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Peasant prospects in the neoliberal age

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13563460600841041

1469-9923

Philip McMichael,

Political Economy and Marxism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size My thanks are due to Rajeev Patel for critical suggestions on an earlier version of this essay. Notes 1. Philip McMichael, 'The Concept of Primitive Accumulation; Lenin's Contribution', Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1977), pp. 497–512. 2. Bangalore Declaration of the Via Campesina, 6 October 2000, http://viacampesina.org/main_en/index.php?option = com_content&task = view&id = 53&Itemid = 28 3. Philip McMichael, 'Global Development and the Corporate Food Regime', in Frederick H. Buttel & Philip McMichael (eds), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (Elsevier, 2005), pp. 265–300. 4. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 2003). 5. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press, 1957). 6. Philip McMichael, Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, 3rd edn (Pine Forge Press, 2004). 7. Farshad Araghi, 'Global De-Peasantization, 1945–1990', The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 2 (1995), pp. 601–32. 8. Philip McMichael, 'Globalization', in Thomas Janoski, Robert Alford, Alexander Hicks & Mildred Schwartz (eds), The Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 587–606. 9. Hannah Wittman, The Social Ecology of Agrarian Reform: The Landless Rural Workers' Movement and Agrarian Citizenship in Mato Grosso, Brazil, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 2005. 10. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Progress Publishers, 1967), p. 632. 11. Philip McMichael, 'The Global Crisis of Wage Labour', Studies in Political Economy, No. 58 (1999), pp. 11–40. 12. K. Bensinger, 'Mexican corn comes a cropper', The Washington Times, 9 September 2003; Oxfam, 'Dumping without borders: how U.S. agricultural policies are destroying the livelihoods of Mexican corn farmers', Oxfam Briefing Paper No. 50 (2003), p. 19. 13. Cristobal Kay, 'Latin America's Agrarian Transformation: Peasantization and Proletarianization', in Deborah Bryceson, Cristóbal Kay & Jos Mooij (eds), Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Intermediate Technology Publications, 2000), pp. 123–38; and Sam Moyo & Paris Yeros, 'The Resurgence of Rural Movements under Neoliberalism', in Sam Moyo & Paris Yeros (eds), Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Zed Books, 2005), pp. 8–64. 14. Henry Bernstein, '"The Peasantry" in Global Capitalism: Who, Where, and Why?', in Leo Panitch & Colin Leys (eds), Socialist Register 2001: Working Classes Global Realities (Merlin Press, 2000), p. 40. 15. Henry Bernstein, '"Changing Before Our Very Eyes": Agrarian Questions and the Politics of Land in Capitalism Today', Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 4, Nos 1–2 (2004), pp. 190–225. 16. Ibid., p. 205. 17. Heather Johnson, 'Subsistence and Control: The Persistence of the Peasantry in the Developing World', Undercurrent, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2004), p. 54. 18. Ibid., p. 63. 19. Bernstein, '"Changing Before Our Very Eyes"', p. 202. 20. Susan George & Fabrizio Sabelli, Faith and Credit: The World Bank's Secular Empire (Westview, 1994), p. 147. 21. Sandra Halperin, 'Trans-Local and Trans-Regional Socio-Economic Structures in Global Development: A "Horizontal" Perspective', in Buttel & McMichael, New Directions, pp. 19–56. 22. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 645. 23. Thus: 'The analysis of "peasants" [concentrates] on peasant production as an economic form, agricultural petty commodity production, constituted by the class relations (and contradictions) of capital and labour and located in the shifting places of agriculture in the imperialist periphery within international divisions of labour.' Henry Bernstein, '"The Peasantry" in Global Capitalism', p. 40. 24. Ibid., p. 29. 25. Cf. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, 'Counter-Development in the Andes', The Ecologist, No. 27 (1997), pp. 221–4. 26. Philip McMichael, 'Globalization'; and Rajeev Patel, 'International Agrarian Restructuring and the Practical Ethics of Peasant Movement Solidarity', Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol. 41, Nos 1–2 (2006), pp. 71–93. 27. Farshad Araghi, 'Global De-Peasantization, 1945–1990', The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 2 (1995), p. 604. 28. Patel, 'International Agrarian Restructuring'. 29. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (Abacus, 1994), p. 289. 30. James Petras, 'Latin America: the Resurgence of the Left', New Left Review, No. 223 (1997), pp. 17–47; Gerardo Otero, Farewell to the Peasantry? Political Class Formation in Rural Mexico (Westview, 1999), p. 154; Marc Edelman, 'Bringing the Moral Economy Back In … to the Study of 21st Century Transnational Peasant Movements', American Anthropologist, Vol. 107, No. 3 (2005), pp. 331–45. 31. Saturnino M. Borras, Jr., 'Questioning Market-Led Agrarian Reform: Experiences from Brazil, Colombia and South Africa', Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2003), pp. 367–94. 32. Paul Nicholson (Basque Country) at the Second International Conference of the Vía Campesina, quoted in Annette-Aurélie Desmarais, 'The Vía Campesina: Consolidating an International Peasant and Farm Movement', The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2002), p. 96. 33. Nettie Wiebe, former President of the Canadian NFU and member of the Vía Campesina's International Coordinating Committee, quoted in Desmarais, 'The Vía Campesina', p. 98. 34. Samir Amin, 'World Poverty, Pauperization and Capital Accumulation', Monthly Review, Vol. 55, No. 5 (2003), p. 2. 35. John Vidal, 'Beyond the city limits', Guardian Weekly, 17–23 September 2003, pp. 17–8; Mike Davis, 'Planet of Slums', New Left Review, No. 26 (2004), pp. 5–34. 36. Philip McMichael, 'Rethinking Globalization: The Agrarian Question Revisited', Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1997), pp. 630–62. 37. Catherine S. Dolan, 'On Farm and Packhouse: Employment at the Bottom of a Global Value Chain', Rural Sociology, Vol. 69, No. 1 (2004), pp. 99–126. 38. Daniel Jaffee, Jack Kloppenburg, Jr. & Mario Monroy, 'Bringing the "Moral Charge" Home: Fair Trade within the North and within the South', Rural Sociology, Vol. 69, No. 2 (2004), pp. 169–96; David Barkin, 'The Reconstruction of a Modern Mexican Peasantry', The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2002), pp. 73–90. 39. Heather L. Williams, Social Movements and Economic Transition: Markets and Distributive Conflict in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2001). 40. Neil Harvey, The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy (Duke University Press, 1999), p. 28. 41. Christine E. Eber, 'Seeking Our Own Food. Indigenous Women's Power and Autonomy in San Pedro Chenalhó, Chiapas (1980–1998)', Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 26, No. 3 (1999), p. 16. 42. James Petras & Henry Veltmeyer, System in Crisis: The Dynamics of Free Market Capitalism (Zed, 2003), p. 195. 43. Judith Adler Hellman, 'Real and Virtual Chiapas: Magic Realism and the Left', in Leo Panitch & Colin Leys (eds), Socialist Register 2000: Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias (Merlin Press, 2000), pp. 161–86; and see the critique of peasant essentialism in Tom Brass, Peasants, Populism, and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth (Frank Cass, 2000). 44. Rachel Bezner-Kerr, 'Informal Labour and Social Relations in Northern Malawi: The Theoretical Challenges and Implications of Ganyu Labour for Food Security', Rural Sociology, Vol. 70, No. 2 (2005), pp. 167–87. 45. Wendy Wolford, 'Families, Fields, and Fighting for Land: The Spatial Dynamics of Contention in Rural Brazil', Mobilization: An International Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2003), p. 202. 46. Angus Wright & Wendy Wolford, To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil (FoodFirst Books, 2003), p. 329. 47. Annette Desmarais, The Via Campesina: Peasants Resisting Globalization, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Calgary, 2003. 48. Quoted in Saturnino M. Borras, Jr, 'La Vía Campesina: An Evolving Transnational Social Movement', Transnational Institute, Amsterdam, October 2004, p. 10, www.tni.org/reports/newpol/campesina/pdf 49. Cf. Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean (Routledge, 2003); Annette Desmarais, 'The Vía Campesina: Consolidating an International Peasant and Farm Movement', Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2002), pp. 91–124; and Edelman, 'Bringing the Moral Economy Back In'. 50. Echoing the early twentieth-century argument by Peter Kropotkin that the pre-eminent social question is the 'question of bread', Amory Starr proposes that the global anti-capitalist movement for 'diversity' is best summarised as 'agricultural': 'encompassing first world farmers seeking market protection, farmers resisting genetic engineering, indigenous sovereignty movements seeking to control land and practices, sustainable development, localist economic visions, and third world peasant movements reacting to the failures of urbanization and neoliberalism by insisting on rights to land and subsistence. These movements have a variety of relationships to political economy, formal democracy and existing nations. But none imagines that growth, modernization or technology provide answers to their problems; indeed they see corporate technology as economically and ecologically dangerous.' Amory Starr, Naming the Enemy: Anti-Corporate Movements Confront Globalization (Zed Books, 2001), p. 224; see also Farshad Araghi, 'The Great Global Enclosure of Our Times: Peasants and the Agrarian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century', in Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster & Frederick H. Buttel (eds), Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food and the Environment (Monthly Review Press, 1999), pp. 145–60. 51. James Scott, 'Afterword to "Moral Economies, State Spaces, and Categorical Violence"', American Anthropologist, Vol. 107, No. 3 (2005), p. 397. 52. McMichael, 'Globalization', p. 598. 53. Cf. Rajeev Patel, 'Transgressing Rights: Via Campesina's call for Food Sovereignty', Feminist Economics (forthcoming); note this is particularly the case for agricultural workers, more than half of whom are women and who comprise a third of the 1.3 billion people actively engaged in agricultural production (half of the world's labour force), concentrated in the global South, and as high as 80 per cent of the workforce in some countries, International Union of Food, The WTO and the World Food System: a Trade Union Approach (International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations, 2002), p. 3.