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The Journal of Peasant Studies

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Class dynamics of agrarian change

Michael Watts
a a

University of California, Berkeley Version of record first published: 01 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Michael Watts (2012): Class dynamics of agrarian change, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39:1, 199-204 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2012.656235

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Kuhn, C.M. 2011. Globalizing the South at mid-century: the case of Arthur Raper. Paper delivered at the Agricultural History Society annual meeting, Springeld, IL, June. Lappe, F.M. and J. Collins 1977. Food rst: beyond the myth of scarcity. Boston: HoughtonMiin. McNamara, R. 1968. The essence of security: reections in oce. New York: Harper & Row. Pearse, A. 1980. Seeds of plenty, seeds of want: social and economic implications of the green revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Putzel, J. 1992. A captive land: the politics of agrarian reform in the Philippines. London: Catholic Institute for International Relations and New York: Monthly Review Press. Sen, A. 1981. Poverty and famines: an essay on entitlement and deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Class dynamics of agrarian change, by Henry Bernstein, Halifax, Fernwood Publishing, 2010, xii 142 pp., CAD$17.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-55266-349-3 There are few people as well positioned to write a book about the class dynamics of agrarian change as Henry Bernstein. For more than three decades he has been a central gure in the peasant studies boom that emerged in the wake of the Vietnam war. Not least there is his, dare I say it, entrepreneurial role, along with Terry Byres, in providing a rich and wide-ranging intellectual space for the study of agrarian transitions through The Journal of Peasant Studies (and subsequently the Journal of Agrarian Change), an internationalist forum of the highest rank. In my own case, I recall vividly the intellectual excitement in rst reading his now classic piece on commodication and the peasantry entitled Notes on Capital and Peasantry penned in 1977 and published in the Review of African Political Economy composed in that terse, dense, propositional form as though he were bringing a dose of Wittgenstein to the Third World peasants. Bernstein is acutely aware of the task at hand: the immense variety of types of farming and their social relations. All of that said, it is nevertheless a slightly mad undertaking to assess the social relations of production and reproduction, property and power in agrarian formations and their processes of change, both historical and contemporary in a such a little book after all, in Marxist terms, which provides the theoretical frame for the book, this would be nothing short of an account of the origins and development of capitalism (and, in principle, of socialist agricultures too). Production and productivity, the origins and development of capitalism, colonialism, local and global agro-food systems, food regimes, neoliberalism, property and livelihood, technology, international markets, capitalist agrarian relations, class formation and political movements (to name some of the key themes) are all covered in a book which checks in at little more than 100 pages. Naturally, the express intention of the book is not to provide a full synthesis or encomium of agrarian studies, but rather a state of the art small book on big issues (which is part, incidentally, of an excellent series developed by Jun Borras). Writing a small book of this sort is no easy matter, but the same might be said of reviewing it. Many very big issues are passed over quickly, every generalization is subject to immediate qualication and proviso. We are in any case talking minimally about a sector constituted by at least 20% of the worlds population right now to say nothing of what it represented in 1700, 1880 or 1945. There are, for example, six short paragraphs on Industrial Capitalism and Modern Imperialism (I am reminded here of a colleague who was asked to contribute a 100 word entry on the origins of universe to an on-line encyclopedia). Most

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frustrating of all is the truncated discussion on topics about which Bernstein is clearly itching to say more and about which any reader would want him to opine at length. Reading between the lines he clearly has much more to say of a quite critical nature on so-called global agrarian resistance in Chapter 8 or on global depeasantization in Chapter 6. In short, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change is a bit of a taster or a smorgasbord with, it needs to be said, some very rich and avorful dishes to choose from. Nevertheless, the experience for the reader is to be alert to the absences: why nothing on agrarian socialisms, why so little on gender or nance capital, why is the retail sector passed over so quickly? It is, in short, hard to resist the temptation to be a little peeved that our own pet topics, books and concepts are not part of the mix (why no reference to the feminist household debate, why so little on the rich literature on peasant revolution and insurgency, why not more on the complex political ecologies of agrarian change?). Bernstein is always attentive to the temporal in his account of agrarian change but much less to space. For all of that, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change is a little gem, and some parts of the book particularly those speaking to the Bernsteins strong suits such as agrarian transitions, the agrarian question of labor, and the relations of petty commodity producers to capital are magisterial in their analytical insight and brevity. Perhaps the way to see this book is as a Marxian haiku on agrarian transformation. Bernsteins approach to agrarian change is, broadly construed, Marxist as he puts it, how Marxs theory of capitalism can make sense of diverse and complex agrarian histories of the modern world (p.9). The primacy of the social relations between capital and labor is understood as a structured totality but one sensitive to what Marx calls the concentration of many determinations. Bernstein is attentive too to the fact that such a task is challenging, that the strongest areas of disagreement and debate are often among Marxists themselves, and that there is no suggestion that Marx or Marxism provides everything we need to know. But all of that said and done, the central conundrum remains: what are Marxisms limits, or to put it dierently what gets included and what is excluded, and can Bernsteins six themes which provide the red threads running through the book (class and gender, divisions of access and labor, property, colonial legacies, paths of agrarian and market development, and relations of power) be fully or even properly addressed with the toolkit provided. Bernstein commences his journey, not surprisingly, with the linked questions of how we think about agrarian production and productivity, which turns on labor understood as acts of human agency. Productivity can be measured in a variety of ways, of course Bernstein cites the mildly astonishing gure that the American farmers labor productivity is two thousands times that of the modal African farmer and may indeed be in conict with one another. He distinguishes between labor quantity and quality, the relations between the energetics of agriculture and what one might call agro-ecological capital (soil fertility, water, germ plasm and so on). The technical conditions of production are naturally to be distinguished from the social conditions of production, which leads Bernstein into an accounting of divisions of labor and co-operation in agriculture (economies of scale, complementation and timing eects) and the social conditions of reproduction. On the latter Bernstein draws on the foundational work of Eric Wolf on peasant funds

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(consumption, replacement, rent and ceremonial) which provides the occasion for Bernstein to ag the centrality of both gender and the domestic divisions of labor on the one side, and the forms of appropriation of surplus labor (which is to say relations of exploitation and the capacity for accumulation) on the other. [Oddly Bernstein does not refer here to what is surely the path-breaking formalization of this sort of agrarian political economy formulated by Alain de Janvry and Carmen Diana Deere (1979)]. All of this leads to his quartet of key political economic questions: who owns what (property), who does what (social organization of work), who gets what (the distribution of income), and what do they do with it (the social relations of consumption, reproduction and accumulation). In the following two chapters, Bernstein wades into the thickets of capitalisms origins and early development and the relations between colonialism and capitalism (all in 30 pages, which is no mean defeat of intellectual compression). It is an impossible task to summarise what Bernstein accomplishes here. Suce to say that he explores the genesis of generalized commodity production, including of labor as a commodity, and the conditions of possibility for pre-capitalist societies to undergo transitions to capitalism (primitive accumulation in short which of course has been the object of considerable scrutiny of late following the work of The Commoner, Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey). He distinguishes between two origins: the classic agrarian questions and its various paths (English, Prussian, American and a rather unconvincing, and in my view analytically incoherent, account of East Asian transitions) and the long march of commercial capitalism (here he links together some theoretically uncomfortable bedfellows including Jairus Banaji, Giovanni Arrighi and Jason Moore). At base, the distinction between the two turns on (i) a presumption that the English model is uniquely denitive of agrarian capitalism, and (ii) a presumption that capital can take hold of labor through a wide range of social arrangements (i.e. a rejection of a unitary theory of a purportedly pure agrarian capitalism) which, as Bernstein properly notes, has the distinct advantage of seeing agrarian capitalism as a world historical process. Inevitably this leads Bernstein to a series of provocative questions well beyond the perimeter of agriculture per se but rather with the challenges of Marxist analysis tout court: distinctions between capital invested in production versus circulation, which forms of capital are capitalist, is labor power limited to proletarians? One wants, of course, to hear what Bernstein has to say about these things. . .. . .but he has to move on colonialism. In Chapter 3 Bernstein covers the histories of when and how capitalism developed as a world system [p. 39] (three phases of accumulation are identied: commercial capitalism in the sixteenth century, slave plantations and merchants capital in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and industrial capitalism and modern imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth) and how capital transformed agriculture regionally through dierent patterns of agrarian change. He makes excellent use of his own foundational work on labor regimes and concludes with several important qualications (pp. 5456) pertaining to how we think about full or partial proletarianization, free and unfree labor and forced commercialization (he might also have added here gender, on which he has little to say). He rightly concludes with a short discussion of the complexities of determining whether colonialism was necessary for the emergence of capitalism and whether and how imperial primitive accumulation did or did not make signicant contributions

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economic growth in Europe. It is less clear how these questions and others associated with capitalisms early history resonate with contemporary debates over agrarian transformations (peasant persistence? the peasant way to development? the existence of pre-capitalist agrarian communities?) in the global south. In the two following chapters Bernstein provides a synoptic account of the rise of a global (and industrial) agriculture, especially after the 1870s. Central to this discussion is the industrial basis of technical change, the formation of global agricultural markets and the centrality of an agrarian sector as an object of national and international policy. This story is, of course, well-trodden territory. It covers the American technical revolution in agriculture (Bernstein makes good use of Cronons (1991) Natures Metropolis) and the agro-industrial treadmill that was to underwrite the Green Revolution strategies of 1950s and 1960s agricultural modernization, and the rise (and periodization) of serial food regimes (using the well known work of Harriet Friedmann and Phil McMichael). Bernstein properly points to the importance of the post-1945 moment of agricultural modernization in the global south and the intersection of both technical innovation (important but uneven green revolutionary strategies and the commodication of subsistence) and state-centered developmentalist strategies, which simultaneously created captured state peasantries and an array of mechanisms for taxing peasants (for purposes of development, which often meant agrarian surpluses being diverted into political parties and personal accumulation by militaries and the political classes). All of this was blown wide-open, of course, by the neo-liberal counter-revolution of the 1980s and thereafter, which Bernstein encapsulates nicely as regards the agro-food sector (what he calls the ongoing and intensifying commodication of subsistence (p. 87)) and the collapse of the Second International Food Regime. There is much that could be said here. The food regime literature is used (in my view) in an uncritical way; the Green Revolution entailed a political and geopolitical undercurrent, which is not explored; indeed the Green Revolution itself is a bigger and more complex (and changeable) phenomenon than Bernstein suggests. After all, the recent International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) is a full-frontal assault on the Green Revolution model from within the ranks of the international agricultural establishment. There is no question that neo-liberalism has, and is, transforming the agro-food order the World Banks 2008 report, Agriculture for Development, made this crystal clear but precisely what sort of order it is other than pointing to its de-regulated and corporate form remains a challenging question. (Bernsteins discussion of the end of the peasantry and of the diversity of forms and dynamics associated with high value commodities, the revival of traditionals, the multiplication of contracting, the soy boom and new patterns of bilateral (China-Brazil) and multilateral trade suggests as much.) Whether what we are currently witnessing is a massive series of global enclosures (Bernstein cites Araghis work, but there is a raft of interest currently in global land grabs) strikes me as rather dubious. What gets folded into land grab is enormously variegated (sovereign wealth funds, retail capital, large scale infrastructure development, conservation schemes) and while the global climate change-energy/biofuels-food crisis since 2008 is important, it is not at all clear whether this is a purely conjectural phenomena a result of capital piling into commodity markets (and, more generally, of the transformation of the intersection of nance capital and commodity markets). Yet this is an arena that is hardly mentioned in Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change and barely understood within the eld of agrarian political economy. At the very

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least, if one wanted to look at agriculture and global land grabs, would we not start with China? You-tien Hsings (2010) remarkable new book The Great Urban Transformation suggests that 15% of the cultivable area has been lost to urban growth and the distinctively Chinese dynamics of real estate speculation. The nal two chapters for me the best in the book address the knotty problems of capitalist and non-capitalist farmers and, relatedly, of class dynamics in the countryside. Bernstein provides a careful and sophisticated analysis of the peasant persistence question linking the debate to Chayanov and Kautsky on selfexploitation and the domestic labor process, to what he has called the agrarian question of labor. He demonstrates convincingly the ways in which family labor can be harnessed under a variety of conditions (from local supermarkets to industrial poultry integrators) but emphasizes the key role played by politics (whether peasant resistance or at the level of class forces) and their contingencies which shape particular outcomes. There is an all too brief discussion of land reforms again one might have expected reference to Alain de Janvrys (1981) important theorization of Latin American land reforms in his The Agrarian Question and to the more recent resurgence of land politics making the point that reformism is a contradictory eort to stabilize small farmers as viable commodity producers (now, of course, draped in the neoliberal discourse of entrepreneurship and market vitality). Bernstein then turns to whether small farmers as commodity producers can be construed as a class or classes of labor. Dierentiation within commodity producers is treated in a nuanced way, doing justice to Bernsteins claim that tendencies to dierentiation are rooted in the multiple determinations of the contradictory unity of class places in petty commodity production. Drawing upon Mike Daviss (2006) brilliant account of the informal working class in the slum world in Planet of the Slums, Bernstein draws provocative parallels with the uid social boundaries linking on- and o-farm labor and complex combinations of wage and self employment in agriculture in the global south. Bernsteins concludes with a brief meditation on the complexities of class in the countryside. He wants to assert the importance of the fact that class relations are universal but not excusive determinations and yet retain, or keep in tension, the fact that forms of agrarian mobilization and movement formation are prismatic and often contradictory. It is pity that Bernstein did not have occasion to enter further into the robust literature on peasant revolutions, agrarian insurgencies and rebellion one thinks of the exciting new work of Paul Richards, Stathis Kalyvas and Jeremy Weinstein (to say nothing of the World Banks 2011 Report). Bernstein is, in my view, somewhat skeptical of the grandiose claims made about a global agrarian counter-movement and of a peasant way, questioning the conceptual foundations of any claims of a purported unity of landed peoples, and problematising how a common political project is constructed from the heterogeneous shards of new farmer movements. His critique, for me, opens up still larger questions about class and politics: not the least of which is what the dominance of nance implies for labor or for class politics more generally. Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change seeks to demonstrate that class is the indispensable starting point for a robust political economy of agriculture. Bernstein has staked out this ground in a sweeping and compelling way. It is evitable that a reader ends the book with more questions than he or she started with and perhaps with a sense of frustration at what little Bernstein sometimes has to say about the intriguing and challenging questions he poses. But it is a measure of the breadth,

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sophistication and brilliance of Bernsteins analysis that his theoretical project remains so compelling. Michael Watts University of California, Berkeley Email: mwatts@berkeley.edu 2012, Michael Watts References
Bernstein, H. 1977. Notes on capital and peasantry. Review of African Political Economy, 4(10), 6073. Cronon, W. 1991. Natures metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton. Davis, M. 2001. Planet of slums. London: Verso. Deere, C.D. and A. de Janvry. 1979. A conceptual framework for the empirical analysis of peasants. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 61(4), 60111. Hsing, Y. 2010. The great urban transformation: politics, land, and property in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Janvry, A. 1981. The agrarian question and reformism in Latin America. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. World Bank. 2011. World development report 2011: conict, security, and development. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. 2007. World development report 2008: agriculture for development. Washington, DC: World Bank.

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Gender and agrarian reforms, by Susie Jacobs, New York and London, Routledge, 2010, viii 256 pp., 70.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-415-37648-8 This comprehensive account of land and agrarian reforms worldwide provides a useful overview at a time when agricultural systems and productivity are coming back in focus with rising food prices, and environmental and social concerns associated with large scale agribusiness. Jacobs did original work in the 1980s in Zimbabwe, giving her rst-hand experience with one sort of state-led attempt at equitable reform. This book, however, draws on an extensive review of existing research on reforms around the world in an attempt to provide a macro picture of dierent models and contexts from which broad trends, trajectories and theoretical implications can be drawn. Jacobs particular focus is on the outcomes of reforms for women and gender relations, but this is anchored rmly in a broader discussion of the practical and ideological aims of reforms in various contexts. The book is divided into three parts and nine chapters. Part I engages with theoretical perspectives and debates relating both to agrarian reforms and feminist studies of rural womens status. Land reforms worldwide are classied as either collective or household/family types of programs, with the former associated mostly with states having undergone socialist or communist revolutions, and the latter both after failed collectivizations, and elsewhere as original models of reform. Debates have centred on issues of productivity and eciency, optimal sizes of land-holdings and public-vs-private tenure. History has taught clear lessons on some of these issues, for example showing that the Soviet assumption that