Harriet Friedmann

World Market, State, and Family Farm: Social Bases of Household Production in the Era of Wage Labor

Between 1873 and 1935 dramatic changes took place in the character of production in the industrial nations of the world. Longstanding and newly formed states in Europe and America engaged in vigorous campaigns of territorial expansion, so that virtually all the globe came to be incorporated within the sphere of world markets. During the same period, the expansion in industrial countries of new techniques of mass production coincided with growth and consolidation of organizations of people who worked for wages. The expansion of world markets, the development of mass produc— tion, and the new social importance of wage laborers, while certainly not the only features of the era, are often viewed as its central, interrelated, and dynamic basis.1 In this context, the transformations of production which accompanied the rise of a world wheat market during these decades were quite unusual.

Household production and the national economy: concepts for the analysis of agrarian formations.

This essay argues that the central concept for analysis of agrarian social relations is the form of production. This is conceived through a double specification of the unit of production and the social formation. The approach allows for the analytical specification of simple commodity production and capitalist relations of production in a manner consistent with the development of new concepts within political economy for agrarian structures which do not correspond to modes of production. The latter have generally been referred to as ‘peasant’, a term derived through empirical generalisation and resting on a (usually) implicit contrast with simple commodity production. The contrast can be made more rigorous through the concept of commoditisation, defined as the penetration into reproduction of commodity relations. Simple commodity production is a concept within political economy, allowing for deduction of conditions of reproduction and class relations. ‘Peasant production is negatively defined as resisting...

Simple commodity production and wage labour in the American plains

Households which exclusively produce a single commodity have a dual character as enterprises and as families. Competition establishes a constant requirement for labour, while demographic variation prevents its continuous supply within the household. Using data from a county in the heart of the American wheat plains to illustrate the analysis, this paper applies a modified version of Marxs theory to the circuits of reproduction of simple commodity production, focusing on their intersection with markets in labour power. The analysis requires elaboration of the Marxist definition of class, in order to differentiate members of specialized commodity production households who work for wages as a temporary phase in the life‐cycle, from a permanent class of wage labourers. It concludes that simple commodity production, although it differs from capitalist production as well as from peasant households, requires for its reproduction a well‐developed market in labour‐power and thus an essentially capitalist economy.

Distance and durability: Shaky foundations of the world food economy

For food and agriculture, the end of the Cold War opens questions about the past no less than the present. The dramatic changes now underway have roots in the first economic breaches of the Cold War dam. Although they were anticipated by smaller transactions in the late 1960s, the Soviet-US grain deals of 1972-73 were so large that they precipitated a prolonged, still unresolved, crisis of the postwar food regime. The first outbreak of the food crisis in the early 1970s was as devastating for the Third World as the energy crisis. Since the Soviet-US grain deals were the economic expression of detente, it is now clear that the stable, if unequal, relations of the postwar food regime were bound up with the mutually exclusive trading blocs of the Cold War. The blocs provided the framework for the decolonisation and building of national economies, including food and agriculture, in the Third World. The crisis of the food regime has been bound up with a restructuring of the framework of rival blocs, which began not in 1989, but two decades earlier. The postwar food regime consisted of distinct complexes. The most important changes in the food regime can be traced through the wheat complex, the durable food complex, and the livestock complex. Each complex is defined as a chain (or web) of production and consumption relations, linking farmers and farm workers to consuming individuals, households and communities. Within each web are private and state institutions which buy, sell, provide inputs, process, transport, distribute and finance each link. Each complex includes many class, gender and cultural relations, within a specific (changing) international division of labour. Each evolved within the politically bounded economic space of the west, until the major transactions of the early 1970s irrevocably linked the Cold War blocs, leading finally to the dissolution of the bloc structure itself.1 Over the past 15 years, the implosive merging of the blocs has coincided with a greater intertwining of the complexes. Although each country or region inherits a specific legacy of incorporation and marginalisation, each of the three complexes created general conditions for the Third World. The wheat complex facilitated food import dependency. The durable food complex reduced demand for traditional tropical exports, especially sugar and vegetable oils. The livestock complex (like fruits and vegetables) shifted from a national to a transnational basis; by taking hold directly of production, it differentiates the Third World in new ways, and more directly than the wheat complex, undermines local, mixed economies.

Commentary: Food regime analysis and agrarian questions: widening the conversation

The central disagreement between McMichael and Bernstein boils down to how each of them analyses food and agriculture in relation to capitalist dynamics. McMichael thinks the main contradictions of capitalism now stem from agriculture, and any positive future will be guided by farmers. Bernstein thinks capitalism has fully absorbed agriculture (including farmers not expelled from the land) into circuits of capital, turning agriculture into simply one of many sectors of accumulation and a major font of surplus labor. They have arrived by different paths to the same deeper question: Granted its illumination of the past, does the food regime approach remain useful for interpreting present contradictions, and if so, how? To invite a wider exploration of this very real and important question, I have tried to shift the debate towards a conversation about the complexity of the current transition. I start by widening the frame of the debate to include other writings by McMichael (his method of incorporated comparison) and Bernstein (his distinction between farming and agriculture). I conclude that food regimes and agrarian changes must be located in a wider set of analyses of agrarian and capitalist transitions, each of which misses something important. Older agrarian thought about urban society has much to offer but misses larger food regime dynamics; socio-technical transitions and new commons literatures offer critical analysis of technics, but lack appreciation of the centrality of food and farming; recent works recovering Marxist thought about human nature in a possible transition to a society of abundance and collaboration also ignore food and farming. Connecting with literatures outside the frame of food regimes and agrarian questions offers a way forward for those literatures and for ours.

Forum: Fifty years of debate on peasantries, 1966–2016

The idea for this discussion originated in a wooden cabin in the Dutch polders in the late summer of 2015. Harriet Friedmann responded enthusiastically to my observation that the International Rural Sociology Association (IRSA)’s 2016 conference in Toronto would coincide with the 50th anniversary of the publication of two landmark books which had defined new poles of debate in peasant studies: Peasants (Wolf 1966) by Eric Wolf (1922–2009), and The theory of peasant economy (Chayanov 1966), the first English translation of parts of the work of the Russian ‘social agronomist’ Alexander Chayanov (1888– 1937). Both of these books had great influence on us, and on many others, at the time; and the debate between the two traditions which they represent, and their implications for agrarian policies and agrarian movements, continues to the present. We therefore proposed a panel discussion to mark this anniversary and to consider what has stayed the same, and what has changed, in the last 50 years of agrarian thought and agrarian politics. The organisers enthusiastically picked up the idea, elevating it from ‘panel’ to plenary and inviting us to organise the first plenary session of the conference, with the title 50 years of debate on peasantries, 1966–2016. The present panel, minus Jun Borras, matches our original wish list. The five members of the panel were born at various times between 1930 and 1950, but – having differing early life-course trajectories – we all developed our interest in peasant societies, as undergraduate or graduate students, at some point during the 1960s; we thus came under the influence of these books at roughly the same time. Eric Wolf, then teaching at the University of Michigan, was a formative influence on his student Harriet Friedmann; Teodor Shanin became aware of Chayanov almost by accident when he was asked to assist his PhD supervisor R.E.F. Smith with the translation of Chayanov’s work. As graduate students or young lecturers, we also read Teodor’s edited book Peasants and peasant societies (1971) which was widely used in teaching. In the second edition (1987) two emerging agrarian scholars, Harriet Friedmann and Henry Bernstein, contributed original chapters. Harriet wrote on ‘The family farm and the international food regimes’ (Friedmann 1987), a theme on which she had already published two landmark papers