bernstein farewells to the peasantry

7/28/2019 BERNSTEIN Farewells to the Peasantry

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ArticleFarewells to the PeasantryHenry Bernstein1This lecture is about a theoretical issue that has obsessed me, on and off,for many years: how to understand the conditions of existence of thosepeop le termed 'pea san ts', or collectively 'th e peasa ntry ', within the worldof mature capitalism.2 Any pursu it of the theme imm ediately confronts anissue that plagues the social sciences as much as it does everyday d ispute:it all depends on what you mean by 'pea san try'. Indeed it does, and this isno t merely a semantic issue because different conceptions of the peasantry,and its fate in modern cap italism (and once socialism), resonate differentinterpretations of modernity and 'development' and the dramatic dialecticthat attaches to them of destruction and creation, in short, the dialectic ofprog ress (Berman 1983). The central analytical issue at stake here is whether'the peasantry' constitutes a general (and generic) social 'type' (entity,formation, class, and so on). That is, whether there are qualities of'peas antn ess' applicable to, and illuminating , different parts of the world indifferent periods o f their histor ies, not least the poorer countries of LatinAmerica, Asia and Africa today, and their processes of development/underdevelopment.

The view that there are such qualities is termed 'peasant essentialism'.Those qualities include such familiar notions as household farming organisedfor simple reproduction ('subsistence'), the solidarities, reciprocities andegalitarianism of (village) community, and commitment to the values ofa wayof life based on household and comm unity, kin and locale (and harmony withnatu re, a motif revived and privileged by current 'gr ee n' discourses). Thequa lities of an essential 'peasan tness' can thus be constructed in econom ic,sociological or cultural terms, or some combination of them, in order tospecify what makes peasants different and special, and to contrast them explicitly or implicitly - with (rural) proletarian s on one hand, m arket-oriented and entrepreneurial 'farmers' on the other. Such essentialist

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constructions acknowledge the relations of peasants with other socialgroups and entities - landlords , merchants, the state, the urban in general- wh ich they typically view as relations of subordination and ex plo itationthat also define the peasant condition and generate the politics of peasantresistance. The most important and enduring claim (or assumption) ofpeasant essentialism is that the core elements of peasant 'society' household, kin, community, locale - produce (or express) a distinctiveinternal logic or dynamic. It follows that the relations of peasants withpowerful others amount to various forms of appropriation and oppressionexternal to that essence of peasant existence, which, in principle, can thusnot only survive their demise bu t subsequently, and consequen tly, flourish.It is more difficult to construct a generic 'peas antry ' in sociological andcultural terms that travel across different types of society and historicalperiods with much plausibility, than it is to do so in term s of con ven tiona leconomics with its postulate of a universal matrix of human behaviour.Arguably the most rigorous formal attempt to theorise asuigeneris peasantryis the model of peasant economy of the great Russian agrarian scholar A VChayanov (1966). The originality, and indeed peculiarity, of Chay anov 'smodel consists in its combination of a claim for 'pe asa ntry ' as a specific andgeneric type of economy, akin to a mode of production in M arxist terms, andstaking that claim on a marginalist analysis of the behaviour of the peasan thousehold as both unitary farming enterprise and site of (biological)reproduction.3

The plot now thickens because ideas of peasant essentialism do notattach to any one ideological position or programme, in my view. First,essentialist conceptions lurk in both Left and Right versions of thedisappearance of the peasan try necessary to econom ic, social and culturalprogress ('developm ent'). Second, they can inspire varieties of p opu lismthat celebrate 'resistance' to urban-industrial civilisation and its discontents('anti-development'); or, third, that advocate aprog ram me of developm entthat frees the productive energies, and social and moral virtues, of thepeasantry from its historic condition of subjugation and exploitation. T helast has probably never been better expressed than in Cha yan ov 's definitionof neo-popu lism: 'a theory for the development of agricu lture on the basisof cooperative peasant households, a peasantry organised cooperatively asan independent class and technically superior to all other forms of agriculturalorganization' (Bourgholtzer 1999:3,16).4 How Chayanov envisaged a societybuilt on these foundations is set out in his strange novella, written in 1920


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and set in 1984, The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of PeasantUtopia. There, among other good things, Alexei discovered that he 'waspositively crazy about Utopian wo m en '! (Chayanov 1976:83).The Utopia of peasant socialism in a post-Soviet Russia in 1984 waspresented by Chayanov as a 'third way' of development, a desirablealternative to both capitalism and Bolshevism, and one he portrayed instrongly modernist terms of the development of technology and socialregulation, as well as in aesthetic and even mystical terms. If Chayanovpinn ed his hopes of progress on the return of the peasantry, I refer next toanother scholar whose modernism bids farewell to the peasantry with noapparentregret. In his AgeofExtremes,EJH.obsbawm declared that 'Fo r 80per cent of hum anity, the M iddle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s... themost dramatic change of the second half of this century, and the one whichcuts us forever from the world of the past, is the death of the peasantry'('which had formed the majority of the human race throughout recordedhistory') (Hobsbawm 1994:288-9,415).

Hobsbawm locates the disappearance of this truly world-historicalanachronism in the 'rev olution of global socie ty' or 'global transform ation'from the 1950s that extended industrial capitalism beyond its historicheartlands of W estern and Central Europe and North America. 'On ly threeregions of the globe remained essentially dominated by their villages andfields: sub-Saharan Africa, South and continental South-east Asia, andChina' - although 'admittedly' these regions of 'peasant dominance'com prisedhalf the w orld 's population in the 1990s (Hobsbawm 1994:291).The ' death of the peasan try ' is thus somewhat exaggerated, even accordingto Ho bsbaw m 's idiosyncratic demographic accounting, and 'ev en ' thoughthese regions 'w ere crum bling at the edges under the pressures of economicdevelopment' (Hobsbawm 1994:291).

Let me reprise briefly different versions of the 'death of the peasan try '.Firs t, there are denia ls of this event, and of the inevitab ility ofprocesses thatproduce it: views of the 'persis tenc e' of the peasantry in the world of maturecapitalism. Such 'persistence ' m ay be celebrated in various forms of agrarianpopulism as the effect of qualities of peasant resilience and 're sis tan ce '. Orit may be regretted, in both M arxist andbourgeois versions of m odernisation.Second, the prediction of the 'dea th of the peasan try' may be maintained,and again whether this outcome is regretted or welcomed, as it is by EricHobsbawm albeit w ith a recognition that the death throes are more protractedthan once believed (and that this itself is an historical puzzle). What the se


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positions share, despite all their other differences, are typically essentiali stviews of 'th e peasan try' as pre-capitalist.5Is a different approach possible, without any assumption of 'th e peasan try 'as anachronism or exemplifying 'backwardness', and without any trace ofpeasant essentialism and romanticism? I believe that it is. My argument alsoentails a farewell t o ' the peasan try', but in a different manner to those whichdeny, confirm or predict its demise from essentialist prem ises. I start from theother direction, as it were. Rather than seeking to explain the 'pe rs ist en ce 'of a pre-capitalist social form as an historical puzzle, as cause for celebrationor regret, I ask whether and how those termed 'pea san ts'/ 'pea san try' in the

contemporary world can be theorised by investigating their cond itions ofexistence, and reproduction, through the categories of the cap italist m od eof production: the social relations, dynamics of accum ulation, and div isio nsof labour of capitalism/imperialism. I attempt to answ er this by consideringthe specificities of, first, petty commodity production, and, second,agriculture, in capitalism. A third step concerns how 'peasants ' in the Sou thand' family farm ers' in the North are located in the international divisions o flabour of imperialism and their m utations.First, then, the concept of petty comm odity production. T his specifies aform of small-scale - 'fam ily', 'househo ld' or individual - produc tion incapitalism engaged in more or less specialised com modity prod uctio n an dconstituted by a particular combination of the class places of capital andlabour (Gibbon andNeocosomos 1985). The agents ofthis form ofproductionare capitalists and workers at the same time because they own or otherw isecommand means of production and employ their own labour. Thisspecification of a form generic to the capitalist mode of production is

necessarily highly abstract. It does not distinguish agricultural from no n-agricultural enterprises nor their locations in the social divisions of lab ou rof the South and the North. 'Peasan ts' become petty comm odity pr odu cersin this sense when they are unable to reproduce themselves outside therelations and processes of capitalist commodity production, when thoserelations and processes become conditions of existence of peasant fan nin gand are internalised in its organisation and activity. That historical mo m entis satisfied when 'forced commercialization' (Bharadwaj 1985), typical ofearly colonialism, gives way to the reproduction of commodity p rod uc tionand producers through 'the dull compulsion of economic forces' (in M arx 'sterm). And that, I would argue, was the case for the vast majority of'peasants ' by the end of the colonial era in Asia and Africa.


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The theory of petty comm odity production suggests that its 'sp ac es' inthe soc ial division of labour are continuously (re)created as well as destroyedin processes of capitalist development, a dynamic likely to be p articularlyaccentuated in agriculture for reasons I return to. Here a distinction isnecessary between the destruction of petty commodity production inparticular branches of activity (for example, the emblem atic fate o f hand-loom weavers in both nineteenth-century Britain and colonial India, as aconsequence of British industrialisation) and the demise of individualenterprises as the effect of competition between petty comm odity prod ucersand the pressures on the ir reproduction as bo th capital and labour. Th is alsopoin ts to the vexed issue of class differentiation.For M arx, whose research centred on the original transition to capitalismin Britain, the transformation of agriculture was charted above all throughthe displacement or dispossession of peasant by capitalist farming, whatmight be called the enclosure model or effect. Lenin's emphasis on thetendency to class differentiation of peasants (and other petty commodityprod ucers ) was a fundamental addition to unde rstanding paths of agrarianchange, identifying the possibility of the dissolution of the peasantrythrough the formation of distinct classes of agrarian cap ital and wage labourfrom its ranks. Lenin's argument, of course, is strenuously contested byversions of peasant essentialism inherent in agrarian populism. It is alsooften misunderstood theoretically, hence misapplied empirically, by itsadheren ts as well as its opponen ts. The tenden cy to class differentiationarises from the pecu liar com bination of the class places of capital and labou rin petty comm odity produ ction, hence its 'exagg erated form of in stability'(Gibbon and Neocosmos 1985). Poor peasants are subject to a simplereproduction 'squeeze' as capital or labour, or both. Their poverty anddepressed levels of consumption (reproduction as labour) commonly expressintense struggles to maintain their means of production (reproduction ascap ital), loss of which entails proletarianisation. M iddle peasants are thoseable to meet the demands of simple reproduction; while rich peasants are ableto engage in expanded reproduction : to increase the land and/or other meansof production at their disposal beyond the capacity of family/householdlabour, hence hiring w age labour.I want to emphasise two further aspects of the class differentiation of thepeasantry. O ne is that the class places of capital and labour which com bineto constitute petty comm odity production in capitalism are not necessarilydistributed symm etrically within 'fam ily' or 'household ' production. Indeed ,


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they are unlikely to be so as they typically follow the contours of gend ered(and other unequal) divisions of property, labour and income in 'f am ily ' andkinship structures. The other aspect is that class differentiation of peas an tscan proceed via the increasing 'entry' or reproduction costs of pettycommodity enterprise, resulting in the dispossessionVproletarianisation ofweaker producers/poor peasants without any necessary formation of c lassesof rich peasants or capitalist farmers. This is emphasised because thepresence/reproduction of 'family farmers' (in the USA and Eu rope) or ofmiddle peasants (in the imperialist periphery) is so often, and m istakenly ,understood to signal an absence of differentiation rather than one kind ofoutcome of class differentiation, generated by the levels of capitalisationnecessary to the simple reproduction of farming enterprises.6

The abstract ideas I have presented are necessary to provide a theoreticalpoin t of entry and basis for considering 'peasan ts' in the capitalist mode o fproduction, and in imperialism as its modern global form. They suggest (an dhelp explain) class differentiation of 'peasa nts ' (as of other petty com m odityproducers) as a tendency within capitalism, no t as an inevitable and uniformempirical trend. This tendency contains its own distinctive com plexities an dcontradictions, as I have noted, which are compounded by introducingother, more concrete observations. First, m a n y -n o doubt the great majority- of 'peasan ts' today are not engaged exclusively in farming bu t com bineagricultural petty commodity production (including so-ca lled ' sub sisten ce 'farming) with a range of other economic activities. They rotate betweendifferent locations in social divisions of labour constituted variously byagricultural and non-agricultural branches of production, by rural and urba nexistence, and by the exchange of labour power as well as its com bin ationwith property in petty commodity production. Of course, these diversecombinations of farming with other activities are also structured by classrelations. Poor peasants are most likely to engage in wage labour and in th emore marginal (an d' crowded') branches of non-agricultural petty com modityactivity, in other words pursu e' survival' in conditions of extreme constraint;middle peasant households also typically diversify sources of income(including from wage labour) to reproduce their means of production(reproduce themselves as capital); rich peasants frequently pursue diversifiedaccumulation strategies, with investment 'portfolios' in crop trading andprocessing, money lending, rural transport, tractor renting, and villageshops and bars (this can help explain why agrarian accumulation by richpeasants often does not proceed beyond certain limits).


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A second and related observation is that rural labour markets are pervasivein most areas of peasant production and mu ch m iddle peasant farming (aswe ll as rich peasant farming) depends on hired labour. The rural labourquestion is com plicated by the fact that some middle peasant h ouseholdssell as well as buy labour power (and even poor peasant householdsoccasionally hire labour), and that the boundaries between the poorpeasantryand the rural proleta riat are typically blurred. None theles s, the preva lenceand importance of labour hiring to agricultural petty comm odity produc tion(and its implications) is often overlooked as is the intensity of class struggleit gene rates in some areas of peasant capitalism. Third, if the poor p easantryis typically an important component of the reserve army of labour in thecountrysides of the imperialist periphery, all classes of the peasantry arelikely to have links, albeit of different kinds, with urban centres and markets.The framework sketched points to the great diversity of 'pe as an ts' in thehistory and current period of capitalism/im perialism. I t should be clea r that'the pea santry ' is hardly a uniform, or analytically helpful, social categoryin contemporary capitalism , whether by anachronistic reference (the survivalof' the world of the p as t') or in seeking to understan d changes in agricultureand rural social existence generated by imperialism/globalisation. The samestricture necessarily applies to views of 'th e p easantr y' as a (single) 'cla ss '(' exploited' or otherwise) comm on in agrarian popu lism.I move now to the second theme, that of specific structural sources ofdiversity (and ins tability) in the characteristics of agriculture as we ll as ofpetty commodity production in capitalism, hence in the ways that theyintersect in 'pea san t' production (as well as other 'fam ily' farming).A comm on assumption, inherited from classical political economy (and

its roots in England's distinctive, indeed unique, path of transition tocapitalism) is that the capitalist agricultural enterprise the farm ishomologous with the mode of production, that it necessarily consists ofcapital and 'free' wa ge labour. By analogy with manufacturing industry,capitalist farming should increase its scale (concentration of capital), techn icaldivisions of labour (formation of the collective worker) an d productivity oflabour (development of the productive forces), inline with the laws of motionof capitalism. Already in the late nineteenth century , this expectation wascontested by reference to the strong 'persiste nce' of small-scale ('family')farming into the era of industrial capitalism: in Europe in the form ofpeasantries of feudal provenance (b y contrast with the fate of pre-industrialartisans ), and in the USA in the form of mechanised g rain produ ction in the


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prairies by family (rather than wage) labour farms.The particular unevenness of the capitalist transformation of farming hasthus long been remarked, and attempts to explain it in general terms typica llystart from the conditions of transforming nature peculiar to agriculture, andtheir implications for capital. While manufacturing industry transformsmaterials already appropriated from nature, agriculture only transformsnature through the very activities of appropriating it, and thus confronts theuncertainties of natural environments and processes and their effects for thegrowth of plant and animal organisms.Accordingly, it has been suggested that capital is inhibited from directinvestment in farming for several reasons. One is that this tends to be riskierthan investment in other branches of activity; the normal risks of marketcompetition are compounded by the risks inherent in the environmentalconditions of farming. A second reason, derived from M arxian value theory ,is the non-identity of labour time and production time: production timeexceeds labour time because of the growth cycles of plants and animalsduring which capital is 'tied up' and unable to realise profit (Mann andDickinson 1978). Another argument from value theory emphasises theburden of ground rent which capital tends to leave to 'family' farmers toabsorb, similar to their absorption of risk and the delayed realisation ofsurplus value (Djurfeldt 1981). Yet other arguments centre on labour m arketsand labour processes: capitalist agriculture is unab le to com pete for labouras economic development raises wage rates, giving family lab our farms a'labour-price advantage' (Koning 199 4:17 2);thelab ourp rocessargu mentisthat it is much more difficult, hence costly, to supervise and control the p aceand quality of wage labour in the field than in the factory (Nolan 1988).These are, of course, very general reasons advanced to explain a tend ency,the accentuated unevenness of capitalist transformation of forms ofproduction in farming. At the same time, they point to two features ofagriculture in capitalism tha t are key to the formation and mutations of itsinternational divisions of labour, especially in the era of g lobalisation . T hefirst is the drive of technical innovation to simplify and standardise theconditions of agricultural production: to reduce the variability, obstaclesand uncertainties presented by natural environments to approximate the

ideal of control in industrial produ ction. This means to produce y ields thatare as predictable as well as large (and fast maturing) as possible - by actingon soils, climate, the attributes of plant and animal organ isms, p arasites anddiseases, weed growth, and so on.


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The second, and related, feature is the increasing integration of farmingby capital concentrated upstream and downstream of production on theland. 'Upstream' refers to capital in input production, above all chemicalcorporations which dom inate seed development and production as well asthat offertilizers and other agricultural chem icals; 'dow nstream' refers to thegiant corporations in food processing/manufacturing and distribution. Theprovenance of such corporations is in the industrialised capitalist coun tries,and they tend to be the m ore concentrated, the more developed the agriculturalsector (and economy in which it is located). These corporations are nowengaged in a new wave of globalisation, in ways that affect the fortunes andprospects of many different kinds of farmers, including 'peasants' in theimperialist periphery. Of course, a strategic im plication of the features ofagriculture in capitalism outlined is that the diversity of types of farming ismuch greater than that of the (globalising) branches which integrate thebackward and forward linkages of fanning. Farming enterprises incontemporary capitalism, within as well as across North and South, exh ibitgreat diversity in their size, scale, social organisation and labour p rocesses(forms, and combination s, of family labour, free and unfree w age labour) ,their degree and types of capitalisation and mechanisation, and their formsof insertion/integ ration in markets and commodity chains.

The third elemen t of my argument entails a periodisation of imperialismand agriculture from the 1870s, to sketch the differential locations of'peasan ts' (in the South) and 'fam ily' farmers (in the North) in internationaldivisions of labour.The last three decades of the nineteenth century were as mo mentous inthe formation of global capitalism as the current period since the 1970s,marked as they were by the 'Second Industrial Revolu tion', the new w aveof internationalisation of capital and final maj or phase of European colonialexpansion emphasised in Le nin 's analysis of imperialism, and the formationof the first 'international food regime' identified by Harriet Friedmann'sremarkable project on the intemationalpolitical economy of food (Friedmann1978,1982a, 1982b, 1993; Friedmann andMcMichael 1989).7Thebasisofthatregime was the massive growth of grain (and livestock/meat) production onthe vas t internal frontiers of 'sett ler ' states - Argentina, Australia, C anada,and above all the US A. In a (relatively) open international trade order, theexports of these coun tries, especially of wheat, com peted directly w ith thetemperate agriculture of he European heartlands of ndustrial capitalism, b ycontrast with the complemen tary tropical agricultural exports of Asia and


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Africa whose colonial incorporation was completed in the same per iod .For the agrarian economies of the imperialist periphery , this perio d was

marked by three broad types of change. One was the emergence of the' industrial plantat ion ' w hich replaced earlier types of plan tation in Asia, theCaribbean, andparts of Latin Am erica, generated new plantation 'fro ntie rs'(in Indochina , Malaya, Sumatra) and greatly enlarged the scale and vo lum eof highly specialised world market production of rubb er, oil palm , sisal,sugar, cocoa, tea and bananas. Latin Am erica, which was mostly independen tof colonial rule before the international hegemony of industrial capitalism ,also experienced a second type of change; central to its massive agriculturalexport boom in the same period was a new phase of comm oditisation of theoriginally colonial hacienda, involving further land grabbing from pea san tcommunities and the expansion of a servile labour force.

The third kind of change, pervasive in much of Africa and most of A siawhere colonialism did not dispossess the varied peasan tries it enco untered ,was the increased incorporation (in scale and intensity) of peasan t farmersin capitalist economy as producers of export crops (cotton, oil palm , coffee,cocoa, tobacco, groundnuts), of (sometimes new) food staples for d om esticmarkets and of labour power via migrant labour systems (including indenturedand corvee labour) to build the railways and roads, and to work in theplantations, mines and ports. Of course, these processes m anifested a grea tvariety of forms of land tenure and differential access to land, labo ur andmarkets, reflecting both diverse pre-colonial agrarian structures and thecomplex ways in which colonial rule and comm oditisation inco rporated andchanged them.Following the (first) 'golden age' of globalisation (1870s-1914), theinterwar periodplunged the first international food regime into crisis. Duringthe uneven recovery of the world economy in the 1920s, the agricu lture o fthe developed capitalist economies again started to experien ce the effectsof overproduction (still one of their definitive features). W ith the advent o fthe Depression of the 1930s the major capitalist countries embarked on acourse of agricultural protectionism.8 In the Asian and African colo nies, theinstruments of agricultural protection introduced in Europe (like m arketing

boards) were adapted to extract the maximum transfers from pea sant expo rtagriculture to imperial exchequers.In the revival and unprecedented grow th of the wo rld economy from the1950s to early 1970s, a new and quite different 'internation al food re gim e'was established, under American hegemony and turning on the 'Atlantic

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pivot' of the USA and Europe. This both maintained the farm supportpolicies of the pre-w ar years and added the export of Am erican maize andsoya (the definitive field crops of he postwar 'second agricultural revo lution ')for animal feeds. The production of meat and ofhigh value-added manufacturedfoods ('food durables') for mass consumption became the leadinginterna tional agribusiness sectors in the developed capitalist world as thepostw ar economic boom accelerated. In return for its openness to US exportsof raw materials for feedstuffs (and US corporate investment in theirmanufacture in Europe), the EU was able to m aintain high levels of protectionfor other branches, notably wheat and dairy products. In effect, thisgenerated systems of national agricultural regulation by which Europeancountries sou gh tto replicate US agricultural growth through a combinationof import tariffs and export subsidies, without similar limits on the movementof agribusiness c a p it a l- an unstable combination of the freedom of capitalwith restriction on trade, as Friedmann (1993) puts it.

The USA also deployed its surpluses of subsidised grain (and soy oil) forstrategic foreign po licy purposes through foreign a id and export prom otion(dum ping), which stimulated dependence on (cheap) American wh eat inareas of the imperia list periphery hitherto largely self-sufficient in staplefood production . In turn this facilitated the further specialisation of h e latterin the produc tion o f industrial and (mostly non-staple) food crops for worldmarkets, as did the am bitious development plans of the newly independentformer colon ies of Asia and Africa, for most of which the earnings of primarycom modity exports (agricultural and mineral) were the principal source offoreign exchange for import-substituting industrialisation. This created theconditions of apotentia l scissors effect for many poor, primarily agricultural,coun tries, one blade being increasing food import dependence, the other thefluctuating but generally declining terms of trade for their historic exportcrops.Agricultural production in the imperialist periphery thus becameincreasingly internationalised in this period: through the quasi-publicinvestment of aid agencies, notably the World Bank, to create moresystematically comm oditised and productive export-cropping peasantriesin Asia and Africa in the name of' national developm ent'; through A merican(and later European) strategic food aid and/or commercial dumping; and,reflecting post-war Malthusian fears of mass famine and starvation (hencepursued alongside population control), through (international) researchand development of new high-yielding hybrid grain varieties (in order of

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importance, of rice, wheat and maize) to boost food production in poorcountries: the'GreenRevolution'.The conjuncture of the 1970s appears, in retrospect, to have been asdefinitive a mom ent of subsequent structural shifts in the world economy asthat of the 1870s a century before (similarly manifested in a dialectic of g lobalrecession, adjustment, and massive expansion of international flows ofmoney and commodities). This applies to the collapse of the prevailinginternational food regime no less than to the end of internationa l monetarystability, the declining competitiveness of US industry, or the subsequentglobal(ising) ascendancy of neo-liberalism. The prox imate cause o r trigger

of that collapse was a brief episode of ' a sudden, unprecedented shortageand sky-rocketing pr ices' in world grain markets, linked to enormous (andpreferential) US grain sales to the USSR in the early 1970s (Friedmann 1993:40). This stimulated greatly increased borrowing by Am erican farmers toexpand production, paving the way for the US farm crisis of the 1980s whenthe structural nature of overproduction reasserted itself.US grain exports now faced increasing competition - in wheat from theEU (above all France), and in soya, and especially processed soy p roducts,from what Friedmann (1993) terms New Agricultural Co untries (N AC s). Inshort, the basis of the relatively stable post-war interna tional food regim ewas undermined as the EU and the NACs successfully replicated theAmerican mode l. The increasing weakness and then dem ise of the SovietUnion and its bloc further undermined a key strategic rationale of theAtlantic pivot. As is well known, the Uruguay Round from 1986 establishedagricultural trade and its liberalisation as central to the agenda of GA TT (nowthe WTO) under pressure from the USA, which had hitherto blocked its

subjection to GATT processes and rules.The most fundamental struc tural shift Friedmann po ints to - and onefamiliar from wider debates about contemporary globalisation is tha t fromthe ruins of international (Atlantic-centred) regulation em erged transnationalagro-food corporations as 'th e major agents attempting to...o rganize stableconditions of production and consumption which allow them to planinvestment, sourcing of agricultural materials, and m ark etin g', tha t is, asintegrating various sites of production and consumption through globalprivate (corporate) regulation (ibid: 52). This occurred in a conjuncture inwhich the debt of the imperialist periphery, escalating since the 1970s,became the key lever of structural adjustment lending and trade liberalisationwith a renewed emphasis - for the poorest countries - on their com parative

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advantage in agricultural exports.9In addition to this agricultural 'expo rt platform' dynamic, globalisationalso impacts on countries of the imperialist periphery with sufficient dem and

to attract agribusiness production for domestic markets, whether as anelement of wage goods (eg certain par ts of Latin America and North Africa)and/or luxury consumption. India provides a perhaps surprising, henceinstructive, example of the latter.Despite its levels of poverty, bo th rural andurban, but given the size of its population and inequality of incomedistribu tion, since liberalisation of its economy in the early 1990s India hasbecome an arena of intense competition between transnational agro-foodcorporations. They seek to locate new food processing and manufacturingplants in rural areas lacking histories of worker organisation, where they canalso be sourced by converting adjacent farm land to production of the rawmaterials they require, often through contract farming arrangements (Banaji1996).

The enhanced connections of sites/forms of production and consumptionin a globalisation of agriculture driven by transnational corporations mightseem a compelling manifestation of 'the pressures of economic developm ent'observed (if not specified)by Hobsbawm (1994; 291). The effects are likelyto be un even and contradictory for the kinds of reasons I suggested earlier.Some forms of globalisation undoubtedly generate expansions of capitalistagriculture tha t displace peasan t farming (the enclosure effect), for example,large-scale m echanised cultivation of feed grains in Mexico together withincreased grain imports for human consum ption, and otherwise reduce ormarginalise the contributions of their own farming to the incomes/reproduction of especially poor, but also many middle, 'peasants' and/oraccelerate tendencies to class differentiation. Not surprisingly, the costs ofentry into such new activities as contract farming of high value 'non-traditional' crops (fresh fruits, vegetables, cut flowers, decorative houseplants) for global markets, are beyond the reach of most peasant farmers(while expanded production of these comm odities generally stimulates thedemand for rural wage labour).

In short, while it is impossible to generalise about the impact of (unevenand diverse forms of) globalisation on (differentiated) peasantries, it is likelythat in this current phase of imperialism, most poor peasan ts confront anincreasing simple reproduction 'sq ueez e', as indeed do the great majority ofthe poor in both South and North. Together with the landless rura l proletariat,poor peasants form part of an expanding reserve army of labour in the

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countryside and in the cities and towns of large areas of the imperialistperiphery, given the prevalence of rural-urban links which include regula rmigration in search of wage employment as 'footloose labour' in JanBrem an's term (Breman 1996). This doesnot, however, indicate any uniformor linear route to an inevitable destination: the gen eral o r definitive dem iseof agricultural petty commodity production. The impulses to economicchange generated by globalisation, and how they are mediated by thediverse class structures and dynamics of the imperialist periphery, canconsolidate certain spaces for agricultural petty com modity produc tion, andcreate new spaces as well as destroy existing ones. Indeed, pressures onindustrial and urban employment, and the immiseration that results, maygenerate tendencies to 're-peasan tisation' in some instances. Latin Am ericaagain provides some notable examples, like the former tin miners, historicallythe vanguard of the Bolivian working class, now turned coca growers (Petras1997:26-9), and the Landless Workers Movem ent in Brazil {MovimientoRural San Terra)which James Petras (1998:124) considers 'the most dynam icrural social movem ent in Latin America ' today.10

To conclude: the argument I have presented an d illustrated for biddingfarewell to 'the peasantry' concentrates on the theorisation of an econom icform - agricultural petty commodity production - constituted by the classrelations (and contradictions) of capital and labour, and located in theshifting places of agriculture in the international divisions of labour ofimperialism. I do not claim that the ideas I have presented are sufficient toexplain the great diversity of forms of agricultural production and theirdynamics, and the various fortunes and fates of different types of farmersin the world today, but I do believe that they have a lot to con tribute to theinvestigation of contemporary agrarian change, including theorising itsdiversity (a challenge TJ Byres addressed in his inaugural lecture some yea rsago; Byres 1995). The same applies to the po tential value of this prim arilyeconomic analysis for considering sociological, political and cultural issues,as Byres and I try to illustrate in our introductory essay in the new JournalofAgrarian Change we have established (Bernstein and B yres 2001). Th isjournal will provide a forum for a wide range of contributions and deb ateson the terrain of the agrarian political econom y that lecture has sketch ed.Notes1. This is the slightly modified text of an inaugu ral lec ture delivered in the Lectu reTheatre of the Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Stud ies (SO AS) ,

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University of London, on 20 October 2000. Notes and references have beenadded.2. A first foray in this area was in a review article in the first volum e of the Journalof Peasant Studies (Bernstein and Pitt 1974), influenced by theories of thearticulation of modes of production w ith w hich I grappled for several years. Myscepticism ab ou t this approach (with no loss of respect for its foremost think erslike Claude Meillassoux and Pierre-Philippe R ey) sharpened during a grow ingengagement with issues of agrarian political economy over four years at theUniversity of Dar es Salaam (1974 -1978), which afforded the opportunity forfieldwork as well as a rich and dynamic intellectual m ilieu. Work based in thisexperience (Bernstein 1977 ,1978a, 1978b, 19 79 ,19 81 ,19 82 ) was influenced

by th e idea of peasan ts in capitalism as 'wage labour equivalents', proposed ina powerful theoretical essay by Jairus Banaji (1977). A subsequent, andcontinuing , pha se of thinking about 'pe asan try' has been informed above all bythe seminal contribution of Peter Gibbon and Michael Neocosm os (1985). Thiscontained a detailed (and persuasive) critique ofmy earlier work and formulatedan alternative approach to petty commodity production that I have sinceincorp orated, adapted and sought to apply in analyses of the agrarian ques tionin transitions to capitalism (Bernstein 1994, 1996b), of South Africa (1996a,1998), of the historical trajectories of land reform (Bernstein 2002), and ofenvironm ental change in sub-Saharan A frica (Bernstein and Woodhouse 20 01).Th e lecture drew substantially on two papers (B ernstein 2 000; Bernstein andByres 2001) not yet published when the lecture was given.

3. These two complementary aspects of Chayanov's theory are representedrespectively in his works On the Theory of Non-Cap italist Econom ic Systemsand Peasant Farm Organization, in Chayanov (1966).4. Fro m notes written by Chay anov for the OGPU (Soviet secret police apparatus)during his first arrest during the early 1930s, as translated in Bourgholtzer's

splendid edition (1999) of Chayanov's letters from his time in Germany andBritain in 1922-3 .5. As any 'persistence' view must be.6. A s Mam dani (198 7) illustrates, in extreme conditions the poorest peasants maynot even be able to replace their hoes as they becom e w orn.7. An d from which m uch of the following is draw n. The highly original thesis ofBen oit Daviron (2 002) su ggests that relative shifts from plantation to pea santproduction of tropical export crops that beg an in this period (in parts of L atin

America, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa) were facilitated by theevolution of nationally established (and internationally recognised) standardsfor products like cocoa, cotton and rubber and the linked em ergence of futuresm arkets in their trade. At the same time, this w as also the conjuncture of theimpact of devastating fam ines on entire regio nal peasantries in India and C hina

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when the mechanisms of colonial and quasi-colonial im perialism combined withextreme (El Nino) climatic conditions (D avis 2001 ).8. As did South Africa, whose Marketing Act of 1937 wa s influenced by Britishand other European legislation of the tim e; there is an illum inatin g first-han daccount in the memoir by De Swardt (1983).9. Aspects of 'glob alisation ' since the 1970s have also affected th e m arke ting o ftropical agricultural exports in ways that tend to reduce the earnings theygenerate for both their producers and the national econo mies from w hich theyemanate, in a general (if not uniform) shift from 'producer-driven' to 'buyer-driven ' global commodity chains. Those aspects include, on o ne hand, chang esin transport logistics, processing technologies and industrial organisation in

global markets, and, on the other hand, the effects of liberalisation /privatisationin the domestic marketing of export crops. The former are illuminated b y P onte(2001) for coffee, and Fold (2002) and Losch (2002) for cocoa /cho cola te; th elatter by Fold (2002) for cocoa in Ghana, Larsen (2002) for cotton in Zim bab w e,Losch (2002) for cocoa in Co te d' Ivoire, and Ponte (2002 ) for coffee in K eny a,Tanzania and Uganda; see also Raikes and Gibbon (2000 ), Daviron (20 02 ), andDaviron and Gibbon (200 2).10. Southern African examples include the 'return '/move to the countryside of thoseretrenched from waged employment in mining and industry in Botswana(O'Laughlin 1998), Zambia (Ferguson 1999), and Zimbabwe (N yambara 200 1).ReferencesBanaji, J (1977) 'Modes of production in a materialist conception of history',Capital and Class 6.

(1996), 'Globalisation and restructuring in the Indian food industry', inBernstein and Brass (eds).Berman, M (1983) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. The Experience of Modernity.London: Verso.Bernstein, H (1977), Capitalism and Peasantry in the Epoch of Imperialism.

University of Dar es Salaam: Economic Research Bureau, Occasional Paper 77.2.(1978a), Conceptsfor the Analysis of Contemporary Peasantries. Universityof Dar es Salaam: Economic Research Bu reau, Occasional Paper 7 8.2 .(1978b) 'Notes on capital and peasantry', Review of African PoliticalEconomy 21.(1979) 'African peasantries: a theoretical framework', Journal ofPeasantStudies 6(4).(1981) 'Notes on state and peasan try', Review of African Political Econom y21.(1982) 'Contradictions of the Tanzanian ex perien ce', in S Jones, PC Jo shi

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and M Murmis(eds) Rural Poverty and Agrarian Reform. New Delhi: AlliedPublishers.(1994) 'Agrarian classes in capitalist development', in L Sklair (ed).Capitalism and Development. London: Rou tledge.

(1 99 6a )'S ou th A frica's agrarian question: extreme and exc eptio nal? ', in HBernstein (ed) The Agrarian Question in South Africa. London: Frank C ass.

(1996b) 'Agrarian questions then and now', in Bernstein and Brass (eds).(1998) ' Social change in the South African countryside? Land and pro duction ,poverty and pow er' , Journal of Peasant Studies 25(4).(2000) '"T he peasantry " in global capitalism: who, where and w h y ?' , in LPanitch and C L eys (eds) The Socialist Register 2001. London: Merlin Press.

- (2002) 'Lan d reform: taking a long(er) view', Journal of Agrarian Change2(4).Bernstein, H and M Pitt (1974) 'Plantations and modes of exploitation', Journalof Peasant Studies 1(4).Bernstein, H and TJ Byres (2001) 'From peasant studies to agrarian change',Journal of Agrarian Change 1(1).Bernstein, H and P Woodhouse (2001) 'Telling environmental change like it is?Reflections on a study in sub-Saharan Africa', Journal of Agrarian Change 1 (2).Bernstein, H and T Brass (eds) (1996) Agrarian Questions. Essays in Appreciation

of TJ Byres. London: Frank Cass.Bharadwaj, K (1985 ) 'A view of comm ercialisation in Indian agriculture and the

development of capitalism', Journal of Peasant Studies 12(4).Bom gholtzer,F(ed) (1999) AleksandrChayanov and Russian Berlin, special issue

ofJournal of Peasant Studies 26(4).Breman, J (1996) Footloose Labour. Working in India's Informal Econom y.Cam bridge: Cam bridge University Press.Byres, TJ (1995) 'Political economy, the agrarian question and the comparativemethod' , Journal of Peasant Studies 22(4).Chay anov, AV (1966 ) in D Tho rner, B Kerblay and RE F Smith (eds) The Theory

of Peasant Economy. Homewood, 111: Richard Irw in.(1976) The Journey of My Brother A lexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia, in

The Russian Peasant 1920 and 1984. REF Smith(ed). London: Frank C ass.Daviron, B (2002) 'Small farm production and the standardisation of tropicalproducts', in Daviron and Gibbon (eds).

Daviron, B and P Gibbon (2002) 'Global commodity chains and African exportagriculture', in Daviron and Gibbon (eds) Global Comm odity Chains and AfricanExport Agriculture, special issue o fJournal of Agrarian Change 2(2).17


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Davis, M (2001) Late Victorian Holocausts. El Nino Famines and the Making of theThird World. London: Verso .De Swardt, SJJ (1983) 'Agricultural marketing problems in the 1930s', SouthAfrican Journal of Economics 51(1).Djurfeldt, G (1981) 'Wha t happened to the agrarian bourgeo isie and rural p roletariatunder monopoly capitalism? Some hypotheses derived from the classics ofMarxism on the agrarian que stion', Ada Sociologica 24(3).Ferguson, J (1999) Expectations of Modernity. Myths and M eanings of Urban Lifeon the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.Fold, N (2002) 'Lead firms and competition in "bi-polar" commodity chains:

grinders and branders in the global cocoa-chocolate ind us try ', in Daviron andGibbon (eds).Friedmann, H (1978) 'World market, state and family farm: social bases ofhousehold production in the era of wage labou r', Comparative Studies in Societyand H istory 20.

(1982a) 'The political economy of food: the rise and fall of the postwarinternational food order', American Sociological Review 88 (annual supplem ent). (1982b) 'State policy and world comm erce: the case of whea t, 1815 to the

present', in P McGowan and CW Kegley (eds) Foreign Policy and the ModernWorld System. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.(1993) 'The political economy of food: a global cris is', New Left Review 197.

Friedmann, H and P McM ichael (1989), 'Ag riculture and the state system : the riseand decline of national ag ricultures, 1870 to the pres en t', Sociologica Ruralis29(2).Gibbon, P and M Neocosmos (1985), 'Some problems in the political econo my of"African Socialism '", in H Bernstein and BK C am pbell(eds) Contradictions of

Accumulation in Africa. Studies in Econom y andState. Beverly Hills, C A: Sag e.Hobsbawm, EJ (1994) Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991.London: Michael Joseph.Koning, N (1994) The Failure of Agrarian Capitalism. Agrarian Politics in theUnited Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and the U SA, 1846-1919. London:Routledge.Larsen, ML (2002 ) 'Is oligop oly a condition of successful p rivatiz ation ? The caseof cotton in Zimbabwe', in Daviron and Gibbon (eds).Losch, B (2002 ) 'Global restructuring and liberalization: Co te d'lvoire and the endof the international coffee m arket? ', in Dav iron and Gibbon ( ed s).Mamdani, M (1987) 'Extreme but not exceptional: towards an analysis of theagrarian question in Ugan da ', Journal of Peasant Studies 14(2).

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M ann, SA and JA Dickinson (1978) 'Obstacles to the developm ent of a capitalistagriculture', Journal of Peasant Studies 5(4).N olan, P ( l 988) 7%e PoliticalEconomy ojCollective Farms. An Analysis ofChina'sPost-Mao Rural Reforms. Cam bridge: Cam bridge U niversity Press.Nyambara, P (2001) 'The closing frontier: agrarian change, immigrants and the"squatter menace" in Gokwe, 1980-1990s', in Worby (ed).O'Laughlin, B (1998) 'Missing men? The debate over rural poverty and women-headed hou seholds in Southern Africa', Journal of Peasant Studies 25(2).Pe tras, J (1997) 'Lat in America: the resurgence of the L eft', New Left Review 223.Petras, J (1998) 'The political and social basis of regional variation in land

occupations in Braz il ' , Journal of Peasant Studies 25(4).Pon te, S (2001) The 'Latte Revolution'? Winners and Losers in the Restructuringof the Global Coffee Marketing Chain. Copenhagen, Centre for DevelopmentResearch: Working Paper 01.3.Po nte, S (2002) 'Brew ing a bitter cup? Deregulation, quality and the re-organizationof coffee marketing in East Africa', in Daviron and Gibbon (eds).Raikes, P and P Gibbon (2000) '"G lobalisation" and African export crop agricultu re',Journal of Peasant Studies 27(2).W orby, B (ed) (2001) The New Agrarian Politics in Zimbabwe, special issue ofJournal of Agrarian Change 1(4).

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bernstein farewells to the peasantry

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