Frank Cass Publishers

The Journal of Peasant Studies
ISSN: 0306-6150

The Journal of Peasant Studies is one of the most outstanding journals in the field of the political economy of agrarian change. With its focus on considering peasants within the broader systems and historical situations in which they exist, it is essential reading for all who want to achieve an understanding of the role of peasants in political, economic and social transformation. It embraces both the theoretical and the empirical, and encompasses a multi-disciplinary area of study, rigorously pursued: catering for economists, historians (including historians of art), anthropologists, political scientists, geographers and sociologists, as well as literary scholars. It has a comprehensive reviews section, and a meticulously compiled Index of the first twenty volumes of the journal's contents was published separately in 1994.

Quarterly

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

Issue 28.3

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

Issue 28.3

Issue 28.3

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

Issue 28.3

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

Issue 28.3

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

Issue 28.3

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

Issue 28.3

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

Issue 28.3

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

Issue 28.1

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

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

Issue 28.1

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

Issue 28.1

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

Issue 28.1

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

Issue 28.1

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

Issue 27.4

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

Issue 27.4

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

Issue 27.4

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

Issue 27.4

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

Issue 27.3

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

Issue 27.3

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

Issue 27.3

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

Issue 27.3

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

Issue 27.3

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

Issue 27.3

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Issue 27.2

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

Issue 27.1

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

Issue 27.1

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

Issue 27.1

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

Issue 27.1

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

Issue 27.1

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

Issue 26.2&3 - Special Issue: Rural Labour Relations in India

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

Issue 26.2&3 - Special Issue: Rural Labour Relations in India

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

Issue 26.2&3 - Special Issue: Rural Labour Relations in India

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

Issue 26.2&3 - Special Issue: Rural Labour Relations in India

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

Issue 26.2&3 - Special Issue: Rural Labour Relations in India

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

Issue 26.2&3 - Special Issue: Rural Labour Relations in India

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

Issue 26.2&3 - Special Issue: Rural Labour Relations in India

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

Issue 26.2&3 - Special Issue: Rural Labour Relations in India

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

Issue 26.2&3 - Special Issue: Rural Labour Relations in India

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

Issue 26.1

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

Issue 26.1

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

Issue 26.1

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

Issue 26.1

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

Issue 26.1

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

Issue 26.1

Issue 25.4

Issue 25.4

Issue 25.4

Issue 25.4

Issue 25.4

Issue 25.4

Issue 25.4

Issue 25.4

Issue 25.3

Issue 25.3

Issue 25.3

Issue 25.3

Issue 25.3

Issue 25.2

Issue 25.2

Issue 25.2

Issue 25.2

Issue 25.2

Issue 25.1

Issue 25.1

Issue 25.1

Issue 25.1

Issue 24.4

Issue 24.4

Issue 24.4

Issue 24.4

Issue 24.4

Issue 24.4

Issue 24.3

Issue 24.3

Issue 24.3

Issue 24.3

Issue 24.3

Issue 24.1 & 2 - Special Issue: Agrarian Questions: Essays in Appreciation of TJ Byres

Issue 24.1 & 2 - Special Issue: Agrarian Questions: Essays in Appreciation of TJ Byres

Issue 24.1 & 2 - Special Issue: Agrarian Questions: Essays in Appreciation of TJ Byres

Issue 24.1 & 2 - Special Issue: Agrarian Questions: Essays in Appreciation of TJ Byres

Issue 24.1 & 2 - Special Issue: Agrarian Questions: Essays in Appreciation of TJ Byres

Issue 24.1 & 2 - Special Issue: Agrarian Questions: Essays in Appreciation of TJ Byres

Issue 24.1 & 2 - Special Issue: Agrarian Questions: Essays in Appreciation of TJ Byres

Issue 24.1 & 2 - Special Issue: Agrarian Questions: Essays in Appreciation of TJ Byres

Issue 23.4

Issue 23.4

Issue 23.4

Issue 23.4

Issue 23.4

Issue 23.4

Issue 23.2 & 3 - Special Issue: The Agrarian Question in South Africa

Issue 23.2 & 3 - Special Issue: The Agrarian Question in South Africa

Issue 23.2 & 3 - Special Issue: The Agrarian Question in South Africa

Issue 23.2 & 3 - Special Issue: The Agrarian Question in South Africa

Issue 23.2 & 3 - Special Issue: The Agrarian Question in South Africa

Issue 23.2 & 3 - Special Issue: The Agrarian Question in South Africa

Issue 23.2 & 3 - Special Issue: The Agrarian Question in South Africa

Issue 23.2 & 3 - Special Issue: The Agrarian Question in South Africa

Issue 23.1

Issue 23.1

Issue 23.1

Issue 23.1

Issue 23.1

Issue 23.1

Issue 23.1

September 2002