Editors Introduction 341

Book Review Agrarian South: Journal of

Political Economy
1(3) 341346
2012 Centre for Agrarian Research
and Education for South (CARES)
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi, Singapore,
Washington DC
DOI: 10.1177/227797601200100305
http://ags.sagepub.com

Henry Bernstein (2010). Class dynamics of agrarian change.

Halifax, NS, and Sterling, VA: Fernwood Publishing and
Kumarian Press. Paperback ISBN: 9781552663493. Price:
CAD$ 17.95.146 pp.

Sociologist and scholar of agrarian studies, Henry Bernstein is the former

editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies (18952000) and founding
editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change (200108). For four decades,
he has been at the forefront of North Atlantic debates on the agrarian
question, distinguishing himself as a theorist of agrarian sociology and
African political economy. His new book is the inaugural volume of a
series on the agrarian question published by Fenwood Publishers in
Canada and Kumarian Press in the United States.
As would have been expected of a veteran scholar, Bernsteins treat-
ment of the class dynamics of agrarian change is driven by an ambition
to draw macro-historical and inter-regional comparisons and elaborate
concepts with universal appeal. Nevertheless, his approach reveals an
economistic and indeed, Eurocentric vocation, manifest in the pure
notions of capitalism which he espouses and his nonrecognition of the
specificity of peripheral capitalism.
The book is divided into eight chapters. After a brief introduction, the
author embarks in Chapter 1 on an elaboration of Marxist concepts
related to the division of labour, accumulation, exploitation and repro-
duction under the capitalist mode of production. The exposition has a
didactic style, whose purpose is ostensibly to present the basic concepts
in accessible language. However, this purpose is undermined from early
on by a partial presentation of concepts and an economistic bias.
342 Book Review

The author, seemingly in Leninist fashion, seeks to abstract the capital-

labour relation from the social and political impurities that influence
the concrete process of accumulation. What goes missing is precisely a
fair treatment of the diversity of Marxist perspectives on the develop-
ment of capitalism, including the diversity inspired by Leninism.
Thus, it would have been useful to include references to Luxemburgs
critique of self-contained capitalism and the extensive debates on prim-
itive accumulation; the tradition drawing on Lenin/Bukharin on monop-
oly capitalism (which appears in passing as late as Chapter 3) and its
relevance to the agrarian question; and the equally historic contributions,
emanating from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, on the centre-
periphery contradiction and the relationship between the agrarian and
national questions. Missing also is the obligatory prior question to any
conceptual discussion: What is the agrarian question today? In recent
years, the author has provoked a stir, especially in Africa and Asia where
his work is best known, for arguing that the classical agrarian question,
including its land component, has ended. Oddly enough, in this book
there is no explicit reference to this thesis, or to the critiques thereof, or
to any other discernible proposal for the twenty-first century.
Chapters 2 and 3 present the diverse trajectories of capitalism in the
countryside, from its English and other European origins to those of
Asian and other Southern regions marked by the colonial experience.
Here, the author counterposes two analytical tendencies not flagged in
the theoretical chapter: the conventional, which generalizes the purity
of the English path and relegates the rest, especially those of the South,
to pre-capitalist stages; and another which relaxes the concept of capi-
talism to contemplate the functional relationship between capitalist
expansion and apparently pre- or non- capitalist social relations. The
author presents these two approaches without taking sides, ostensibly in
the interest of debate. Yet, the conceptual tools elaborated in Chapter 1
already preclude fair consideration of the second tendency.
Bernsteins economistic bias becomes clearer in the subsequent dis-
cussion on the agrarian transition in Latin America, where the author
presents one single perspective (by reference to one single scholar)
which likens the colonial regime in Latin America to European feudal-
ism. It should have at least been acknowledgedfor didactic purposes,
if nothing elsethat this basically Soviet version of the purity thesis
came under sustained challenge in Latin America from the 1960s

Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1, 3 (2012): 341346

Book Review 343

onwards, by a whole generation of intellectuals and activists drawn to

dependency theory. In the case of Africa and Asia, the author persists
with the same minimum-reference strategy, recurring to one or two
authors, who despite their importance, do not, by any means, reflect the
richness of the debates on these two continents.
It is worth adding that Bernsteins analysis limits itself to capitalist
transitions, at the exclusion of the socialist, such as the Soviet and the
Chinese, despite the political and intellectual influence they exercised in
the twentieth century. In a book that intends to be didactic, it would have
been useful to at least alert the younger generation to the existence of
such debates.
The author completes Chapter 3 by considering the contribution of
colonialism to the expansion of capitalism in Europe and especially to
the Industrial Revolution. Without much ado, he concludes that colonial-
ism was not a sufficient condition for such expansion. This conclusion
might not, in itself, be problematic, but the real question remains unan-
swered: what is the function of the periphery? The author avoids such a
challenge, which would draw him directly into a discussion on imperial-
ism and makes only superficial reference to the debate regarding the
blocking, or not, of development in the periphery.
Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to the evolution of the global agro-
food regime since 1870. The author briefly outlines the contributions of
Philip McMichael and Harriet Friedmann, and divides the regime in
three periods: 18701914, 194070 and 1980 to the present. This would
have been one of those necessary discussions, given that the global
determinants of the agrarian question have so oftenas abovebeen
marginalized in North Atlantic debates. Nonetheless, the recuperation of
the global via regime theory does not compensate for the silences on
imperialism. The concept of regime has not obtained the necessary
conceptual rigour, given its retreat into discrete issue areas (the agro-
food system, in this case) and isolation from the broader power relations
which give form and substance to the imperialist system.
To take just one example, in the case of the second regime (post-
WWII), its characterization as mercantilist-industrial does not properly
recognize the tectonic movements brought about by national liberation
struggles, against monopoly capitalism, including the pioneering experi-
ence of de-linking in China. More precisely, what is missing is an under-
standing of the Cold War as the key systemic rivalry, between evolved

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344 Book Review

monopoly capitalism and struggles to delink, which determined the tra-

jectory of the agro-food system. Perhaps inadvertently, the author recog-
nizes this, contrary to the implications of regime theory, when he
concludes that the fall of the second regime owed to the end of the
Cold War!
This is all a strange debate which, despite the welcome research that
it has produced by McMichael and Friedmann, has indeed been subject
to constructive critiquereaders might consult the introductory chapter
to Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (Eds), Reclaiming the land: the resurgence
of rural movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America (London and Cape
Town: Zed Books and David Philip, 2005), a book to which Bernstein
contributed, and of which he cannot claim ignorance. One might wonder:
what didactic purpose does it serve not to recognize and respond to
critique?
Another question raised at the end of Chapter 5 refers to the disap-
pearance of the peasantry thesis and the struggles for reproduction in the
countryside. Once again, the author pretends to be impartial on the
matter, without openly taking sides. Yet, his wish for a post-peasant
world is palpable and he clearly reveals his aversion to those who defend
the peasantry, by lumping them together and dismissing them as agrar-
ian populists. Clearly, the author does not see in the defense of the peas-
antry a possible anti-imperialist project; his notion of transition to
socialism is as pure as his notion of transition to capitalism.
The authors thinking on this issue is elaborated in Chapters 6, 7 and
8, which are dedicated to the social and political dimensions of contem-
porary rural society. The author here presents his theory of complex
variations, situating the post-peasant rural population in a diversity of
class situations, from salaried labour to petty-commodity production and
a diversity of other relations, namely of gender, ethnicity, and race. This
belated attempt to grapple with the class and ideological complexities of
capitalism, tinged with concessions to post-structuralism, in no way
absolves Bernstein of economism: for the diversity in question is
simply added on to pure capitalism. On the one hand, the so-called
peasantry has for long been in a flux, reproducing itself not as an indeter-
minate post-peasantry, but as a semi-proletariat, structurally necessary
and permanent to peripheral capitalism. On the other hand, the question
of identity has been intrinsic to the expansion of the system, never an
add on, as well as to the social forces that have opposed it. Yet, we are

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Book Review 345

left with a picture of rural politics in a structural vacuum, where identi-

ties do not appear to have any special ideological function, or signifi-
cance for social struggle, or indeed any notable strategic objective among
their diverse demands, which so often, we know, is the control of land.
Such conceptual shortcomings have further consequences, as in the
authors understanding of the land question itself. In his previous writ-
ings on land reform in the postwar period, the author has downplayed the
social basis of land struggles, to portray land reform as the result of a
redistributive political will, differently from the current neoliberal
period in which such will has dissipated. This book recounts the same
narrative, divested of class struggle or systemic logic, and surrendered to
its mysterious variations. But the key questions, known to the author,
do not themselves surrender: what was the relation of forces that pro-
duced, from one continent to the next, such diverse outcomes in land
reform? What was the relationship between reform and revolution, given
the systemic pressure which the latter generated? Why did the United
States, in particular, support certain land reforms, including radical land
reforms in East Asia, against the will of local ruling classes, while sup-
pressing and combatting others, as in Latin America and Africa, in line
with ruling classes there? A theory of complex variations is a poor
guide to the history of the land question.
The theory also falls short of explaining contemporary land politics.
More reflection would have been necessary on the nature of the expand-
ing global reserve army of labour; this has added to the ranks of the semi-
proletariat and escalated its struggle for land, both rural and urban. The
author makes only passing reference to the concept of semi-proletarian-
ization, with no desire to engage. This concept has, in fact, constituted a
critique of his complex variations thesis, by stressing the systemic
character of super-exploitation in the periphery and the continuing
importance of land as a political and economic resource.
The author moves on to a discussion of contemporary social struggles
in the countryside, which he essentially reduces to the MST in Brazil and
Via Campesina. This amounts to another bland discussion, again based
on a minimum of references, grossly inadequate in themselves and
restricted to the work of researchers in the North writing about the South.
Bernsteins only discernible preoccupation here seems to be with
the populism of these movements, not their real tactical, strategic, or

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346 Book Review

ideological dilemmas, or indeed their failure to make headway on the

land question at a time in which land struggles are escalating.
It is noteworthy, in this surreal debate, that the author avoids discuss-
ing a rural movement which did make headway, specifically in
Zimbabwe, to obtain the most comprehensive land reform since the end
of the Cold Warthe period supposedly superseding land reform!
Empirical evidence has now confirmed the breadth and depth of
Zimbabwes land reform, permitting comparisons with the other great
land reforms of the twentieth century, including the Mexican, Russian,
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Cuban, and Mozambican. The
author has ample knowledge of the Zimbabwe debate; he has partici-
pated in it as an intellectual adversary of the land reform. What purpose
does it now serve to smother this unique and instructive debate, and to
divert attention to the non-debate of populism in the MST?
Finally, the book does not address the new scramble for land in the
South, a process gaining momentum over the last quarter-century. This
grave oversight follows logically from his exotic thesis (not explicitly
repeated here) that the agrarian question, especially of capital, has
ended. Yet, monopoly-finance capital is now in overdrive, with the
ominous potential of undermining further the economic basis of whole
regions, for decades to come. Can we really come to grips with the class
dynamics of agrarian change without taking into account this new impe-
rialist assault?
This book should be read widely, not despite its shortcomings, but
because of them. It is a clear example of stubborn academic imperialism,
of the Marxist variety, which, half a century after decolonization, remains
full of silences and evasions and contempt for researchers and debates in
the South. One can only hope that the new generation of researchers in
the North Atlantic, in these times of crisis, will take sincere interest in the
agrarian question as a North-South relation and show the solidarity nec-
essary to think through, collectively, the long transition to socialism.

Paris Yeros
Adjunct Professor of International Economics at the Federal
University of ABC, So Paulo, Brazil
Email: parisyeros@gmail.com

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