Henry Bernstein

African peasantries: A theoretical framework∗

The paper seeks to contribute to a framework for the investigation of the specific historical conditions and contemporary manifestations of the agrarian question in sub‐Saharan Africa. The latter is distinguished, inter alia, by the timing and modes of incorporation of African social formations in the international economy, and by the forms of intervention of the colonial and post‐colonial states in the absence of features classically associated with the agrarian question elsewhere, such as large landed property, the political power of landlords, and the formation of an agrarian bourgeoisie. The forms and degrees of subsumption of peasant simple commodity production in the circuit of capital, a process in which the state plays a central role, are seen as moving towards a situation in which peasant producers are constituted as ‘wage‐labour equivalents’.

Food sovereignty via the ‘peasant way’: a sceptical view

This paper attempts to identify and assess some of the key elements that ‘frame’ food sovereignty (FS): (1) a comprehensive attack on corporate industrialised agriculture, and its ecological consequences, in the current moment of globalisation, (2) advocacy of a (the) ‘peasant way’ as the basis of a sustainable and socially just food system, and (3) a programme to realise that world-historical goal. While sharing some of the concerns of (1), I am sceptical about (2) because of how FS conceives ‘peasants’, and the claim of some of its leading advocates that small producers who practice agroecological farming – understood as low (external)-input and labour-intensive – can feed the world. This connects with an argument that FS is incapable of constructing a feasible programme (3) to connect the activities of small farmers with the food needs of non-farmers, whose numbers are growing both absolutely and as a proportion of the worlds population.

Notes on capital and peasantry

Bernstein examines the diverse ways in which capital and the colonial state incorporated rural producers into the production and consumption of commodities as the means of securing their own subsistence. Regulations, services and the monopoly of crop producers have been used to require an often recalcitrant peasantry to organize production to meet the requirements of international capital and the local state for particular commodities, for trading profits, and for revenues and foreign exchange. The peasantry must be analysed in its relations with capital and the state, in varying concrete conditions, which means within capitalist relations of production. These are mediated not through the wage relation, but through various forms of household production by producers who are not fully expropriated, and who are engaged in a struggle with capital/state for effective possession and control of the conditions of production.

From Peasant Studies to Agrarian Change

This inaugural essay surveys themes and approaches in agrarian political economy over the last three decades, especially with reference to contributions to, and debates in, the Journal of Peasant Studies of which T. J. Byres was editor from 1973 to 2000 and Henry Bernstein editor from 1985 to 2000. We indicate intellectual strengths and lacunae, new approaches to longstanding issues, and new concerns which emerged over that period, and which inform the project of this new Journal of Agrarian Change and the challenges it presents.

Modernization theory and the sociological study of development

Summary The focus of this article is methodological and macro‐sociological. Its purpose is to disentangle some of the issues which arise in the sociology of development, and to question the assumptions and implications of a particular mode of conceptualization based on the notions of modernity and modernization which has provided the characteristic theoretical framework of the sociology of development. The principal assumptions of modernization theory as understood here—often enough made explicit by those who use this approach—are (1) that modernization is a total social process associated with (or subsuming) economic development in terms of the preconditions, concomitants, and consequences of the latter; (2) that this process constitutes a ‘universal pattern’. Obviously among various writers there are differences of emphasis with respect to the meaning of modernization, partly due to its relationship with—or derivation from—that most contentious concept ‘development’. For Lerner modernization is ‘the soc...

Land Reform: Taking a Long(er) View

The paper proposes a broad argument that the end of state–led development from the 1970s coincided with (i) the final wave of major redistributive land reform, and its place within transitions to capitalism, that lasted from about 1910 to the 1970s, and (ii) the beginnings of contemporary ‘globalization’. Self–styled ‘new wave’ agrarian reform in the age of neo–liberalism, centred on property rights, is unlikely to deliver much on its claims to both stimulate agricultural productivity and reduce rural poverty. The reasons are grounded in the basic relations and dynamics of capitalism, and how these are intensified and reshaped by and through globalization. Understanding these processes, with all their inevitable unevenness, requires (i) recognizing that the historical conditions of the ‘classic’ agrarian question no longer apply, and (ii) developing the means to investigate and understand better the changing realities facing different agrarian classes within a general tendency to the concentration of capital and fragmentation of labour, including how the latter may generate new agrarian questions of labour.

V.I. Lenin and A.V. Chayanov: looking back, looking forward

This essay revisits aspects of the ‘Lenin–Chayanov debate’ which was so prominent in the formative period of The Journal of Peasant Studies: to distinguish some of its various strands, to identify some of its tensions and ambiguities, and to reflect on the legacies of Lenin and Chayanov. The resonances and ramifications of Lenins and Chayanovs work encompass so many aspects of the world-historical, and highly charged, theme of the fate(s) of the peasantry in the making of modernity – the development of capitalism and (once) socialism – that the observations and suggestions presented here can only be selective. They are offered in the hope of clarifying and stimulating consideration of patterns of agrarian change today: how they differ from, and might be illuminated by, past experiences and the ideas they generated.

Is There an Agrarian Question in the 21st Century

ABSTRACT This paper first explores the lineages and applications of the “classic” agrarian question, including its fateful adaptation in the early Soviet Union, as the agrarian question of capital. It then argues that the agrarian question of capital has been superseded in the current period of globalization. There are no longer classes of predatory pre-capitalist landed property of any major weight, nor is it useful to regard todays small farmers as “peasants” in any inherited historical sense. Struggles over land may manifest an agrarian question of (increasingly fragmented) classes of labour, but—for all their importance—do not have the same systemic (or world-historical) significance as the agrarian question of capital once had.

Social change in the South African countryside? Land and production, poverty and power

The article examines land and production, poverty and power, as coordinates of the agrarian question in South Africa, and uses them to sketch the context of the apartheid legacy, to interrogate the discourses of land and agricultural policy reform, and to investigate the paradox of the apparent marginality of reform in the ANC Governments agenda alongside a widespread and dynamic politics of land and farming. In particular, it confronts stereotypical views of large farm and small farm paths of agrarian development in post‐apartheid South Africa, and suggests the importance of recent work by Mamdani [1996] on the colonial state in Africa and its legacy to the politics of agrarian reform and its relationship with national democratic revolution.

Land Reform in Southern Africa in World-Historical Perspective

This paper attempts to place issues of land reform in South Africa and Zimbabwe in a ‘world-historical’ perspective. ‘World-historical’ is used in two senses. The first is that given by the ‘classic’ agrarian question and its tradition, concerning the role of agrarian transformation in the transition to capitalism, and especially industrial capitalism, in general general. The second applies to the trajectories, and mutations, of the ‘classic’ agrarian question in the development of capitalism on a world scale and its historical and spatial coordinates. It is suggested that the moment of ‘globalisation’ from the 1970s signaled the end of the ‘classic’ agrarian question, as the agrarian question of capital, without its resolution in most countries of the South. At the same time, however, the ‘fragmentation’ of labour associated with and intensified by the global restructuring of capital discloses possibilities of (new) agrarian questions generated by the struggles of labour for means of livelihood and reproduction. This is illustrated in relation to South Africa and especially Zimbabwe as social formations that combine key aspects of previous phases of capitalism, given their belated, and limited, national democratic revolutions, and of the current phase of ‘globalisation’ and its fragmentation of labour. While schematic in presentation, the aim is to illustrate the relevance and utility of some wider theoretical and historical ideas to debate of land redistribution in South Africa and Zimbabwe today.