/'globalization' and agrarian transition are linked in turn to (and recognize the political importance of ) issues raised by the 'fettering' of the productive forces by national and international capitalism.

Book Reviews

Abstracts of articles in Issue 28.4

Reel Images of the Land (Beyond the Forest): Film and the Agrarian Myth by Tom Brass

Considered here is the way in which the agrarian myth is reproduced on film, together with the reasons for this and its political effects. It is argued that apparently different filmic themes projecting seemingly opposed representations of the agrarian myth (plebeian/aristocratic, pastoral/Darwinian, 'Nature under attack'/'the death of Nature') all exhibit the same nostalgia for and an accompanying sense of loss of a vanishing rural landscape, the locus both of traditional/enduring socio-economic values and of an 'innate' class structure. The peasant or 'from below' version is termed the plebeian, while the 'from above' landlord version is the aristocratic form; each possesses a pastoral and a Darwinian variant. As their portrayal in a number of different film genres confirm, these contrasting manifestations of the agrarian myth can apply equally to peasant economy and to landlordism. In the pastoral each is depicted as harmonious, while in the Darwinian each is engaged in struggle.

Passive Revolution meets Peasant Revolution: Indian Nationalism and the Telangana Revolt by John Roosa

An explanation of how the struggles by villagers in the region of Telangana in the 1940s evolved into the largest rural armed conflict in twentieth-century India, requires an understanding not just of property relations in the region (the focus of most previous studies of the revolt), but also of the nationalist movement there, and the political conjuncture at the time of Indian independence. As much a nationalist mobilization as a revolt over land and grain, the Telangana struggle attained its success because the enemy was a decrepit sultanate - the princely state of Hyderabad attempting to remain outside an independent India - against whom followers of both the CPI and the Indian National Congress fought.

Capitalist Development, Peasant Differentiation and the State: Survey Findings from West Bengal by Sudipta Bhattacharyya

The analysis which follows examines the structure of investment and production taking place in West Bengal, the reference point being the debate between Marxism and populism about peasant differentiation. The process of socio-economic differentiation has not stopped, but in methodological terms farm size alone fails to register its extent. The main claim advanced by populism - Chayanov's argument concerning demographic differentiation, that rising consumer/worker ratios are accompanied by higher family labour input - was found to be inapplicable. Of particular interest is the role during the last quarter century of the Left Front government in the process of agrarian transformation, and the extent to which its pro-poor policy interventions have stabilized smallholding peasant production. Among the effects of state intervention in the agrarian sector have been declines in (a) the number of holdings above ten acres (b) in the extent of sharecropping contracts, and (c) in the incidence of absolute landlessness. Although producers under 2.5 acres have been the main beneficiaries of institutional credit provision by the state, distress sales (in the form of marketed surplus) by poorer farmers are still evident.

Debate: The Agrarian Roots of Fascism: German Exceptionalism Revisited by David Renton

This article takes issue with the common belief that a major cause of fascism in countries like Germany, Italy and Japan was late economic development. In contrast to the suggestion that national exceptionalism occurs where a bourgeois revolution has failed, this article maintains that capitalist development has generally followed the same kind of path in many different national contexts. For this reason it is wrong to exaggerate German exceptionalism. Also challenged here is the notion of fascism as a rural movement which grows in underdeveloped societies. Nazism in particular, it is argued here, was an urban-based movement operating in a modern capitalist economy.

Review Article: Peasants on the Internet? Informalization in a Global Economy by James Overton

Considered here is an increasingly influential approach, associated mainly with the work of Keith Hart, to the informal sector economy worldwide. His view is that the trend towards informalization is liberating, an economically empowering method whereby the urban and rural poor avoid state regulation, taxation and control. For this reason, Hart regards the new technology embodied in the internet as a means of realizing the autonomous community implied in informal sector economic activity; both combine to give expression to an authentic form of grassroots political democracy. Against this view it is argued that the new technology emancipates only the bourgeoisie, and that it is the urban and rural poor who suffer most from a decline in the capacity of the state to regulate and tax capital.

Book Reviews

The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-century America by Allan Carlson
Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica by Marc Edelman
Unequal Partners: Power Relations, Devolution and Development in Uttar Pradesh by G K Lieten and Ravi Srivastava
Struggles over Geography: Violence, Freedom and Development at the Millenium (The Hettner Lecture 1999) by Michael J Watts
Colonial Hegemony and Popular Resistance: Princes, Peasants and Paramount Power by Hira Singh

Abstracts of articles in Issue 28.3

Transformations in the Age and Gender of Unfree Workers on Hybrid Cotton Seed Farms in Andhra Pradesh by Davuluri Venkateshwarlu and Lucia da Corta

Unfreedom in Indian agriculture is ordinarily associated with adult male bonded labour, and it is generally argued that unfreedom is likely to disappear as capitalism spreads/advances. By contrast, we find that workers employed on advanced capitalist cotton seed farms in Andhra Pradesh - accumulation linked to national and multinational capital - involves the employment of labour-power which is mostly unfree, female and young (7-14 years). Addressed here are the reasons for the transformations in the age and gender of unfree workers on such farms since the early 1970s. We argue that, in the context of men's emancipation from bonded labour, employers actively sought out relatively cheaper, more easily disciplined, unfree female labour. Then, in order to secure even cheaper female child labour, employers segmented the female labour market via ideologies about the superiority of female children over adult females. Corresponding changes in labourers' gender relations, which put more of the onus of family maintenance on to women and daughters, were found to facilitate the unfreedom of females.

What Are We Fighting For? Rethinking Resistance in a Pewenche Community in Chile by Robert Fletcher

The contradictory reactions by members of an indigenous group in southern Chile to the prospect of their displacement by a hydroelectric dam presents an opportunity to reconceptualize 'resistance', studies of which have come under increasing attack in recent years. Using this case,1 I explore contemporary perspectives on 'subaltern' struggle and propose an alternative framework for the interpretation of this phenomenon that seeks to salvage a viable conception of 'resistance' for future study. I argue that resistance studies' current critique finds the bulk of its substance in deficiencies of the 'everyday forms of resistance' paradigm presently dominating the field and offer a tentative outline of ways in which the field might be reconceived so as to transcend this paradigm and direct the study of resistance into more productive arenas.

Rural Non-Farm Employment: Agricultural versus Urban Linkages - Some Evidence from Kerala State, India by Mridul Eapen

Rural non-farm employment is regarded as a critical component of rural transformation in LDCs given the failure of the industrialization-led development strategies of the 1950s. An issue much debated in the restructured development dialogue was: Is the process of rural diversification primarily agriculture-driven, or do the impulses derive from the urban economy? Our study addresses this question for Kerala by examining changes in employment patterns in rural areas between 1971 and 1991. An examination of certain socio-economic characteristics (proxies for 'agricultural' and 'urban' linkages) for 1971 in those villages which became urban in 1991 reveals the importance of both types of linkages in generating non-farm employment, depending on the location of the village vis--vis large urban settlements.

Sharecropping and the Management of Large Rural Estates in Catalonia, 1850-1950 by Ramon Garrabou, Jordi Planas and Enric Saguer

This article examines the role of sharecropping in the operation of great estates in Catalonia (Spain) from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Noting that the sharecropping option was not the fruit of inertia, but of the failure of alternatives, we look at the various factors which led to its predominance. Next, we show the adaptability of sharecropping to a variety of ecological and social contexts. Finally, we argue that the backwardness of Catalan agriculture is not to be attributed to sharecropping, which, on the contrary, proved comparable to other forms of tenure, not just in terms of economic efficiency, but also in terms of a successful instrument for the reproduction of social inequalities and of labour exploitation.

Clash of Resource Use Regimes in Colonial Assam: A Nineteenth Century Puzzle Revisited by Sanjib Baruah

In the nineteenth century the British colonial government in Assam tried to change the land titles of Assamese peasants from annual leases to decennial leases. But Assamese peasants mostly abandoned their claim to their land after a single harvest. The peasants' behaviour gives a clue to the impact of the colonial land settlement project whose major effect was to eliminate the access of shifting cultivators and hunter-gatherers of the Brahmaputra Valley and the surrounding hills to most natural resources. The major beneficiary of land settlement were the tea planters. The behaviour of the Assamese peasant reflected the habits formed by the old resource use regime.

PEASANTS SPEAK

Women, Social Memory and Violence in Rural Colombia by Jairo Tocanipa Falla

Peasant and State in Mozambique by Alice Dinerman

Merle Bowen's study focuses on the evolution of the 'middle peasantry' in both colonial and postcolonial Mozambique. In doing so, she successfully challenges long-standing, if highly problematic, notions that the Mozambican economy consists of a 'traditional', subsistence-oriented peasant sector with only nominal links to 'modern' forms of agriculture, the urban areas, and regional and international markets. At the same time, she usefully illuminates continuities in colonial and post-independence agrarian policies and shows the ways in which the experience of smallholder agricultural co-operatives under the Portuguese shaped the peasantry's perceptions of, and responses to, collective agriculture under Frelimo. However, the evidence in Bowen's case study does not necessarily sustain her central thesis that the post-independence state, like its colonial predecessor, was 'anti-peasant'. This is one of several criticisms made of Bowen's text.

At Their Prefect Command'? The Struggle of/(over) Post-Emancipation Rural Labour by Tom Brass

Abstracts of articles in Issue 28.2

From 'Abaixo' to 'Chiefs of Production': Agrarian Change in Nampula Province, Mozambique, 1975-87 by Alice Dinerman

This article reconstructs key aspects of the evolving relationship between state institutions and former rgulos (Portuguese appointed chiefs), in Nampula Province, Mozambique during the first 12 years of independence. In doing so, it simultaneously draws on and critiques two opposing interpretations of revolution and counterrevolution which have dominated scholarly production on post-independence Mozambique and have polarized Mozambican studies in recent years. Against both sets of literature, my study finds that state socialism did not always and everywhere bring major disruptions to grassroots structures of authority; rather, many families who had been recognized by the Portuguese as royals were able, through a variety of strategies, to maintain their grip on local power. Secondly, I argue that the provincial government's enlistment of former rgulos to serve as 'chiefs of production' was but one aspect of an attempt on the part of officialdom to recreate the most salient aspects of the colonial cotton regime rather than a war-induced genuflection by the Frelimo regime to Renamo on the question of chiefly rule, as has been claimed by what I call 'revisionist' scholarship. Frelimo's refusal to acknowledge the role of villagization in agricultural decline throughout the country, a point raised and highlighted by revisionist writing is, however, crucial to understanding the ideological practices that helped justify and legitimate the return to Portuguese precedent on matters relating to rural labour. The reasons why Nampula was the site of these initiatives are explored. Are Latin American Peasant Movements Still a Force for Change? Some New Paradigms Revisited by James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer This article is a critique of structuralist and postmodern approaches to the study of agrarian reform and the viability, nature and significance of peasant and landless movements in Latin America. Contrary to the dominant structuralist view, we argue that peasant and landless workers' movements in Latin America are not anachronistic but dynamic modern classes, which in many contexts play a major role in opposing the dominant neoliberal agenda. Against postmodern interpretations of such grassroots agrarian movements, we also argue that in terms of action and programme, peasant and landless workers' movements have raised fundamental class issues, in some instances combining them with ethnic demands. Deploying a reconstituted class analysis, we examine four cases of peasant/landless workers' movements currently challenging state power: the Rural Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, the Revolutionary Armed Forces in Colombia, the National Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities in Ecuador, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico. Our conclusion is that in the current context, peasant and landless workers' movements in Latin America are engaged in a modern form of struggle, combining traditional forms of solidarity not only with the acceptance/adaptation of modern goals and techniques, but also with a strategic understanding of the levers of power in the national and international system.

Surplus Yield and Production Structure: The Case of Small-Scale Rural Industries in West Bengal by Pradip Kumar Biswas

Rural industries in West Bengal are characterized by a multiplicity of organizational forms, such as independent petty production, petty production under subcontracting relations with a master trader, modern small-scale production, and medium-sized capitalist production. On the basis of field data, we have estimated the amount of surplus generated by these different kinds of producer across a number of organizations and industries, using an alternative criterion: imputing wages to family labour. It was observed that a large number of petty producers generate negative or very low surpluses, and thus have to find supplementary sources of income. Further, the surpluses generated by petty producers attached to a master trader are generally higher than those of independent petty producers. This can be explained in one of tow ways. Either the existence of mutual trust between attached petty traders and a master trader offers the former certain advantages over the independent ones, in terms of steady access to urban markets, cheaper sources of raw materials, and easy credit. Or, alternatively, the control such attachment licenses enables a master trader both to extract and to maintain continuous access to higher levels of surplus. For these reasons, this system of organization lends viability to artisanal production.

Peasants Speak: The Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil by Wilder Robles

Review Article: We are All Hybrids Now: The Dangerous Epistemology of Post-Colonial Populism by Meera Nanda

Obituary: Remembering Arvind Narayan Das (1948-2000) by Manish K Thakur

Abstracts of articles in Issue 28.1

Academic Populists, the Informal Economy and Those Benevolent Merchants: Politics and Income Security Reform in Newfoundland by James Overton

Academic populists in Newfoundland are wont to celebrate the informal economy and even the system of merchant credit in the country and, after 1949, this Canadian province, as a kind of proto-welfare state. Now, in an era of crisis in the fishing industry, mass unemployment and state retreat from responsibility for providing support for the poor and unemployed, the putative value of the old 'moral economy' of rural Newfoundland is being rediscovered by those who are promoting social policy reform. Their argument is that we should look to the informal economy to provide a degree of security for people in a future of diminished state support. This article outlines a critique of the populists which is theoretical, empirical and political.

A Materialist Analysis of Slavery and Sharecropping in the Southern United States by Daniel Gaido

The historical nature of Southern slavery and of the social relations established after its abolition have for a long time been a source of heated debate among American historians. During the last decades, historians have tended to divide into two camps: neoclassical economic historians, who identify slavery and sharecropping with capitalism, and social historians, more or less influenced by Marxism, who define them correctly as pre-capitalist social relations. Yet the contributions of the social historians have been marred by their empiricist approach and by their reluctance to avail themselves of the theoretical tools provided by classical and Marxist political economy. This work examines Southern slavery and sharecropping in the light of the studies of the European Marxists on ancient slavery and of the works of the classical political economists and Marx on French mtayage. This comparison reveals the pre-capitalist though combined character of plantation slavery, and at the same time shows that the social relations established in the South after the abolition of slavery were, due to the defeat of the Radical Republicans' plans for agrarian reform, akin to the social relations established in Europe during the age of transition from feudalism to capitalism. The result of these backward relations of production was to retard for a long time the economic development of the South, where the transition to capitalism took place 'from above' (that is, through a compromise between the bourgeoisie and a pre-capitalist class of landowners) in the most painful possible way for the working masses, and at the same time to sustain a system of oppression and discrimination against the black population which reinforced the racist prejudices born of slavery among whites - thus further weakening a working class already divided between immigrants and native white Americans, and strengthening the conservatism of American political life.

Beyond Muffled Murmurs of Dissent? Kisan Rumour in Colonial Bihar by Arun Kumar

Rumour as a language of peasant politics in colonial Bihar has remained unexplored hitherto. Studies by Ranajit Guha and Shahid Amin are forceful but require further probing. Peasants deployed rumour as a device to articulate political aspirations and create public opinion when mass politics had yet to become a generalised affair. Such rumours often had religious sources and locations. Gandhi's idioms were successfully received by the masses owing to a field already prepared by rumour within which these ideas could take root and flourish. Arguably, the religious overtones and prophetic pronouncements of Gandhian mass politics borrowed heavily from an earlier polity that was based on rumour. A study of nineteenth century rumour is illuminating not only for the insight it provides into the manner in which politics was conducted then, but also for the indications it gives about politics of the future.

Debate

Labour in Post-Colonial India: A Response to Jan Breman by Tom Brass

Resuming the debate with Breman about debt bondage in post-Independence India, this reply to his two-part survey explores the fact of and the reasons for continuing disagreements about the capital/unfreedom link in general, and in particular the connection between accumulation, the decommodification of labour-power, the enforcement of debt-servicing labour obligations, the presence/absence of coercion, and worker 'assertiveness': the mere existence of agency. Also considered is the analytical efficacy of using a depoliticized concept of worker '; the mere existence of the latter, it is argued here, is neither a defining criterion of proletarianization, nor an indicator of rising levels of class consciousness, and thus not as empowering as claimed.

Agrarian Capitalism: A Response to Michael Zmolek by Robert Albritton

While Brenner's theory of 'agrarian capitalism' with its emphasis on class struggle provides the best starting point for understanding the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the theory is not without flaws. The flaws mostly stem from the lack of a determinant theory of precisely what capitalism is in its inner most logic. Marx's Capital as reconstructed by Sekine [1997] provides such a theory, and if we are clear that the theory of capital's inner logic is a theory of pure capitalism, then it follows that this logic is never more than partially in command at the level of history. Such a theory implies not only a careful analysis of the degree to which labour power was commodified and the degree to which 'relative surplus value' was in force, but also it would mean considering other important elements of capital's inner logic both inside and outside the agrarian sector so as not to overstate the capitalist character of agriculture nor its particular causal efficacy in the rise of capitalism.

Review Article: Unmasking the Subaltern, or Salamis without Themistocles by Tom Brass

Obituary: Eric R. Wolf (1923-99) by George Kaplan

Abstracts of articles in Issue 27.4

English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism by George G Comninel

The specific historical basis for the development of capitalism in England - and not in France - is traced to the unique structure of English manorial lordship. It is the absence from English lordship of seigneurie banale - the specific political form of parcellised sovereignty that figured centrally in the development of Continental feudalism - that accounts for the peculiarly 'economic' turn taken in the development of English class relations of surplus extraction. In France, by contrast, the distinctly ' tenor of subsequent social development can equally specifically be traced to the central role of seigneurie banale in the fundamental class relations of feudalism.

Enclosure, Common Rights and Social Change: Evidence from the Parts of Lindsey in Lincolnshire by Rex C Russell

Parliamentary enclosure is considered between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. Three motives for enclosure are identified: to change the structure of rural society, to secure profit, and to promote social stability. Enclosure laid the basis for the final destruction of the English peasantry. Those who gained were, essentially, large landlords and large capitalist tenants. Those who lost were all other members of rural society who relied on their rights of commons: and especially independent owners of small acreages, cottagers with no holdings in the common fields and squatters on the commons. The article seeks to establish (1) the importance and value of commons and rights of common and (2) what happened at enclosure when rights of common were abolished; with evidence almost entirely from the Parts of Lindsey in North Lincolnshire. From c.1790 onwards (until well after 1870, in fact) there was a prolonged attack on all aspects of rural popular culture and parliamentary enclosure was one important element in that attack.

Relative Prices and the International Comparison of Real Agricultural Output and Productivity by Massoud Karshenas

This article reviews the different methods of constructing multilateral output and productivity indices for agriculture in cross-country panel studies. We show that various multilateral output indices used by different researchers can have considerable disparities, thus rendering the comparison of the final results problematic. The production indices produced by the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) are increasingly used by researchers as a unique source of data for cross-country panel studies. The article examines the properties of the FAO index, and finds them deficient in paying little attention to the problem of loss of characteristicity in a highly heterogeneous panel. It is shown that the FAO production indices lead to unacceptably large deviations from domestically based production indices in the case of low-income countries. It is argued further that the use of the FAO production index can lead to spurious results in econometric studies of the links between productivity growth, per capita income, and price levels.

Debate: The Case for Agrarian Capitalism: A Response to Albritton by Mike Zmolek

Albritton finds Brenner's designation 'agrarian capitalism' inappropriate for early English agriculture, as the law of value and the commodification of labour are undeveloped. But Brenner is not theorising a 'full-blown' capitalism. His theory traces a process of transition, by which new rules for social reproduction and a new capitalist logic unfolded gradually. Albritton's evidence, moreover, actually supports Brenner's thesis. Charges of class reductionism misconstrue Brenner's efforts to overcome the tendency to dichotomise society into political and economic spheres. Brenner's theory provides what the bourgeois paradigm does not: a logical explanation of how market dependency and capitalist classes emerged.

Abstracts of articles in Issue 27.3

Weak Weapons, Strong Weapons? Hidden Resistance and Political Protest in Rural Ecuador by Tanya Korovkin

The article critically applies the theory of everyday forms of peasant resistance (EFPR) to an analysis of land struggles in the Ecuadorean Andes. It explores the effectiveness of 'weapons of the weak'used by indigenous peasants in conflicts with the haciendas. The relationship between hidden resistance and the rise of political organisation is also examined. Special attention is paid to the structural context and cultural underpinning of both covert and overt peasant action.

Inequality, Land Reform and Agricultural Growth in China, 1952-55: A Preliminary Treatment by Chris Bramall

Although the Agrarian Reform Laws of the late 1940s were intended to preserve the rich peasant economy, Chinese land reform during 1947-52 was uneven in its spatial impact. In some areas, the reform was indeed a 'wager on the strong'. But in others, land reform was more egalitarian, re-distributing self-cultivated land from rich peasants to the rural poor. New county-level evidence suggests that this egalitarianism hampered the pace of agricultural growth in the years immediately prior to collectivisation.

Origins of Debt, Mortgage and Alienation of Land in Early Modern Punjab by Pervaiz Nazir

The agrarian structure of the Punjab in Pakistan and India was fashioned by the socio-economic and legal institutions established by the British after their annexation of the Province in 1849. One of the consequences of this was an increase in usury/money-lending capital and a resultant rise in endemic debt among the peasantry and alienation of proprietors' land by money-lenders. These changes alarmed the colonial authorities who attempted to deal with the situation simply through legislation, without addressing the complexities of Punjab's political economy. The problem of debt and the reliance of cultivators on the money-lenders for finance continued after 1947. Based on evidence from settlement reports and other original documents this article explores the origin of this problem.

Consumer Food Subsidies in India: Proposals for Reform by Madhura Swaminathan

In recent years, an important item on the agenda of economic reformers in India has been to reduce the scale of food subsidies, by means of targeting the system of public distribution of food (PDS). A recent World Bank study makes concrete suggestions for reform of the PDS and these are examined critically in this article. Specifically, I argue against narrow targeting and in favour of broad targeting or near-universal provision of the PDS. I also argue that a strong and effective system of procurement needs to be maintained and this requires the continuation of an organisation such as the Food Corporation of India. The lesson from Kerala is that strong political support is essential for establishing and maintaining an effective system of food security.

Elite Perceptions of Land Reform in Early Republican Turkey by M Asim Karamerlioðlu

This article focuses on the land reform attempts of the single-party regime in Turkey of the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s, culminating in the reform Law of 1945. Why the Turkish ruling elite wanted a land reform is still not adequately understood, and there are a number of controversial and often contradictory interpretations. The thesis here is that despite mainstream approaches to the issue in Turkish historiography, the land reform attempts during the single-party era should be seen as part of the Kemalist project of conservative modernisation. The article argues that a variety of concerns were important in shaping the Turkish elite's thinking on land reform, including an ideology of peasantism combined with a fear of rural unrest (from sharecroppers, agricultural laborers and landless and land-poor peasants); a fear also of urbanisation, proletarianisation and socialist ideas; a desire to strengthen Republican nationalist ideology in the countryside as a basis of regime support (with a particular emphasis on the Kurdish issue). The conclusion presents an interpretation of the Turkish land reform that connects the long- and short-term causes of the land reform Law of 1945.

'After Years in the Wilderness': The Discourse of Land Claims in the New South Africa by Deborah James

This article examines land restitution in the new South Africa, and the intersecting roles of land-claiming communities, forcibly resettled from their land during the apartheid years, and the NGOs and - since 1994 - Government Commissioners who have helped them to reclaim the land. Ideas and practices concerning land, community and development that emerge from the interaction between these different players are mutually constitutive but sometimes also mutually incomprehensible. A populist rhetoric, evident both in discussions with former land owners, and in much of NGO publications such as Land Update, depicts land as something communally owned which must be communally defended. This sense of uniformly experienced injustice and shared resistance against outside intervention obscures the fact that claims on land derive from a series of sharply differentiated historical experiences and articulate widely divergent interests, such as those - in the case of the farm Doornkop for example - between former owners and their former tenants. The restitution of land to these former owners, while of great importance to them as a source of identity and as a redress of past injustices, is not necessarily the key to solving 'poverty, injustice and misery' as claimed for the process of land reform in South Africa as a whole.

Abstracts of articles in Issue 27.2

Nature, Property and Polity in Colonial Bombay by Vasant Kaiwar

This article contends that ecological issues are vital to understanding the long-term dynamic of the agricultural economy and have to be considered along with class/property structures and the state. It examines the underpinnings, potentialities and limitations of the colonial discourse of agriculture as a field for improvement and suggests that the neglect of this literature by latter-day economic historians has led to either Promethean or Malthusian discourses of limited explanatory value. This article notes that combining the insights of this earlier discourse with recent attempts at theorising the links between nature, property and polity constitutes the most promising line of development.

'Globalisation' and African Export Crop Agriculture by Philip Raikes and Peter Gibbon

It is commonly agreed that Africa has become increasingly marginalised within the current global economy. However, there are few existing attempts to identify the precise contours of this marginalisation or to explicate the dynamics giving it a precise shape. Against the background of a discussion of theoretical entry points to this problem, as well as of some of its broad quantitative dimensions, this article attempts to develop working hypotheses focused on the marginalisation/restructuring of African export crop agriculture.

Mothering Earth? Gender and Environmental Protection in the Jharkhand, India by Sarah Jewitt

With reference to field-based evidence from the Jharkhand region of India, this article seeks to problematise the assumption of a simple women-environment link and outline the pitfalls of translating such ideas into development policy-making. Following the work of Bina Agarwal and Cecile Jackson (amongst others), it challenges the perception of women as environmental guardians. In particular, it highlights the fluidity and localised nature of inter- and intra-community variations in work allocation and identifies significant gender variations in decision-making and control over environmental resources. Specific emphasis is placed on the impact of patrilineal inheritance systems and patrilocal residence patterns

Perspectives on the Peasantries of Europe by Terence J Byres

A collected volume on The Peasantries of Europe: From the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, edited by Tom Scott, is reviewed. It contains an Introduction by Scott; papers on France (Jonathan Dewald and Liana Vardi), Iberia (Teofilo F. Ruiz), Italy (S.R. Epstein), Western Germany (Thomas Robisheaux), East-Elbian Germany and Poland (William W. Hagen), the Austrian Empire (Hermann Rebel), Russia (Edgar Melton), the Ottoman Empire (Fikret Adanir), Scandinavia (David Gaunt) and England (Richard M. Smith); and a concluding essay (John Langton). The volume's scope and the claims made on its behalf, as a work of major historiographic importance, are noted; the theoretical/ methodological intent and the authors' remit identified; and the individual papers considered critically. It provides a useful depiction of the specificities of a wide range of European peasantries. It is, however, in several ways, analytically defective. This is so, it is argued, inasmuch as the authors' quest for diversity turns out to be unhelpful; it is structured by an inadequate political economy, seen in an absence, or deficient treatment, of various crucial themes - most notably sharecropping, differential land productivity, social differentiation, and the state; and the volume has major shortcomings in terms of comparative history (including a curious neglect of the influential work of Robert Brenner).

The 'Other' Agrarian Transition? Structure, Institutions and Agency in Sustainable Rural Development by Subir Sinha

This essay reviews some of the new literature on the transition to sustainable rural development (SRD). By considering various accounts of environmental degradation, its links with poverty and aspects of the agenda for SRD, the essay notes an ambiguity regarding the role of the state, which is held, in this literature, as culpable for environmental degradation, as well as given a substantial role, implicitly or explicitly, in making the transition to SRD. This ambiguity is shown via an analysis of the treatments written from historical, socio-cultural and political economy perspectives, from which the essay draws the theme of state-class relations, arguing a central position for these relations in SRD agendas. The essay concludes with an argument for a move to create a framework of analysis which takes into account not only public policy but also political economy and popular politics.

Abstracts of articles in Issue 27.1

The Agrarian Question in Colonial Java: Coercion and Colonial Capitalist Sugar Plantations, 1870-1941 by Alec Gordon

The article sets out to restore the recently denied view that state-backed coercion is vital to colonial sugar plantations in Java (as elsewhere). Most unusual for a plantation system the Java sugar mills owned no land (other than that on which the mill was sitting). They leased fresh land each year from irrigated rice farmers. Secondly, and also remarkable, all this system was legally and effectively regulated (at least for the leasing farmers whilst for the mills the legal side was rather more optional). This provided the basis for cheap land to the plantations that the farmers were obliged to lease. Thirdly, each year every mill would calculate its needs for land and forward those to the level of Resident. Having consulted with his own and with lower staff, the Resident might amend the mills' requirements and then approve them. These were then passed down through the various levels of the administration until reaching the village. However, they now appeared in the form of approved measures to which officials and village heads were supposed to adhere. Fourthly, the mills needed large contiguous areas of land to plant sugar cane whilst the average individual farmer had about half a hectare of irrigated land usually in more than one spot. This pushed the mills into favouring the leasing of 'communal' village land. These were in blocs. This procedure although widely used was illegal for most of the period. Whilst most satisfactory to Dutch colonial capitalism the system constituted the Agrarian Question (with no solution except Independence) in Java.

Dalits and Politics in Rural North India: The Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh by Ian Duncan

In the last decade the Bahaujan Samaj Party has established a strong electoral presence in northern India. It has been particularly successful in Uttar Pradesh where it has participated in government three times in the 1990s. Although the party seeks to mobilise the support of the 'bahujan' - the non-high caste majority of the population - it is argued here, on the basis of aggregate and survey analysis, that it has been constrained by its excessive reliance on just some sections of former untouchables (Dalits). The Bahujan Samaj Party represents a significant social and political movement of some Dalit groups but it has failed to secure the support of the wider population of the rural poor.

'Sail on, O Ship of State': Neo-Liberalism, Globalisation and the Governance of Africa by David Moore

Contrary to many claims, the World Bank's 1997 Development Report The State in a Changing World is no radical departure from neo-liberal development principles. Rather, it marks the culmination of the Bank's gradual move away from crude anti-statism to its 'good governance' discursive efforts to 'get the state right' in its quest for a solution to the post-1970s development crisis. This article examines The State in a Changing World from within the Bank's discourse on the role of the state and its managers, and current academic discussions of the 'third world' state and globalisation. It is difficult for these realms of discourse to construct a hegemonic vision of 'development' in the current conjuncture - particularly while the Bank remains hostage to private capital markets. Perspectives on the role of the state with deeper than Hayekian neo-liberal roots must go beyond the contradictory melange of anti-statism and managerialism which make up the current discourse of 'neo-statism'. However, such alterations take place within much larger realms of transformation than analyses such as the 1997 report consider.

Review Articles:

Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham: The Debate Over Unfree Labour by J Mohan Rao

Definitional disputes may be disregarded as inconsequential aside from getting in the way of communicating substantive positions. In the present instance, such an attitude seems untenable if only because Free Labour and Capitalism are big words in wide currency. And debates involving these terms reflect deeper differences in theoretical and historical interpretation. Though, or perhaps because, a considerable part of the volume in review is energised by such disputes, it makes an eminently valuable contribution and provokes many substantive questions relating to labour and class relations, both contemporary and especially historical. While opinion may vary whether, on balance, the eighteen wide-ranging case studies in the volume shed useful light on the categories in contention and vice versa, their collective value transcends the debates themselves.

Community, Citizenship and the Maligned State in Modernising Mexico by Simon Miller

The fashion for 'subaltern studies' has taken researchers back to the archive and field in search of social agents both marginalised and forgotten. In Mexico this has entailed an exacting task of reconstructing the lives of Indians and peasants on the remote frontiers of state influence. The books reviewed here are worthy examples of this project. They offer illuminating glimpses of the ways in which such semi-autonomous societies experienced the extension of state rule as modern Mexico emerged painfully as a nation. If they are to be faulted it is in the emphasis they place on 'the People's' resistance to assimilation, implicitly heroic, whilst casting a rather contemporary light, often explicitly pejorative, on to the efforts of those other agents whose efforts were directed at the creation of a uniform citizenship.

Abstracts of articles in Issue 26.2&3

Special Issue

Rural Labour Relations in India

Edited by: T J Byres, Karin Kapadia and Jens Lerche

Introduction by Karin Kapadia and Jens Lerche

This volume is the outcome of the Workshop on 'Rural Labour Relations In India Today' held in London in 1997. The aim was to analyse the emerging development trajectories of rural labour relations and labour struggles in India, based on studies from its different states. The organisers wished to see examined, inter alia, how accumulation patterns and the balance of power between classes facilitated and shaped labour relations. Important was the extent to which agricultural employment was being substituted by non-agricultural employment, and whether, consequently, rural labourers were being de-linked from their old masters in ways which broke previous exploitative relations; or whether such relations were being maintained, or even extended to new groups. Discussion of the role of the state in rural labour relations was also called for. It is argued that the papers show that politicisation among rural labourers is taking place. However, the papers also point to a range of elements that qualify the politicisation process when it is evaluated from a class perspective, not the least being that rural labour politicisation may strengthen or even depend on intraclass divisions such as gender and caste.

Rural Labour Relations in India: Persistent Themes, Common Processes and Differential Outcomes by T J Byres

The paper has three aims: (1) to identify and consider those major persistent themes which inform this volume; (2) to distinguish, within those themes, whatever common processes, with respect to labour relations in the Indian countryside, can be observed in the contributions published; and (3) to suggest what the studies reveal about differential outcomes within the Indian social formation. The overarching theme of class conflict is singled out and that of the nature and impact of state intervention noted. A series of 'stylised shifts', or clear general tendencies, are seen to be in evidence in the analyses, which suggest the operation of vigorous emancipatory processes. The limitations and contradictions inherent in these emancipatory processes are discussed, the influences which condition class struggle are highlighted, and the crucial role of the state (and, in particular, the significance of poverty alleviation programmes) stressed. It is argued, finally, that a primary analytical task is to pursue a far more systematic interpretation of regional variations in the Indian social formation than is currently available.

Liberalisation, Rural Labour Markets and the Mobilisation of Farm Workers: The Haryana Story in an All India Context by Sheila Bhalla

In India, the new economic policy, especially after 1991, has been associated with a contraction of public spending on economic and social infrastructure, with technological and structural changes which have caused a decline in the employment generating capacity of economic growth, a widening of the gap between farm labour productivity and labour productivity in all other sectors and a substantial rise in the number of rural people living in absolute poverty. In Haryana, a Green Revolution state, which enjoyed exceptionally high agricultural and industrial output growth rates during the 1990s, employment contracted or stagnated in both agriculture and manufacturing, and poverty soared. Simultaneously, during the 1990s, there was a significant awakening of rural Haryana wage workers as a class, but it is not clear how much this development had to do with worsening labour market conditions. Much of it may be attributable to the way in which the Haryana agricultural workers' union was organised during this period. Some of their most successful mobilisations involved joint action, either with the All India Kisan Sabha and other left-led peasant and agricultural workers' organisations, or with a union representing industrial and other non-farm workers. It is noteworthy that whatever victories were won, were won largely through the intermediation of governments - central, state or local. No major agricultural workers' union victories were recorded in Haryana which emerged from direct confrontations of agricultural labourers with their employers.

Unfree Relations and the Feminisation of Agricultural Labour in Andhra Pradesh, 1970-95 by Lucia da Corta and Davuluri Venkateshwarlu

Neo-liberal writers have argued that 'green revolution' induced agricultural growth in south India is largely responsible for rising wages, increased land ownership among landless labourers and even some equalisation in land owned between rich and poor. Such growth is now also seen to be responsible for a faster rise in women's employment relative to men (known as the 'feminisation' of agricultural wage labour), for declining wage differentials, and for a rise in women's 'empowerment'. These views are examined afresh in light of evidence gathered from villages in Andhra Pradesh. It is argued that male agricultural labourers were the chief beneficiaries of state policies that helped men escape from traditional permanent bonded relations and to engage in petty commodity production and non-agricultural employment. Agrarian capitalists responded to the resulting rise in labour costs by commission trading, based on tied harvest arrangements, in order to secure the labour of smallholders indirectly, and intensifying non-permanent forms of attached labour. The latter were designed to secure male labour for exclusively male work and in order to replace male workers seeking emancipation and higher wages with cheaper, unfree female labour for the remaining agricultural tasks. Female labour was cheaper and less free than male labour because men shifted more of the responsibility for family provisioning on to women by spending more outside the home and by refusing wage work as a protest against low, tied wages. As a consequence, the cost of men's struggle for emancipation was women's unfreedom. Under these circumstances, feminisation of labour was largely disempowering for women.

Rural Labour Relations and Development Dilemmas in Kerala: Reflections on the Development Dilemmas of a Socially Transforming Labour Force in a Slowly Growing Economy by K P Kannan

Kerala is well known for its achievements in the sphere of social development; and these include a rapid and high-level mobilisation and organisation of workers, regardless of location and sectoral occupation. Such a process of social development without a commensurate transformation of the productive forces has, however, presented Kerala with some major dilemmas. In this study the political economy of labour and development is considered, via treatment of the respective roles of labour unions, state and capital in the rural context. Three major dilemmas are examined: (1) technological choice in the face of trade union resistance and rising labour costs; (2) the mismatch between labour supply and labour demand, as a result of the changing job expectations of the younger generation; and (3) the failure of the state to attract new investment in the context of liberalisation of the Indian economy. There is a close relationship between the dynamics of labour relations and the emergence of these dilemmas. The study presents an analysis of how this works out in concrete terms: in relation to rural labour relations in the rice cultivation sector, where these dilemmas have pushed the trade unions, state and farmers to reconsider their earlier strategies.

Politics of the Poor: Agricultural labourers and Political Transformations in North India by Jens Lerche

This contribution addresses the question of how local agrarian labour relations and labour struggles, and class- and caste- based emancipatory processes, relate to the wider political development of the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). It argues that in UP rural labourers have experienced a number of important positive changes since Independence, and are increasingly able to assert what they now perceive to be their rights. Rural labour struggles have intensified and, in spite of counter actions by middle and big peasants, the position of labourers has improved. The 1990s have seen an extraordinary development in UP, whereby low caste BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party) governments have actually been voted in. This has been both a result of a catalyst for some of these developments. Part I of this study examines the development of rural class relations in UP since Independence, through an analysis of sharecropping and labour relations, local labour struggles and the overall position of rural labourers until the early 1990s. Part II concentrates on the issue of caste- and class-based policies and mobilisation among rural labourers in the 1990s, including a discussion of why the BSP has been more successful than the communist parties in mobilising rural labourers.

Agrarian Power and Unfree Labour by J Mohan Rao

This study contributes a theoretical analysis of unfree and free employment relations and reopens the Indian debate on the unfree status of attached labour. It is argued that the concepts of unfree and free employment relations are based on the incommensurable categories of negative freedom and self-determination. Nor can any clear separation be sustained between labour subject to 'non-economic' coercion versus labour subject exclusively to 'economic' coercion. In this light, the study specifies the production relations through which agrarian power is exercised and thereby identifies the substantive differences between attached labour in rural India and wage labour under canonical forms of capitalism.

Rural Labour in Uttar Pradesh, India: Emerging Features of Subsistence, Contradiction and Resistance by Ravi S Srivastava

While conflict and struggle between the poor and dominant classes has never been absent from the rural scene in Uttar Pradesh, evidence examined in this study suggests that recent changes may have added new dimensions and assertiveness to the poor. The changes in the nature of dependence, contradictions and ensuing resistance analysed in this paper have significant implications for the restructuring of labour relations within villages, and still wider ramifications for the political articulation of the labouring classes. The study aims to delineate the extent to which labour market changes are embedded in a wider socio-economic and political dynamic - a point which is missed in orthodox analyses of the rural labour market.

Patterns of Accumulation and Struggles of Rural Labour: Some Aspects of Agrarian Change in Central Bihar by Kalpana Wilson

Agrarian conflict in Central Bihar has frequently been ascribed to the 'stagnant' and unchanging nature of the rural economy. It is suggested here that in reality, this region has witnessed major changes in patterns of surplus appropriation and investment during the last 25 years. An initial spurt of capital accumulation among a section of larger landowners employing wage labour provided the catalyst for the emergence in the late 1970s of an organised movement of mainly dalit agricultural labourers. This movement has continued to develop despite a subsequent slowing down of the process of accumulation in agriculture in the face of constraints rooted in the agrarian structure itself and the nature of State power in Bihar. The interrelated questions of class, caste and gender which have shaped this movement are discussed, and it is suggested that a number of changes in production relations during the last 15 years represent either acceptance by employers of demands put forward by agricultural labourers, or essentially defensive reactions to such demands. At the same time, employers are constantly developing new strategies to attempt to neutralise or reverse gains made by labourers.

Abstracts of articles in Issue 26.1

Breaching the Nadu: Lordship and Economic Development in Pre-Colonial South India by Vivek Chibber

In this article I present a new framework for the analysis of the South Indian economy over the medieval and early modern epochs, centred on the effects of social property relations. I argue that the overall pattern was one of steady economic development, but with a marked increase in trade and commodity development in the early modern era. This is explained through a transformation of intra-class relations that followed the fall of the Vijayanagara Empire. Whereas in the medieval period, economic growth had been subject to the constraints imposed by effective lordly cohesion, which squeezed peasant income and limited trade, this cohesiveness gave way under the hammer blows dealt to it by Vijayanagara rulers. As the South entered the early modern era, lords found themselves without the traditional mechanisms of class organisation, and producers were able to capitalise on their weakness for economic gain. Nevertheless, production still remained peasant based, and, pace some of the more ambitious claims of recent historiography, was oriented toward the minimisation of risk, and not the maximisation of profit. Hence, though there was an increase in the circulation of commodities, this was an artifact of a change within a pre-capitalist regime, and not a harbinger of a transition to capitalism.

The Revenge of the Peasant? The Collapse of Large-Scale Russian Agriculture and the Role of the Peasant 'Private Plot' in that Collapse, 1991-97 by Gavin Kitching

This article re-examines the old question of whether the agricultural workforce on the (former) state and collective farms of rural Russia are properly to be called 'peasants'. It shows that the question itself involves an important degree of conceptual confusion. These people still, it is true, call themselves peasants, but this is an expression of their attitudes toward the state, not - or not primarily - a description of their economic or social role. The article then goes on to show, however, that the expansion of 'private plot' production in post-Soviet Russia has been an important cause of the current crisis of large farm ('collective') production there. It ends by considering the question of how far this 'triumph' of private plot production over large-scale production can be considered a 'peasants' revenge' whether by the people themselves or by an 'outside' observer. It concludes that all possible answers to this latter question are gloomily ironic.

Russian Agrarian Reform and Rural Capitalism Reconsidered by Stephen K Wegren

Since 1990, significant institutional and policy change has occurred in the Russian agrarian sector. A crucial question is whether these changes will facilitate rural capitalism and the emergence of a rural bourgeoisie. This article examines Russian domestic economic policies and international trade policies, arguing that macroeconomic policies are inherently detrimental to the agrarian sector, are undermining the prospects for capitalism and the rise of a rural bourgeoisie, and are hindering economic growth. Since the onset of agrarian reform, financial and material investments into agriculture have been slashed. Russia has also pursued an open trade policy which has witnessed an increase in food imports which pits higher priced domestic food against lower priced, better quality imports. As a consequence the agricultural sector is not fulfilling basic requirements for economic growth. Based on these trends, the article concludes that current prospects for the development of a rural bourgeoisie are not favourable.

Unilever, Contract Farmers and Co-operatives in Cameroon: Crisis and Response by Piet Konings

This study examines the role of the contract farmers' co-operative associated with Pamol, a subsidiary of the giant Unilever company, in the South West Province of Anglophone Cameroon. This co-operative is dominated by a small stratum of large producers with close links to the Pamol management and the state. Although they are the most important contract farmers in terms of quantity and quality of produce, they are most dependent on the management for their supply of inputs, as well as for transport, processing and marketing facilities. Little wonder that they were the farmers who formed a co-operative in the early 1980s, when deteriorating market conditions for palm oil threatened the company's continuing existence and the farmers' chances for capital accumulation. Unable to force the management to keep to the terms of the contract, the executive board of the co-operative tried to achieve a larger measure of autonomy vis--vis the company by creating nurseries and transport and processing facilities of its own.

Corruptions of Development in the Countryside of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, 1927-57 by Jeff Grischow

Much current development literature equates civil society with community and invokes both in the name of development. Using Northern Ghana as a case study, this essay argues that the colonial state considered civil society antithetical to community. That is, for colonial administrators African civil society represented the corruption of development. Driven by forces of political and economic change, civil society pressed against the colonial project of preserving community in the African countryside. In response, the colonial state invoked the idea of community, not to encourage civil society but rather to block its emergence in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast.

Some Thoughts on a HeterodoxView of the Causes of Low Agricultural Productivity by Terence J Byres

A conference volume, Economic Development and Agricultural Productivity, edited by Amit Bhaduri and Rune Skarstein, is reviewed. The aim of the conference was to address the causes of low agricultural productivity in underdeveloped economies, and a group of scholars from various disciplines was invited to consider that issue. Four sets of themes are covered: historical perspectives on agricultural productivity (with papers by Robert Brenner and Paul Bairoch), the role of the price mechanism (with papers by Servaas Storm and Hans-Bern Schafer, both on India); the influence of class relations and the role of the state (with papers by Amit Bhaduri, Solon Barraclough, Mahmoud Abdel-Fadil and Kjell J. Havnevik and Rune Skarstein, which relate, respectively, to India, Latin America, Egypt and Tanzania); and ecological sustainability (with papers by Juan Martinez-Alier and Lawrence Busch).The papers are discussed and some critical, political economy perspectives on them are suggested.