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Journal of Peasant Studies
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Surveying the agrarian question (part 1): unearthing foundations, exploring diversity
A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi; Cristbal Kay
Online publication date: 22 January 2010
To cite this Article Akram-Lodhi, A. Haroon and Kay, Cristbal(2010) 'Surveying the agrarian question (part 1):
unearthing foundations, exploring diversity', Journal of Peasant Studies, 37: 1, 177 202 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03066150903498838 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150903498838
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The Journal of Peasant Studies Vol. 37, No. 1, January 2010, 177202
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Surveying the agrarian question (part 1): unearthing foundations, exploring diversity
bal Kay A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristo
This two-part article surveys the origin, development, and current meaning of the agrarian question. Part one of the survey explores the history of the agrarian question, elaborating its origin in the work of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin, and its development in the work of Preobrazhensky, Dobb, Brenner, and others. Part two of the survey identies seven current variants of the agrarian question and critically interrogates these variants in order to understand whether, and if so, how, the location of small-scale petty commodity food and farm production within contemporary capitalism has been recongured during the era of neoliberal globalisation. Together, the two parts of the survey argue that the agrarian question continues to oer a rigorously exible framework by which to undertake a historically-informed and country-specic analysis of the material conditions governing rural production, reproduction, and the process of agrarian accumulation or its lack thereof, a process that can now be located within the law of value and market imperatives that operate on a world scale. Keywords: agrarian question; agrarian change; rural development; rural transformation; peasant studies; globalisation
Peasants, capitalism and globalisation Fifteen years ago Eric Hobsbawm (1994, 289) wrote that the most dramatic and farreaching social change of the second half of this (last) century, and the one which cuts us o for ever from the world of the past, is the death of the peasantry. While Hobsbawm was referring to the size of the global peasantry relative to global population, the underlying reason for this empirical fact is more fundamental: since the late 1970s capitalism underwent sea changes with critical implications for the global peasantry. In the past peasants were subordinated to a variety of state forms, economic systems, and labour regimes. By the time Hobsbawm was writing the state forms, economic systems and labour regimes that subordinated peasants had become incorporated into global circuits of production, trade, and nance as historically unprecedented processes of concentration and centralisation of capital
Preliminary versions of this article were presented to the XVth World Economic History Congress, Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands, August 2009 and the International ma de Zacatecas, Zacatecas, Conference on the Global Food Crisis, Universidad Autono Gra da, Henry Veltmeyer, and Mexico, August 2009. Our thanks to Eric Vanhaute, Cormac O Jun Borras. We also acknowledge the contribution made by two anonymous reviewers, who must be commended for the diligence with which they worked: they have signicantly improved the article.
ISSN 0306-6150 print/ISSN 1743-9361 online 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/03066150903498838 http://www.informaworld.com
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A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay
on a world-scale took place. These phenomena have become generally known as globalisation.1 In agriculture capital has reorganised the social and technical arrangements governing farming on a world-scale. Under the aegis of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, almost three decades of structural adjustment in developing capitalist countries as well as the collapse of the central planned economies led to the dismantling of a panoply of trade, investment and nancial restrictions. This allowed global agro-food transnational capital, working in close collaboration with states rendered compliant by the rules of the World Trade Organization and its predecessor, to intensify the integration of developing capitalist countries into the temperate grain-livestock complex (Weis 2007) established at the beginning of the twentieth century. But this corporate food regime (McMichael 2009) has been constructed on a dramatic social and distributional contradiction: world supplies of agricultural commodities are more than sucient to meet global food demand, but the numbers of those living in varying degrees of calorie and protein insecurity and chronic hunger in the worlds towns and countryside is, at more than one billion, historically unprecedented. The establishment of the dominance of capital over world agriculture has thus produced a systemic global agrarian crisis, in which underconsumption collides with overconsumption and in which overproduction calibrates with underproduction. So, in a world of the stued and starved (Patel 2007) three-quarters of the worlds poorest people live in the countryside and face a systemic livelihoods crisis (International Fund for Agricultural Development 2001, Food and Agriculture Organization 2008, International Food Policy Research Institute 2007, Weis 2007). The global food crisis that erupted in 2008 has only starkly revealed an underlying reality that was already there (Bello 2009, Thurow and Kilman 2009, Johnston 2010). The dynamics of globalisation and the intensifying systemic crisis in the countryside means that our depiction of the worlds peasants cannot remain rooted in the approaches developed over the past ve decades. The peasantry has been understood in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most classic analysis of the characteristics of the peasantry is that of Wolf (1966), but the two editions of Peasants and Peasant Societies (1971, 1988), edited by Shanin, oered a number of ways of conceptualising peasants, and Ellis (1993) oered a clear exposition of the economic characteristics of the peasantry. From these and others, peasant studies has explored the life and times of female and male agricultural workers whose livelihoods are primarily but not exclusively based on having access to land that is either owned or rented, who have diminutive amounts of basic tools and equipment, and who use mostly their own labour and the labour of other family members to work that land. So, allocating small stocks of both capital and labour contemporary peasants are petty commodity producers, operating as both petty capitalists of little consequence and as workers with little power over the terms and conditions of their employment (Bernstein 1991, Gibbon and Neocosmos 1985). Trying to do both, within an often contradictory set of social and economic conditions, brought with it a set of challenges; while most survived, and many resiliently and indeed deantly held onto their agrarian culture within myriad dierent agricultural histories, they did not prosper.
Critical overviews of globalisation are provided by Hirst and Thompson (1996), Weiss (1997), and Chernomas and Sepehri (2005).
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Globally, this picture has become somewhat much fuzzier, particularly because systemic crisis in the countryside means that for many an exclusive emphasis on farming is not an adequate survival strategy because it does not produce a rudimentarily secure livelihood or even sucient household food supplies (Bernstein 2009, World Bank 2007). It is now more common for rural livelihoods to be constructed from a plethora of fragmentary and insecure sources: petty commodity production in farming, to be sure; but also the sale of temporary and casualised waged labour, both on and o-farm; as well as petty commodity handicraft manufacture, petty merchant trading, the provision of petty services, and a reliance on remittances arising from migration (Kay 2008a). The relationship of peasants to product and labour markets has also changed: while markets continue to be structured by the operation of personalised sets of social relations, and are thus bearers of power and privilege, their importance to petty commodity producer survival strategies has increased immensely. With rural livelihoods in the twenty-rst century being constructed on such a vulnerable terrain, could it be, as Henry Bernstein says, that much is obscured by characterizing social formations in the South today as peasant societies, or contemporary classes of petty-commodity producing small farmers as peasants (Bernstein 2009, 249). Does it make sense to speak of peasants, or have they, in the early years of this century, become a historical anachronism, unable to survive the dynamics of the capitalist development of agriculture (Veltmeyer 2006, 445) on a world-scale? These suggestions make it clear that there are a range of alternative viewpoints about the place and relevance of petty commodity producing peasants in capitalist development in the early twenty-rst century. In this light, this two-part article will survey the trajectory of the historical materialist analytical framework as it has been used, over time, to grasp the place of farming and agriculture in emergent and mature capitalist societies, an analytical framework that was rst identied more than 100 years ago and which is known, in the political economy literature, as the agrarian question. The best previous survey of the agrarian question is now more than a decade and a half old, and predates discussions of globalisation (Bernstein 1994). This survey is therefore undertaken in order to ask whether, and if so, how, the location of small-scale petty commodity production within contemporary capitalism has been recongured; whether we have seen, in Hobsbawms words, the death of the peasantry?2 So, although framed as a survey, the article oers an analysis of the place of small-scale petty commodity producing peasant farming and rural labour in contemporary developing capitalist countries under the sway of globalising capital and the ongoing expansion of capitalism in agriculture. In so doing, the article develops ideas in Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2009). More than a century ago Karl Kautsky succinctly dened the agrarian question as being whether, and how, capital is seizing hold of agriculture, revolutionising it, making old forms of production and property untenable and creating the necessity for new ones (Kautsky 1988, 12, orig. 1899). Just over a decade ago Terence J. Byres (1996, 26) elaborated Kautskys denition by identifying the agrarian question as the continued existence in the countryside, in a substantive sense, of obstacles to an unleashing of accumulation in both the countryside itself and more generally in
2 Hobsbawms (1994, 289) obituary has been challenged by Otero (1999), Bryceson et al. (2000), Bernstein (2000), Watts (2002), Johnson (2004), McMichael (2006a, 2006b), and Kay (2008b).
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particular, the accumulation associated with capitalist industrialization. Clearly, as an analytical framework concerned with capitalist transformation and capital accumulation in farming and agriculture the agrarian question must be located within the specics of the world-historical context within which it is asked, whether that be the period of imperialism or the period of globalisation. These contexts are predicated on a specic conguration of the development of the forces and relations of production on a global scale, and these congurations have implications for the prospects of capitalist transformation and capital accumulation within the rural economy and beyond. Indeed, this is the heart of Hobsbawms assertion: if the tendency is for capital and capital accumulation to be increasingly internationalised, does small-scale petty commodity producing peasant farming continue to have a possible role in the emergence of capital within agriculture and the prospects for capitalist accumulation within states, or is it, in the current international economic conjuncture, marginal to capital and capitalism in an era of globalisation? This survey argues that agriculture continues to be relevant for capital and capitalism in an era of neoliberal globalisation. It argues that small-scale petty commodity producing peasant farming still has a role in the emergence of capital in the agriculture of some social formations, and argues that agriculture still has an impact on the prospects for capitalist accumulation within states and globally. But the article also argues that this is not the fate of many small-scale petty commodity producing peasant farmers who, other than partially supporting the reserve army of labour and in so doing mitigating a degree of its social explosiveness, have been rendered redundant to the needs of capital, and are increasingly dumped into rural and urban slums. Having said that, though, how these former peasants resist the logic and imperatives of their marginalisation is of central importance in understanding the prospects for capitalist accumulation and anti-systemic movements on a world-scale. In these ways, then, the concerns of the agrarian question, a problematic that oers a remarkably exible, subtle, and nuanced analysis of the modes and mechanisms of agrarian change, has returned with a vengeance as capitalism enters a new phase in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis. The treatment that is oered in this survey is conceptual and analytical. Space prevents the detailed presentation of the ample theoretical and empirical evidence that can be used to substantiate the arguments put forth. But theoretically we draw heavily upon the arguments presented in Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2009), while country-based empirical evidence that supports our positions can be found in our earlier work (Akram-Lodhi et al. 2008) and in Borras et al. (2008), Rosset et al. (2006), Moyo and Yeros (2005), de Janvry et al. (2001), Bryceson et al. (2000), as well as some of the background papers for World Bank (2007), amongst others. The origin of the agrarian question: Marx and rural change Political economy has been concerned with the place of agriculture since the time of the Physiocrats (Hunt 1979); Quesnay in particular presented a treatment of the role of agriculture in structural transformation. But a specically agrarian political economy originated with Marxs analysis of the genesis of capitalism, and the processes by which its core characteristics came to be established: being a system that is on the one hand exploitative and inhumane in its construction of the dierential material interests of capital and labour; while being at the same time a system that is,
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because of its capacity to develop the material forces of production, a necessary precondition of a more economically prosperous and socially humane society. As is well known, for Marx the possibility of transcending capitalism lay in the hands of the class that it created: only the proletariat, a class free from the ownership of the means of production and free to sell its labour-power, was capable of eradicating class society and ending exploitation. This then was the starting point for Marxs analysis of the agrarian question: if small-scale peasant producers combined elements of being petty capitalists and labour, how could the complete development of the capitalist mode of production, and the concomitant creation of a working class, take place? Marxs answer was to carefully consider the relationship between small-scale pre-capitalist peasant farming, petty commodity production, and the emergence of agrarian capital. This was evident as early as the Grundrisse (Marx 1973, orig. 19391941), which elaborates a variety of ways in which transitions from pre-capitalism to capitalism occur. In the Grundrisse small-scale pre-capitalist peasant farming often appears in the guise sketched out in many of Marxs writings over a 30-year period, including his famous journalism on India (Marx 1977, orig. 1852 and 1853), in which the peasantry is essentially seen as being, for lack of a better phrase, a pre-capitalist remnant that will be dragged into modernity by the capitalist mode of production. He could be brutal in his judgment of this kind of peasant society, but this was, in part, because of its implications for the establishment of capitalism, a historically progressive force: agricultural smallholding, by its very nature, rules out the development of the productive powers of social labour (Marx 1981, 943, orig. 1894) and thereby impedes the development of capitalism.3 This perspective that Marx viewed the small-scale pre-capitalist peasantry as an impediment to the full fruition of the capitalist mode of production is very widely held. It is also, in our view, not wholly accurate. Marxs most fully developed analysis of the development of capitalism in agriculture is that which he worked out later in his life and which was published in the rst volume of Capital (Marx 1976, orig. 1867). Bernstein (2006, 449) reminds us that here the class basis of the emergence of capitalist farming within England was explored, through the use of the concept of so-called primitive accumulation, which is used to explain how capital initially comes into existence. There, Marx wrote that
all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in course of formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labourmarket as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation assumes dierent aspects in dierent countries, and runs through its various phases in dierent orders of succession, and at dierent historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form. (Marx 1976, 876)
In Marxs classic example, which came, in many ways, to be seen as a sui generis, serfdom in England had all but disappeared by the end of the fourteenth
Furthermore, as Marx (1971, orig. 1852, 230) characterised the French peasantry at the time: Their eld of production, the small-holding, admits of no division of labour in its cultivation, no application of science and, therefore, no diversity of development, no variety of talent, no wealth of social relationships.
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century. Feudal lords remained, but their might . . . depended . . . on the number of peasant proprietors (Marx 1976, 878). These were the free, and comparatively prosperous, pre-capitalist yeoman peasant farmers that owned their land and cultivated it with their own labour, but whose social and material reproduction relied heavily upon access to common lands. At the start of the sixteenth century feudal landlords began forcibly driving the peasantry from the land as well as the coercive usurpation of common lands (1976, 878). So-called primitive accumulation . . . is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production creating a class of workers that are free (or released) from the means of production and free (and compelled) to sell their labour-power (1976, 874). Primitive accumulation in England used dispossessory enclosures by predatory feudal landlords, later supported by the state, to recongure the relations of production in order to physically expel a prosperous yeomanry from the land and create a propertyless class of rural waged labour that faced a class of capitalist tenant-farmers, beneath the dominant landlord class (Tribe 1981, Byres 2009). Primitive accumulation is in this sense not accumulation at all, but rather the conversion of the pre-capitalist means of production into capital and the consequent establishment of the capital-labour relation. For many readers of Marx it appears that the outcome of the introduction of capitalist relations of production into agriculture must inevitably be the emergence of agrarian capital and agrarian wage labour. But note the critical provisions that Marx has made in the above quote: the history of this expropriation assumes dierent aspects in dierent countries, and runs through its various phases in dierent orders of succession, and at dierent historical epochs (Marx 1976, 876). Here and elsewhere Marx argued that there could be multiple and dierential ways by which a set of capitalist social relations of production could be established or consolidated in agriculture. This is to be expected because the establishment or consolidation of capitalist relations of production in agriculture was not an event but a complex and contradictory tendential process. As he noted, the entry of capital into agriculture as an independent and leading power does not take place everywhere all at once, but rather gradually and in particular branches of production (Marx 1981, 937). While supremacy and subordination in the process of production supplant an earlier state of independence (Marx 1976, 10289, emphasis in original), capital subsumes the labour process as it nds it (Marx 1976, 1021). So the modes and mechanisms by which capital subsumes labour in the establishment of the capitalist mode of production can produce certain hybrid forms, in which although surplus labour is not extorted by direct compulsion from the producer, the producer has not yet become formally subordinate to capital (Marx 1976, 645). Thus while peasants may be dispossessed as capitalism develops, capital can also subsume peasant labour through hybrid forms that consolidate the peasantry. The peasantry would outwardly appear unchanged even as capital produced a fundamental transformation in its social characteristics: there would be an ephemeral yet substantive separation of means of production and labour within the peasant farm. Indeed, this is what establishes small-scale pre-capitalist peasant farms as small-scale petty commodity producers under capitalism (Gibbon and Neocosmos 1985, Bernstein 1991). The transformation of the social characteristics of the peasantry belies their apparent resilience in the face of capitalism. Peasants survive; but their poverty is
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created because of coping mechanisms that are employed by petty commodity producers under capitalism:
the smallholding peasants exploitation is not limited by the average prot on capital, in as much as he is a small capitalist; nor by the need for rent, in as much as he is a landowner. The only absolute barrier he faces as a petty capitalist is the wage that he pays himself, after deducting his actual expenses . . . and he often does so down to a physical minimum. (Marx 1981, 9412)
So smallholding and petty landownership . . . production . . . proceeds without being governed by the general rate of prot (Marx 1981, 946), which can foster tendencies toward peasant class dierentiation as
the custom necessarily develops, among the better-o rent paying peasants, of exploiting agricultural wage-labourers on their own account . . . In this way it gradually becomes possible for them to build up a certain degree of wealth and transform themselves into future capitalists. Among the old possessors of the land, working for themselves, there arises a seed-bed for the nurturing of capitalist farmers, whose development is conditioned by the development of capitalist production. (Marx 1981, 935)
So Marx recognised that processes of capitalist development in agriculture can create both peasant dispossession by displacement, or enclosure, and peasant dispossession by dierentiation (Araghi 2009, 118, Akram-Lodhi 2007), which is driven by the market imperatives of capitalism to exploit labour, improve productivity, and cut the costs of production (Wood 2009). In this light a letter Marx composed in 1881 appears somewhat less remarkable than that which is sometimes claimed (Shanin 1983). Rather, the four drafts and nal text of the letter to Vera Zasulich resemble The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx 1967, orig. 1852), demonstrating how Marx applied his materialist political economy to the analysis of the messy and complex set of social and economic conditions governing the possible fate of the Russian peasantry (Marx 1983, orig. 1925). The context is clear: a formally independent but internationally weak state, with a dominant small-scale peasant population, which was nonetheless rapidly industrialising under the auspices of an interventionist state, and with industry under the control of the state or non-Russians. It is, in many ways, a remarkably contemporary setting,4 made all the more so because Marx situates the fate of the Russian peasantry within the context of global economic processes: the Russian commune was linked to a world market in which capitalist production is predominant (Marx 1983, 102). He stresses the specicity of the economic structure: a type of capitalism fostered by the state at the peasants expense (Marx 1983, 104). In so doing, Marx argues that in this setting the Russian commune was not threatened by the irresistible economic logic of the capital-labour relation per se but was rather threatened by oppression by the state and by capitalist intruders whom the state has made powerful at the peasants expense (Marx 1983, 105). So Marx identies a set of powerful interests seeking to subordinate the rural commune and the peasantry: overburdened by state exactions, fraudulently exploited by intruding capitalists, merchants, etc., and the landed proprietors, it is also being undermined by village usurers (Marx 1983, 114). In this muddled setting, two dierent resolutions of the agrarian question were identied by Marx as
4
Southeast Asia, and particularly Thailand and Vietnam, spring to mind.
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being possible. The rst would see the dominant class coalition the new pillars of society largely eliminate the peasantry, converting them into wage-labourers or, for a small number, into a rural middle class (Marx 1983, 116), thus completing the transition to a fully capitalist mode of production. The second resolution of the agrarian question in the letter to Zasulich would see the agricultural commune gradually transforming itself into an element of collective production on a national scale (Marx 1983, 106). This could occur, according to Marx, because of the corporate specicities of the commune. These specicities included the fact that membership of the commune was not based on kinship, that all members of the commune received a private house and garden, and that the arable land itself had never been private property but was allocated and reallocated to individuals that were allowed to individually appropriate the product of the land for their own subsistence (Marx 1983, 108). This dualism (Marx 1983, 104), according to Marx, gave the commune a set of social relations that articulated the positive and progressive features of capitalism with a set of features derived from an archaic but historically adaptable structure. It was clearly an example of a hybrid form: subordinate to an emerging capitalist mode of production that was not yet supreme (Marx 1976, 1027), yet with social relations that opened up the possibility that the commune could reap the fruits with which capitalist production has enriched humanity without passing through the capitalist regime (Marx 1983, 112). But in order for the second path of transition to take place, the collective tendencies within the commune would have to gain a dominant logic over private interests, and this required, in turn, a working class revolution that succeeded in creating a countervailing social force to the anti-commune compulsions fostered by emergent capital. Moreover, Marx hypothesised that following such a revolution new technologies could also be introduced to sustain the position of small-scale peasant farming. Finally, the deepening of democratic processes arising out of the revolution would be essential to the survival of the commune. Thus, Marx argues in the letter, to save the Russian commune there must be a Russian revolution (Marx 1983, 116). This letter is more than a historical footnote. It shows that multiple resolutions of the agrarian question facing small-scale petty commodity producing peasants located and operating within a dominant world capitalist economy were both possible and consistent with Marxs underlying logic. Indeed, Marx writes repeatedly in the drafts of the letter that the analysis of Capital is expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe (Marx 1983, 117) and that it is wrong to place all agrarian transformations on the same plane (Marx 1983, 107, fn. c). This intellectual exibility within a rigorously demanding theoretical framework, this willingness to confront diverse material circumstances and existing social relations; these are possibly the most important analytical legacies that should be borne in mind when contemplating the contemporary salience of the agrarian question. For, as Marx writes in the letter, the agrarian communes innate dualism admits of an alternative: either its property element will gain the upper hand over its collective element; or else the reverse will take place. Everything depends upon the historical context in which it is located (Marx 1983, 1201). Engels and the politics of the agrarian question Marxs letter to Zasulich voiced a strong sense that collective political agency could transcend the structural processes underpinning the agrarian question. A decade and
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a half later Friedrich Engels turned his attention to this. In The Peasant Question in France and Germany, Engels (1950, 381, orig. 1894) argued that from Ireland to Sicily, from Andalusia to Russia, and Bulgaria, the peasant is a very essential factor of population, production and political power. However, the development of the capitalist form of production has cut the life-strings of small production in agriculture; small production is irretrievably going to rack and ruin (Engels 1950, 382). The reason was that European farm production in general, whether produced by big landowners or small peasants, was unable to compete with cheap grain produced outside Europe as a consequence of the opening of vast new agricultural frontiers in the Americas, Australia, and Southern Africa. This was leading to the slow dissolution of the peasantry; unable to compete, they were becoming dispossessed from the land. Only in England and in Prussia east of the Elbe was this not taking place, because these places witnessed big, landed estates and largescale agriculture (Engels 1950, 381) capitalism in agriculture was already well established. It was therefore necessary, according to Engels, that the European peasantry adopt a political response to this emergent agrarian crisis. However, the doomed peasant (was) in the hands of his false protectors big landowners that assume the role of champions of the interests of the small peasants (Engels 1950, 382). The political party of the urban working class, which had a clear insight into the interconnections between economic causes and political eects, therefore had to become a power in the countryside (1950, 382) by adopting a programme that reected the political needs of the peasantry and, in so doing, forming an alliance with the peasantry. That was the road, argued Engels, to political power, in both the town and the country. Engels emphasis was thus clearly on the political implications of the agrarian question that, in a sense, the emerging internationalisation of the food system as a result of imperialism5 was undermining peasant livelihoods in Europe, and that the agrarian question was thus an agrarian question for and about labour and the expression of its agency. His concern was not with the issue of the emergence of agrarian capital, rural capital accumulation, or capital more generally, as had been Marxs central concern. These broader, more structural, concerns were raised, though, later in the same decade by Karl Kautsky and Vladimir Lenin. Kautsky and Lenin: the classic agrarian question In the late 1890s Karl Kautsky was the most famous Marxist in the world; Vladimir Lenin would only later don this mantle. Both men, viewing capitalism as being a simultaneously progressive and dispossessive system, paid close political and intellectual attention to the relationship between peasant life and the transformations wrought by the consolidation of capitalist relations of production in the societies in which they lived, including the consolidation of capitalist relations of production in agriculture, using careful empirical analysis to understand tendencies and processes of agrarian change.
5 For materialist analyses of the emergence of the global food system, see Friedmann (1993), Bonnano et al. (1994), McMichael (1994), Goodman and Watts (1997), Davis (2001), Weis (2007), and Watts (2009).
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Capitalist industrialisation and agriculture

For both Kautsky and Lenin the force behind the rural transformation described by Engels, including its political implications, was, as in Marx, the processes facilitating the generalised emergence of capital, and hence the capital-labour relation necessary for the production of surplus value. For example, Lenin (1964, orig. 1899) took it as a given that from the 1880s Russia had been undergoing a tendential process of capitalist industrialisation, which had eroded the basis of the peasant economy, albeit incompletely and unevenly, and had revolutionised property relations, spurring the predominance of private property. The rise of capitalist industrialisation in Russia was breaking the interrelationship of rural agriculture and rural petty manufacturing and was increasingly commodifying agricultural production. It had broken down pre-capitalist labour regimes in town and country as the need for a waged labour force had emerged. Finally, capitalist industrialisation was introducing new, productivity-enhancing techniques and technologies into agriculture and the rural economy. Together, incipient capitalist industrialisation propelled, as a necessary if not sucient condition, the corresponding establishment of agrarian capital. So, for Lenin, as well as for Kautsky, it was the process by which agrarian capital was established which lay at the heart of their classically-construed agrarian question. Developing some of the insights of Marx, the establishment of agrarian capital began, according to Kautsky and Lenin, with the expanding and deepening use of manufactures in rural society. Rural areas had always produced a range of their own simple manufactures, to meet the needs of the peasantry, as well as importing small measures of urban manufactures. What changed with the establishment of capitalist relations of production in industrial manufacturing was that capitalist manufactures became cheaper than manufactures produced under pre-capitalist conditions, because capitalist manufactures were subject to market imperatives that necessitated productivity improvements and cost reductions (Akram-Lodhi forthcoming). Then, as Kautsky understood, as the expanded insinuation of capitalist commodity manufactures into the rural economy proceeded, a need for money would be created. As a consequence, the commoditisation of agricultural production, often initially a staple food for the urban population and the manufacturing producers, would occur. Specialisation and social dierentiation As commodity production for agricultural markets expanded the disciplines of capitalist competition were introduced into rural society. In particular, as more was produced to be sold, the need to sell to survive deepened. The compulsion to sell resulted in increasing specialisation in agricultural commodity production as a means of controlling costs, which further heightened dependence upon the market even as those producers that sought to sustain their market competitiveness found that markets could provide the basis of agrarian accumulation if the principles of capitalism were followed: expansion, innovation, and a lowering of unit costs through scale economies. Those peasants unable or unwilling to successfully compete in markets found that attempts to use markets to sustain or increase consumption while not being able to be competitive in product markets generated cash decits which were only
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reinforced by the distress sales of output and the accrual of debt. In order to meet the costs of increasing market dependence decit households would therefore increasingly engage in waged labour, which was performed both for the more dynamic agrarian producers and for industrial capital. So, as agricultural commodity production expanded, peasants became subordinated to product and labour markets even as some producers, capable of sustaining agrarian accumulation, produced for the purpose of accumulation. The result: as Marx had indicated, the slow emergence of qualitatively distinct types of rural holdings which diered in their purpose of production. One group produced for markets and for accumulation, while the other strove to maintain subsistence in increasingly dicult circumstances. Accumulating peasant households sought to increase their control over productive assets in order to give a further impetus to accumulation. Decit peasant households were forced to liquidate their assets by selling them to more dynamic producers, in order to be able to cope. So a change in the distribution of productive assets both means of production and labour-power took place. Petty commodity production was torn asunder, with peasants being socially and materially transformed into part of the labour force and providing the home market needed by the accumulating peasants. In turn, accumulating peasants had relatively higher incomes which, by contributing to the creation of a home market, spurred capital formation and accumulation as a whole. Moreover, as peasant accumulation proceeded the social and material conditions of petty commodity production were transformed as they slowly became proto-capitalist and fully capitalist employers of not only themselves and their households but, crucially, waged labour. Thus, in the genesis of agrarian capitalism changes in social relations emerging out of a dynamic reconguration of access to and control over productive assets gave rise to changes in the structure of economic processes and rural transformation. Eventually, pre-capitalist property relations and labour processes were subordinated and integrated into capitalism (Brenner 1977). The process of rural transformation Both Kautsky and Lenin did not propose that rural transformation was subject to the inevitability of what today would be called path-dependence; that is to say, selfreinforcing processes. Lenin and Kautsky wrote at a time of intensifying capitalist change and increasing imperial and international trade, of which they were aware, and which was not conned to industrial capitalism but which extended into agriculture. Indeed, as Michael Watts (2002) has cogently reminded us, Kautsky was explicitly aware that at the end of the nineteenth century intense international competition in an increasingly integrated world market in farm products had been facilitated not only by the expansion of the global agricultural frontier but also by improvements in long distance shipping, by changing tastes arising from an ongoing gastronomic transition, and by supply-constrained national grain production being unable to match increases in national demand. Thus, Lenin and Kautsky wrote during the heyday of what has been termed by Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael (1989) the rst world food regime, and the recognition of the impact of these processes on petty commodity producing peasants and incipient agrarian capitalists by Kautsky in particular, and Lenin, to a lesser extent, informed their thinking.
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As a consequence, Kautsky in particular, but also Lenin, argued that the resolution of the agrarian question could take multiple and diverse forms, rooted in the specic circumstances of particular farming practices, agricultural processes, and the conditions by which surplus labour was extracted from the direct producer. Like Marx, Lenin wrote that a theoretical economic analysis can, in general, only deal with tendencies and as such cannot uncover a law for all individual cases (Lenin 1964, 111, 117). What Watts (1998, 450) memorably terms recombinant agrarian capital might, in particular circumstances, prefer to sustain a hybrid non-capitalist rural economy subsumed to capital because of the unique characteristics of agricultural production its seasonal and biological aspects and associated risks, as well as the capacity of family-based petty commodity farm production to, as Marx had noted, depress real wages by working longer and harder, and in so doing sustain an ability to compete with agrarian capital that was driven by the market imperative. In such circumstances, according to Kautsky (1988), agroindustrial capital would restrict itself to food processing, farm inputs, and rural nancial systems, using science, technology, and money to subsume petty commodity production to the demands of agroindustrial capital. We suggest that this is a vividly contemporary picture of some aspects of global rural change. The variant tendencies of recombinant agrarian capital meant that, for Kautsky, there were no inevitable laws of agrarian development: capitalism does not impose path-dependence on agriculture. Thus, there was no tendency for the size distribution of farms to change over time, as might be inferred if capitalist agriculture overwhelmed petty commodity producing peasant farming. Farms did not have to be technically ecient in a capitalist sense in order to survive, but petty commodity producing peasants had to be prepared to work more intensely, depressing the real return to their familys labour, in order to sustain competitiveness with agrarian capital. As a consequence, farms responded to the increased coerciveness of market relations in the late nineteenth century by altering their product mix, by incurring debt, and by out-migrating. So the agrarian crisis of the late nineteenth century that was described by Engels and Kautsky, driven as it was by a massive increase in the global supply of grain from the new temperate breadbaskets, and which, as a consequence, witnessed falling grain prices, falling land rents, and falling prots, was solved by the intensication of rural production amongst petty commodity producers and by agroindustrial capital taking over some of the functions previously done within the petty commodity farm sector, in eect capitalising a range of rural manufacturing processes. Developing the ideas of Engels, Kautsky also identied a contradiction at the heart of the rst world food regime: that as rural economic activity in general, and agriculture in particular, assumed a lesser role in the economy over time, the political importance of rural producers became more important. This was driven by both the slow extension of the democratic franchise, which gave the still populous rural economy political importance, and by the integration of an increasingly competitive global food market. It was the political importance of rural interests that led states to rst develop a structure of import protection for national agricultures capable of sustaining petty commodity production if peasants, when pitted against capitalist competition, were prepared to depress their own real earnings in order to survive. For Kautsky (1988, Ch. 58), this did not have to be a transitional phase this hybrid form could be sustained over time. So Kautsky was able to link the character of the agrarian question to the character of the imperialist world market.
The Journal of Peasant Studies Rural class formation

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Lenin too did not isolate the processes at work in the countryside from the world market. Like Kautsky he saw what was happening in rural Russia as being highly uneven and contingent, processes that had to be explored in all their complexity if the development of agrarian capital was to be understood. This is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in Lenins (1966) Preliminary Draft Theses on the Agrarian Question, written in 1920, which suggested that as agrarian capital developed in Europe rural classes could be identied as emerging from within a petty commodity producing peasantry undergoing tendential processes of fragmentation and change. At the apex of the rural class structure were
the big landowners, who, in capitalist countries directly or through their tenant farmers systematically exploit wage-labour and the neighbouring small (and, not infrequently, part of the middle) peasantry, do not themselves engage in manual labour, and are in the main descended from feudal lords . . . or are rich nancial magnates, or else a mixture of both. (Lenin 1966, 159)
Below the big landowners came a second stratum of exploiters:

The big peasants (Grossbauern) are capitalist entrepreneurs in agriculture, who as a rule employ several hired labourers and are connected with the peasantry only in their low cultural level, habits of life, and the manual labour they themselves perform on their farms. (Lenin 1966, 157, emphasis in original)
Lenin next introduced a strata locked between the clear exploiters and the clearly exploited when he wrote that
in an economic sense, one should understand by middle peasants those farmers who, 1) either as owners or tenants hold plots of land that are also small but, under capitalism, are sucient not only to provide, as a general rule, a meagre subsistence for the family and the bare minimum needed to maintain the farm, but also produce a certain surplus which may, in good years at least, be converted into capital; 2) quite frequently . . . resort to the employment of hired labour. (Lenin 1966, 156)
Amongst the clearly exploited, Lenin dened three strata. First, there were the small peasantry, i.e. the small-scale tillers who, either as owners or as tenants, hold small plots of land which enable them to satisfy the needs of their families and their farms, and do not hire outside labour (Lenin 1966, 154). Second, there were
the semi-proletarians or peasants who till tiny plots of land, i.e. those who obtain their livelihood partly as wage-labourers . . . and partly by working their own or rented plots of land, which provide their families only with part of their means of subsistence. (Lenin 1966, 153)
Finally, there was the agricultural proletariat, wage-labourers (by the year, season or day), who obtain their livelihood by working for hire at capitalist agricultural enterprises (Lenin 1966, 153). Analytically, then, Lenins understanding of the processes of change embedded within the agrarian question critically hinged on the emergence of capitalist exploitation, dened in its strict historical materialist sense as the appropriation by capital of the surplus value produced by classes of waged labour. So the commodication of labour was, in these processes, the pivotal event, even if it was
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contingent, because under capitalist relations of production it was waged labour that produced the surplus value that could serve as the basis of rural capital accumulation. Of course, in order for surplus value to be appropriated from labour it had to be free in Marxs dual sense noted earlier: free to sell labour-power, and free from the means of production. Thus, the emergence of agrarian capital and its corollary, agrarian labour, required a set of interlocking processes by which landed estates were transformed, at least to some degree, into capitalist farms and petty commodity producing peasants were also transformed, at least to some degree, into waged labour. Lenin identied several mechanisms which might serve to facilitate the emergence of agrarian capital by enhancing either the relative or the absolute amount of surplus labour that was being extracted from the direct producer by the dominant class, and in turn promote accumulation. Three of these mechanisms can be mentioned, because of their continuing contemporary relevance: scale economies, changes in tenancy relations, and debt. Scale versus size With regard to the rst, scale economies in agriculture are seen when there are reductions in the average cost of farm products as production per farmer expands over time because of the adoption of technical changes such as mechanisation. Kautsky and Lenin argued that scale economies in agriculture enhanced relative surplus labour extraction, and thus were a necessary part of the capitalisation of farming.6 But Kautsky also crucially distinguished between a concentration in the scale of production permitted by an increase in the ownership of the total means of production and increases in the size of the physical units of production in order to capture the dierences in farm asset ownership, cropping patterns, technology, production, sales, debt, and migration, dierences that would be witnessed in the development of agrarian capital. As Lenin wrote in this regard,
if the land is not being improved, acreage gives no idea at all of the scale of agricultural operations; it gives no correct idea at all if besides this there are so many substantial dierences between farms in the method of cultivation, the intensity of agriculture, the method of eld cropping, quantities of fertilizers, the use of machinery, the character of livestock farming, etc. (Lenin 1964, 68, emphasis in original)
A similar understanding of the dynamics of agrarian change allowed Kautsky to state that a small holding cultivated on an intensive basis can constitute a larger enterprise than a bigger farm that is exploited extensively (Banaji 1980, 75). These dierences in petty commodity producing farms emerged as a result of the extent to which markets governed peasant behaviour. The compulsions of market
6 The comparative merits of small- versus large-scale agricultural production or peasant versus capitalist agriculture were intensely debated by Kautsky and other members of the German Social Democratic party at the turn of the nineteenth century, and are discussed in Hussain and Tribe (1984). This remains an ongoing debate of great importance; recent contributions include Grin et al. (2002, 2004), Byres (2004a, 2004b), and others. The World Bank (2007) has re-entered this debate, arguing about the advantages of large-scale farming in an era of neoliberal globalisation (Akram-Lodhi 2008, Oya 2009). Our own position is that the technical conditions governing farm production can only be understood when set within the social relations of production.
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dependence propelled both investment and the establishment of a more eective, more capitalist, division of labour if petty commodity producing peasant farms sought to survive. This in turn permitted the reaping of scale economies at the level of the production process, the household, and the farm, and engendered the emergence of dynamic and ecient units capable of accumulation. These dierences could not be captured by examining the size of the unit of production because this neglected the increased use of technology per unit of land and thus the technical coecients of production. For Kautsky and Lenin peasant farms used dierent technical coecients of production when they diered in the purpose of production. Yet even uncovering the technical coecients of production could be dicult, as in agriculture, because relationships are so much more complicated and intertwined, it is harder to determine the scale of operations, the value of the product and the extent to which hired labour is employed (Lenin 1964, 656). It was apparent to both Lenin and Kautsky that the larger the size of farm, the more that had to be produced in order to cover costs and obtain a given level of income. This did not mean, however, that smaller-sized peasant farms were necessarily more protable. As Marx had suggested, peasants on smallsized farms which were also small in scale would be pushed by subsistence to work harder in order to survive while remaining mired in poverty. As Kautsky memorably wrote, for small-scale small-size peasant farmers the prot did not mean his barns were full; it meant their stomachs were empty (Banaji 1980, 70). While the utilisation of scale economies in agriculture required stricter conditions than in industry, Kautsky and Lenin argued that diminishing returns to non-xed farm inputs such as labour-power, fertilizer and pesticides, and tools and equipment, would in practice not apply because technological change and the extension of techniques meant that the productivity of both investment and of land would not decline. This was so not only for large-sized large-scale holdings, where the potential for technical change was great; Lenin also argued that the productivity gains typical of a mature capitalist agriculture might lead to an absolute decrease in the size of the capitalist farms, as output growth could permit the leasing out of unneeded low productivity land. The argument that large-scale holdings did not necessarily require large amounts of land led both Kautsky and Lenin to suggest that the emergence of agrarian capital did not have to solely rely on out and out dispossession of petty commodity producing peasants. Small and semi-proletarian peasants could marginally survive alongside and subsumed to agrarian capital. Tenancy and debt Another mechanism of rural transformation could be changes in the forms of holding land. Lenin argued that agrarian peasant class dierentiation might take the form of a decline in mortgage and a rise in tenancy. As Lenin wrote, the class interests of the landowners compel them to strive to allot land to the workers (Lenin 1964, 137). This might be done by large-scale enterprises leasing out unneeded land in order to obviate labour shortages during peak periods: a hybrid form indeed. In addition, as dierentiation led to concentration in the ownership and control of the means of production small plots might fetch high prices and high rents for the landowners; but the higher price of small plots of land is not due to the superiority of small-scale farming, but to the particularly oppressed condition of the peasant (Lenin 1964, 138).
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Kautsky and Lenin also argued that another mechanism of rural transformation and the emergence of agrarian capital was debt. Lenin wrote that the types of debt incurred by the poorer and by the richer petty commodity producing peasants was dierent. Small and semi-proletarian peasants became dependent upon the market over time to maintain subsistence. Although they consumed relatively less than big peasants, poorer peasants spent relatively more on basic wage goods, and debt typically ensued if they lacked cash to meet these needs. Given the tenuous economic position of small and semi-proletarian peasants it was not surprising that Lenin argued that a larger proportion of small-scale farmers were indebted. Big peasants, on the other hand, were both less dependent on the market for basic wage goods and more dependent on the market to supply production-oriented goods. The bulk of their cash expenditure went on the latter. From their more secure nancial position big peasants were more easily able to secure credit for large investments. As a result, while a lower proportion of large-scale farmers were indebted, those farms held a much larger mass of total debt. The emergence of agrarian capital thus gave rise to dierent types of debt; one was a sign of precariousness, the other increasing consolidation and capitalisation. As this discussion makes clear, both Kautsky and Lenin had a thorough, subtle, and nuanced understanding of the agrarian question and the modes and mechanisms of its possible resolution. Both oered an analysis capable of uncovering signicant dierences in processes of change in particular contexts, and thus substantive diversity amongst individual cases, rooted in historically-embedded routes of social and economic transformation. As we have tried to stress, this is a consistent strand of agrarian political economy from the time of Marx, who returned repeatedly to the recombinant ways in which agrarian capitalisms developed (within the swamp of pre-capitalist labour relations) (Watts 2002, 32). Primitive socialist accumulation Kautsky and Lenins analysis of the agrarian question was hugely inuential in the politics and practice of revolutionary political parties in Europe prior to World War I. But during the rst quarter of the twentieth century the conceptual underpinnings of the agrarian question evolved within historical materialism primarily as a consequence of the creation of the Soviet Union, a largely rural and agrarian country in which the victorious revolutionary party sought to use the state to transform the entire social and economic order in a direction that was far removed from the capitalist development that was taking place (Nove 1982). As a result, the principal concerns of the agrarian question extended beyond the specic issue of the emergence of agrarian capital and agrarian waged labour and towards more general issues of the relationship of agriculture to capital accumulation and of the role of the peasantry in the process of capital accumulation in a society undergoing social transformation. In broadening the concerns of the agrarian question, new dimensions of the issues emerged and a wider, more thorough reading of the agrarian question was established (Hussain and Tribe 1981). The Soviet Union was seeking to undertake a form of what McMichael (2004) calls the development project: the transformation of the structure of societies, starting with the economy. Economic structural transformation is seen in: changes in the pattern of employment, with shifts out of agriculture and into manufacturing and services; changes in agriculture, with shifts away from labour-intensive technical
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coecients of production towards capital-intensive technical coecients of production; changes in industry, with shifts away from light manufacturing towards heavy and knowledge-intensive manufacturing; and demand, with increasing shares of production being destined to meet domestic consumption and investment requirements. This kind of structural transformation needs resources: physical, nancial, and human resources, and in the early stages of economic development these can rarely be met solely from outside a country, as aid or as foreign direct investment, or from the small capitalist industrial sector that may or may not be present. The need for resources to facilitate structural transformation was a key constraint for the newlyestablished Soviet Union in the 1920s, recovering from the eects of World War I and a civil conict. Agriculture has the capacity to generate resources for structural transformation because it can produce physical and nancial resources beyond its own requirements. Peasant petty commodity producers have the capacity to produce food and non-food output and generate nancial resources surplus to the immediate consumption and investment needs of the farm economy. This agricultural surplus can provide the physical, nancial, and wage goods needed to undertake the development project. Moreover, the agricultural surplus can grow as new agricultural techniques and technologies are introduced into the countryside. By facilitating a process of accumulation of physical, nancial, and wage goods the agricultural surplus can become the basis of the emergence of capital, both in agriculture and in industry. It also allows the release of labour from agriculture for use in industry as the capitalisation of agriculture takes place. That the agricultural surplus has a role in sustaining capital accumulation has been understood in political economy since before Adam Smith (Dobb 1963), and this provenance led to it being inserted into the extensive debate that took place in the Soviet Union between 1924 and 1928 concerning the policies which would facilitate an economic transition to a socialist mode of production: a structural transformation of a non-capitalist type. Reassessing his position in light of the adoption of the market-oriented New Economic Policy in 1921 in the Soviet Union, Nicolai Bukharin argued that a socialist transformation could only be achieved by strengthening the political alliance of the peasantry and the working class because of the agrarian character of the country (Cohen 1974, Nove 1982). Generating the active consent of the peasantry for the project of socialist development in turn required improving the livelihoods of the peasantry by creating the commercial circumstances in which middle and big peasants could and would produce the agricultural food and non-food surpluses needed for the cities and for industry. But, as Bukharin was well aware, historical materialist agrarian political economy demonstrated that this position was one that would encourage the development of agrarian capital: the sustained production of the agricultural surplus required a rural transformation of petty commodity producing peasants and the facilitation of a dynamic, surplus-generating class of proto-capitalist peasant producers within the countryside. There would be strong tendencies towards the establishment of relations of exploitation: the extraction of surpluses from the direct producers through waged labour. Moreover, prior to the establishment of exploitation agrarian transformation would be constrained by the petty commodity producing peasantrys unwillingness to supply surpluses, in favour of increasing their own consumption. So the attempt to initiate a socialist development project was ripe
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with contradictions in the Soviet countryside, and Bukharin believed it would have to proceed gradually, by increasing balanced trade between agriculture and industry, in order to deal with those contradictions. Evgeny Preobrazhensky (1965, orig. 1926) challenged Bukharin theoretically, using Marxs understanding of primitive accumulation under capitalism as a way of developing policies that were, in his view, more appropriate to the socialist development project (Kay 2009, 1079). Preobrazhensky developed the concept of primitive socialist accumulation, which he dened as accumulation in the hands of the state of material resources mainly or partly from sources lying outside the complex of state economy during the period of structural transformation (Preobrazhensky 1972, 132). Primitive socialist accumulation required the alienation in favour of socialism of part of the surplus product of all the pre-socialist economic forms (Preobrazhensky 1972, 133). In the Soviet Union in the 1920s the bulk of the surplus produced under pre-socialist economic forms was produced by the petty commodity producing peasantry. So Preobrazhenskys primitive socialist accumulation required the appropriation of the agricultural surplus of the peasantry, which could be used to nance investment in the expanding socialist industrial sector that could underpin post-capitalist structural transformation. According to Preobrazhensky the agricultural surplus could be appropriated to fund socialist capital accumulation in two main ways: through taxation; and more importantly, through the manipulation of the intersectoral terms of trade between agriculture and industry (Dobb 1966). Both were forms of forced savings which, when combined with any voluntary savings, could be used to fund socialist investment. Preobrazhensky also argued that industrialisation through primitive socialist accumulation would have to be rapid. This was because the rampant ination and the macroeconomic imbalances plaguing the Soviet Union were, according to Preobrazhensky, the result of both a lack of sucient industrial capacity and changes in agriculture as a result of the revolution (Mohun 1991). The agrarian revolution in the Soviet Union had resulted in the increased consumption of agricultural products in the countryside itself along with a massive increase in the countrysides demand for the products of industry, which could not be met by existing industrial capacity, and which thus fuelled an upward inationary spiral. So, structural transformation required rapid industrialisation, which in turn needed investment which could be obtained by diverting the excess demand of the agricultural sector into industrial investment through forced savings, which would quell inationary pressures. The principal mechanism by which the intersectoral terms of trade could be manipulated to pull this o was to be state trading monopolies that would buy farm products at below-market prices and sell industrial products at above-market prices; unequal exchange would capture the agricultural surplus of the Soviet peasantry for the socialist development project (Gregory and Stuart 1986), while the law of primitive socialist accumulation in the socialist economic sector served as a bulwark against the continuing hold of the law of value in the capitalist economic sector during the period of the transition to socialism (Mohun 1991). Primitive socialist accumulation was used to justify the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture that began in 1928, and has become associated with the death of millions of peasants. But what was done in the name of primitive socialist accumulation by Stalin in order to consolidate his personal political power cannot be attributed to Preobrazhenky, who was a forceful advocate of democracy and whose writing on primitive socialist accumulation did not in any way suggest the extreme degree of
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coercion that was used against the Soviet peasantry to introduce collectivisation (Haupt and Marie 1974).7 Preobrazhenskys concept of primitive socialist accumulation has had a lasting impact on the agrarian question. The classic rendering of the agrarian question in the 1890s examined tendencies in farming that facilitated the emergence of agrarian capital and agrarian waged labour, as well as the political implications of these changes. Byres (1991) was the rst to note that the debates in the Soviet Union over the role of peasant petty commodity production in facilitating or hindering capital accumulation during the process of structural transformation added a new layer of meaning (Byres 1991, 10) to the agrarian question, a meaning that had direct implications for the political economy of the development project, and one which is now intricately bound up in discussions of the agrarian question. Araghi (2009, 118), for example, suggests that the agrarian question
was in its origins a socialist problematic rooted in a political concern about how to conduct socialist revolutions when a substantial majority of the population consisted of peasants. However, the postwar peasant question . . . became a developmentalist problematic rooted in a theoretical concern about how to understand the lack of development or the persistence of backwardness in third world countrysides . . . the lessons of the original debate (were married) to an altogether dierent purpose.
For Araghi, then, the current relevance of the agrarian question is open to debate unless it is situated within a world-historical interpretation that captures the spatial dimensions of class formation and value relations as a global process (Araghi 2009, 118). Araghis argument is dealt with in the second part of this survey, but for now it is sucient to say that historical materialist analysis of the agrarian question pays central attention to the issue of the accumulation impulses fostered by agrarian social relations, in large part because of Evgeny Preobrazhensky. The debate on the agrarian transition In the canonical works on the agrarian question the transformation of pre-capitalist social relations of production into capitalist relations of production sketched out by Marx in Capital and analysed in precise detail by Lenin in The Development of Capitalism in Russia are too often assumed to be a linear process, which we have argued was not the case. However, if this is not the case, it remains to be seen how the capitalist mode of production emerges. Byres (1991) argued that in order for agriculture to no longer pose any obstacles to capitalist transformation the agrarian question must be resolved through some form of successful agrarian transition. Byres denition of an agrarian transition is the occurrence of those changes in the countryside of a poor country necessary to the overall development of capitalism and its ultimate dominance in a particular national social formation (Byres 1996, 27). Bernstein (1996/1997, 245) has in turn stressed that the implication of the radical core of Byres reformulation of the agrarian question as agrarian transition is the possibility of what Byres terms historical puzzles (1996, 15): agrarian transitions which do not necessarily imply the full development of capitalist social relations of production in agriculture as part of the establishment of the dominance of capitalism within a particular social formation.
7
Preobrazhensky was himself a victim of Stalins purges.
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A key issue for the agrarian question then is to understand how one predominant form of surplus creation and appropriation, which denes a mode of production, is transformed into another predominant form of surplus creation and appropriation. In other words, understanding actually-existing agrarian questions requires uncovering the tendencies and processes by which rural relations of domination and subordination are being transformed. In this regard, in 1950 an exchange took place between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy about the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe that generated a lively and ongoing debate and which had important implications for the understanding of the agrarian question and agrarian transition. Economic historians analysing the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe focus on two key questions. First, why did serfdom decline in some regions and persist in others? Secondly, why did capitalist farmers and rural waged labour emerge in some regions, landlord-tenant relations emerge in others, and an owneroccupier petty commodity producing small peasantry in yet others? In a critique of Dobb, Sweezy had argued that in the case of England feudalism ended because of the expansion of trade, which greatly increased commodication and so prepared the ground for the capitalism that later emerged (Dobb 1963, Sweezy 1976). But Sweezy never oered a convincing explanation of the origin of capitalism, while his emphasis on the process of exchange rather than the terms and conditions governing production were deemed by many to be non-materialist. Dobb, on the other hand, prepared the terrain for such a materialist explanation. In Studies in the Development of Capitalism Dobb (1963) had argued that feudalism ended in England because of the conictual social relations that existed between lords and peasants: class struggle allowed some peasants to free themselves from their feudal obligations and to transform themselves into capitalists. Later, Rodney Hilton substantially elaborated Dobbs argument, providing the archival evidence of the character of the transition (Hilton 1990). Hiltons analysis showed that the demands of lords for the agricultural surpluses of the peasants led the peasants to improve their production techniques, which in turn encouraged the emergence of simple commodity production, which had been hindered by feudalism. Hilton also documented the character of peasant resistance to the appropriations of landlords, and its role in bringing about the transition to capitalism (Hilton 1976). In 1976 the Dobb-Sweezy debate (Sweezy et al. 1976) was reopened by Robert Brenner, who systematically examined the transition to capitalism in western Europe and produced the most rounded explanation of it within historical materialism (Brenner 1986, Aston and Philpin 1985). Although inuenced by Dobb and Hiltons emphasis on the social relationships between the appropriators and the appropriated, and agreeing that the downfall of feudalism had to be found with the social relations of feudalism itself, Brenner did not like the implicit assumption of Dobb that within the interstices of feudalism lay the basis of capitalism waiting to be unleashed. Like Sweezy, Brenner believed that feudalism was a tenacious mode of production, but Brenner went further than Sweezy, arguing that it was not trade but rather the property relations of feudalism that resulted in its downfall. In feudalism surplus extraction was the basis by which the dominant landlord class reproduced itself. Surplus extractions from the peasantry were carried out through the mechanism of rent and backed up by force. Production was organised through the institution of serfdom to t the needs of surplus extraction. Peasant ownership was by and large excluded. Property relations thus resulted in lords and
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serfs not having to rely on the market; without the discipline of the market imperative reproductive strategies focused not on accumulation but on consumption were logical. So for Brenner pre-capitalist feudal relations of production cannot develop the forces of production because lords ultimately use force to appropriate the agricultural surplus of the peasantry, not having to rely upon markets and the competitive imperatives that they generate. Lords can increase their incomes by making peasants work harder, work longer, or reducing their incomes, but there is neither incentive nor need to systematically improve the eciency, labour productivity and competitiveness that market imperatives demand. So the material benets of heavy surplus extraction gave no incentive for the dominant classes to innovate, while the peasantry lacked both the incentive and the means to invest. As a result, productivity dropped and an exhaustion of peasant production emerged. The class structure of feudalism thus precipitated a crisis of productivity and threatened the basis of subsistence, and indeed survival. This crisis broke down the inhibiting eect of the lords coercive capacity amongst the peasantry. Conicts could therefore eventually take the shape of struggles over the control of surpluses and possession of the means of production. These struggles occurred from the fourteenth century to, in some parts of Europe, the eighteenth century (Sweezy et al. 1976, Aston and Philpin 1985, Brenner 1985, Hilton 1990). The outcomes of these struggles were regionally specic and based upon the prevailing balance of class forces. Indeed, it is in understanding the balance of class forces that the debate continues to resonate: for Brenner, peasant class dierentiation under feudalism is ignored, as it is an outcome of agrarian transition. As a consequence, understanding the balance of class forces refers to antagonisms between landlords and peasants. Contrarily, Byres (2006, 17; 2009) argues that peasant class dierentiation under feudalism is not an outcome but a determining variable, a causa causans rather than a causa causata; hence, the process of peasant dierentiation aects the balance of class forces both between lords and peasants and within the peasantry itself, and thus shapes the process of agrarian transition. In some areas, such as France, the direct producers took control of the land. Freed of the burden of surplus extraction, they could invest to overcome productivity decline. As output increased and surpluses accrued, the gains to be had from the pursuit of ecient market-oriented competitive strategies became clear. Accumulation was thus fostered. In other areas, such as England, the crisis meant that both landlords and peasants had to become more competitive in the market and more productive on the land: in the lords case, in order to increase the rents they were paid, and in the tenants case in order to keep and indeed enhance their access to land. Those who were not competitive were driven o the land, either by coercive and expropriative enclosure or through the normal workings of market-led appropriation. As serfs became separated from the land they had to rely upon the market for subsistence. With a growing demand for subsistence goods and lacking access to secure surpluses, individual landlords started to move directly into agricultural production. Falling under the sway of market relations meant having to compete, which entailed both labour-productivity enhancing specialisation and innovation. Those that were competitive and more productive increasingly commodied their output, facilitating the emergence over time of agrarian capitalism in England, with landlords, capitalist tenants and waged labour. Agrarian production responded and capital accumulation
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in agriculture began. Again, agriculture was transformed. In other areas the result was the emergence of new, commercially-based tenancy arrangements. The key to the resolution of the agrarian question and the agrarian transition in Europe was thus an economic crisis in the pre-capitalist mode of production, a crisis that was embedded within the prevailing property relations of that mode of production, which created fetters upon accumulation and social transformation. In this context, Brenner placed at the centre of processes of agrarian change the conictual relationships that emerged between lords and peasants trying to best reproduce themselves within the fettered conditions that they faced. Byres further developed the argument by following Hilton and identifying the salience of peasant class dierentiation within this context, which shaped the balance of class forces both between lords and peasants and within the peasantry as the transition from feudalism to capitalism took place. Notwithstanding some dierences, then, for both it was not markets and trade, which had existed for millennia, which fostered change. Rather, in the genesis of agrarian capitalism changes in social relations driven by shifts in the balance of class forces gave rise to changes in the structure of property relations and the economy. Eventually, non-capitalist property relations and labour-processes were subordinated and integrated into the capitalist mode of production (Brenner 1986). The importance of Brenners argument for contemporary readings of the agrarian question and agrarian transition is that Brenner was able to systematically uncover the mechanisms linking structural features of the mode of production to its dynamics . . . Development and underdevelopment are the product of class structures which are themselves the outcome of a historical process (Brewer 1990, 231). Brenner rigorously reasserted the centrality of class structure, class relationships, and class struggle as the central dynamic variables in understanding processes of development and change, including the resolution of the agrarian question through a capitalist agrarian transition. Conclusion By the end of the twentieth century new understandings had been attached onto the classical account of the agrarian question developed in the nineteenth century. These interpretations were evaluated by Byres (1991) and were further discussed by Bernstein (1996/1997). Bernstein argued that the agrarian question could be analytically deconstructed into three problematics. The rst problematic was that of the structure and dynamics of the rural production process. Changing tendencies in the control over productive assets and the transformation of peasant labour into waged labour-power were key factors in comprehending agrarian change. This was the terrain of Marx, of Lenin, and of Kautsky. The second problematic was that of accumulation, and the extent to which agriculture was or was not supplying surpluses capable of sustaining industrialisation and structural transformation. This was the terrain of Preobrazhensky. The third problematic was rural politics: the ways by which changes in the structure of rural production and processes of agrarian accumulation were or were not producing a political response from the rural population, for rural politics is squarely about production and accumulation. This was the terrain of Engels. For us, the analytical framework that is the agrarian question is an essential yet highly nuanced approach to understanding rural change, one that captures both the common processes at work in the countryside of a range of developing capitalist
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countries as well as the substantive diversity that can be witnessed within and between those countries. The agrarian question oers both theoretical and empirical coherence as well as the analytical tools and analytical sensitivity necessary to understand ongoing processes of agrarian change in contemporary developing capitalist countries. Yet despite this practical relevance, in the early years of the twenty-rst century the agrarian question continues to generate signicant and heated debate within agrarian political economy. Why this is so, and how it may be possible to move beyond current controversies, is taken up in the second part of this survey.
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A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi teaches agrarian political economy. He is Professor of International Development Studies at Trent University, Peterborough, Canada and Associated Research ma de Professor of the Academic Unit in Development Studies of the Universidad Autono bal Kay, is entitled Zacatecas, Zacatecas, Mexico. His most recent book, co-edited with Cristo Peasants and globalization: political economy, rural transformation and the agrarian question. Email: haroonakramlodhi@trentu.ca bal Kay is Emeritus Professor in Development Studies and Rural Development at the Cristo International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands; Adjunct Professor of International Development Studies at Saint Marys University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; and Professorial Research Associate in the Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is an editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change. Email: Kay@iss.nl

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Journal of Peasant Studies

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A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay

The Journal of Peasant Studies

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay

The Journal of Peasant Studies

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay

The Journal of Peasant Studies

Southeast Asia, and particularly Thailand and Vietnam, spring to mind.

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay

The Journal of Peasant Studies

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay

Capitalist industrialisation and agriculture

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The Journal of Peasant Studies Rural class formation

Below the big landowners came a second stratum of exploiters:

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay

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A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay

The Journal of Peasant Studies

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay

The Journal of Peasant Studies

Preobrazhensky was himself a victim of Stalins purges.

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay

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A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay

The Journal of Peasant Studies

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay

The Journal of Peasant Studies

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay

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