Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Weapons of the week, weakness of the weapons: Shifts and stasis in development theory

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03066150601120049

1743-9361

Tom Brass,

Global trade, sustainability, and social impact

Abstract Over the past half century the theory, practice and politics informing development studies have followed contrasting trajectories, a tangled epistemological pattern displayed inadvertently by some of the contributions to three of the four books reviewed here. This inconsistency has resulted in confusion, not least where current Marxist approaches to the agrarian question are concerned. Unsurprisingly, therefore, misinterpretations of unfree labour plus the jettisoning of class analysis have led to the abandonment of socialism, and its replacement with nationalism and bourgeois democracy as desirable political objectives. By locating rural class formation and agrarian struggle in a global capitalist context, however, one of the four books demonstrates the continuing importance of socialist politics to the study of development. Notes 1 The impact on development studies of prevailing intellectual fashion is an issue that, for obvious reasons, still awaits a chronicler. When considered, the reason for a change of opinion is subject to a classic form of displacement: from the context of the viewer him/herself to that of the viewed. Its cause is invariably – and wrongly – attributed simply to exogenous factors, such as a new dynamic or a new set of circumstances operating in or affecting the area studied. 2 For an amusing depiction of a fictional university department in the US colonized by postmodern theorists, see the novel by Hynes [2001 Hynes, James. 2001. The Lecturer's Tale, New York: Picador USA. [Google Scholar]]. A description of a star academic theorist conveys humorously (but accurately) the stasis that is an inevitable outcome of postmodern aporia [Hynes, 2001 Hynes, James. 2001. The Lecturer's Tale, New York: Picador USA. [Google Scholar]: 204]: ‘In a discipline where scholarly heft was defined by being more postcolonial than thou [the theorist] was the heftiest of the lot. As a graduate student at an Ivy League school he had announced to his dissertation committee that doctoral theses at major Western universities were a primary locus of the objectifying colonialist gaze on native subjects, and he refused on principle to participate in the marginalization of indigenous voices or to become complicit with the hegemonic discourse of Western postcolonial cultural imperialism. In practice, this meant that for six years he refused to take classes, attend seminars, or write a dissertation. As a result of this ideologically engaged non-participation, he was offered tenured positions even before he had his Ph.D., but by refusing to write a book or any articles on his topic – publishing with major university presses being even more complicit with imperialism than writing dissertations – he provoked a fierce bidding war. Columbia won by offering him an endowed chair and a full professorship, and on Morningside Heights he courageously continued his principled refusal to teach any classes, hold any office hours, publish any books, serve on any committees, or supervise any dissertations. For this demanding and theoretically sophisticated subaltern intervention in the dominant discourse, [the theorist] made well into the six figures, more money than the president of the United States.’ 3 It is perhaps significant that an espousal of systemically unspecific democracy prefigured the abandonment of socialism by those associated with ‘The God that Failed’[Koestler et al., 1950 Koestler, Arthur, Silone, Ignazio, Gide, André, Wright, Richard, Fischer, Louis and Spender, Stephen. 1950. The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism, London: Hamish Hamilton. [Google Scholar]]. One of the contributors [Koestler, 1944 Koestler, Arthur. 1944. ‘The Intelligentsia’. Horizon, 9(No.51) [Google Scholar]: 176] had a short while earlier accepted that ‘conformism is often a form of betrayal which can be carried out with a perfectly clear conscience; and the temptation to exchange the miseries which intellectual honesty entails for the heart-warming satisfactions of [bourgeois] efficiency is great. The collapse of the revolutionary movement has put the intelligentsia into a defensive position; the alternative for the next few years is no more “capitalism or revolution” but to save some of the values of democracy … or lose them all; and to prevent this happening one has to cling more than ever to the ragged banner of “independent thinking”’ (original emphasis). This kind of justification (‘to save some of the values of democracy’) is repeated almost exactly by many ‘new’ postmodern populists in their discourse of disillusion. 4 Three of these Marxist dissidents were – and are – associated with this journal: Petras and Veltmeyer, on which see more below, and Brass [1991 Brass, Tom. 1991. ‘Moral Economists, Subalterns, New Social Movements and the (Re-) Emergence of a (Post-) Modernized Middle Peasant’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 18(No.2)[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]]. Excluded from the criticisms made here is Beverley [2004 Beverley, John. 2004. ‘Subaltern Resistance in Latin America: A Reply to Tom Brass’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 31(No.2)[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]], who, unlike other converts to postmodernism, has not only acknowledged a change of mind but also attempted to confront the theoretical issues raised by this. Disagreement with his current espousal of postmodern theory [Brass, 2006 Brass, Tom. 2006. ‘Subaltern Resistance and the (“Bad”) Politics of Culture: A Response to John Beverley’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 33(No.2)[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]] should not detract from this fact. 5 That followers of this third path were among the participants in a conference the objective of which, according to the editors of the Agrarian Studies volume (Ramachandran and Swaminathan, p.xi – emphasis added), ‘was to provide a forum for discussion and debate on new theoretical and empirical research from a left perspective on agrarian relations in less-developed countries’, is ironic indeed. 6 It is impossible to surmise from the confident assertion about how old and well-known are ‘elegiac accounts of the loss of rural ways of life, or of the despoliation and neglect of the countryside’, that one of the authors [Corbridge and Jones, 2005 Corbridge, Stuart and Jones, Gareth A. 2005. “‘The Continuing Debate About Urban Bias: Its Critics, Its Influence, and Implications for Poverty Reduction’”. London Report for the Department for International Development (DfID) [Google Scholar]: 1] is the same person who a decade earlier missed precisely the longevity and pervasiveness of this very ideology when endorsing its latest manifestation, in the form of the ‘new’ postmodern populism. Then, the same author [Corbridge, 1994 Corbridge, Stuart. 1994. “‘Post-Marxism and Post-Colonialism: The Needs and Rights of Distant Strangers’”. In Rethinking Social Development: Theory, Research and Practice, Edited by: Booth, David. Harlow: Longman Scientific & Technical. [Google Scholar]: 91] wrote just as confidently: ‘I acknowledge the power of the populist and post-modernist turns [and] the power of the post-modernist critique in regard to questions of difference and representation.’ Among those writing about peasants whose approach to the study of development underwent a similar kind of shift – from 1970s critic to a more benign view of populism in the early 1990s, and once again to critic in the late 1990s – was Lehmann. Whereas 1970s texts by Lehmann [1974b Lehmann, David A. 1974b. “‘Introduction’”. Edited by: Lehmann, David A. [1974][Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]; 1978 Lehmann, David A. 1978. ‘The Death of Land Reform: A Polemic’. World Development, 6(No.3)[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]] contain many endorsing references to the existence and importance of class and class conflict, and are generally dismissive of populism (=‘airborne narodnism’), by the early 1990s he had made his peace with populism. Thus Lehmann [1990 Lehmann, David A. 1990. Democracy and Development in Latin America, Cambridge: Polity Press. [Google Scholar]] is a paean to the virtues of non-specific grassroots agency (basismo) guided by NGOs, the epitome of a populist approach to development, whilst elsewhere he observes [Lehmann, 1993 Lehmann, David A. 1993. Review of Rowe and Schelling. Memory and Modernity, in Journal of Latin American Studies, 25 Part 3 [Google Scholar]: 694] that a book under review was ‘a touch too populistic’, but dismisses this as ‘a minor reservation’. By the late 1990s, however, Lehmann [1997 Lehmann, David A. 1997. ‘An Opportunity Lost: Escobar's Deconstruction of Development’. The Journal of Development Studies, 33(No.4)[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]] had declared postmodernism wanting. Yet another example is Michael J. Watts, a geographer who writes about African development. At the start of the 1980s, in what is a staple of populist discourse, he [Watts, 1983 Watts, Michael J. 1983. Silent Violence: Food, Famine and the Peasantry in Northern Nigeria, Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press. [Google Scholar]] was extolling the virtues of what he took to be a pre-capitalist peasant subsistence ethic operating in northern Nigeria, categorized by him as an instance of ‘moral economy’. Nearly two decades later, by contrast, Watts [2000 Watts, Michael J. 2000. “‘Poverty and the Politics of Alternatives at the End of the Millennium’”. In Global Futures: Shaping Globalization, Edited by: Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. London: Zed Books. [Google Scholar]] – like Corbridge and Lehmann – is critical of the postmodern attack on development by ‘the millenarian populists, the romantics’. 7 Why two contributions to the volume edited by Moyo and Yeros (by Ampuero and Brittain, and by Veltmeyer) are regarded as the sole exceptions to this and the following criticisms is outlined below. 8 To say, as does the editor of A Radical History of Development Studies, that the volume ‘is a radical chronicle because it includes plural conceptions of development history and adopts a critical perspective towards, and engagement with, orthodoxies of development theory and practice’ (Kothari, p.1), is to say nothing, since stated thus the term remains politically meaningless. In short, it fails to differentiate between a ‘critical perspective’ of development that emanates from the political left and one that originates from the discourse of the political right. Both are covered by the spuriously progressive (and hence slippery) concept ‘radical’, and the volume simply repeats the same mistake as an earlier volume on the same subject [Horowitz, de Castro, and Gerassi, 1969 Horowitz, Irving Louis, de Castro, Josué and Gerassi, John, eds. 1969. Latin American Radicalism, London: Jonathan Cape. [Google Scholar]], the difference being that now there is no longer any excuse for making this kind of error. That Kothari is wholly unaware of the different politics structuring this rubric is evident from her categorization as radical not just Marxist theory but also ‘post-colonial and feminist perspectives and analyses’, and the classification of them all as ‘thinking from the “left”’. Unlike Marxism, both post-colonial and feminist essentialisms have strong roots in conservative discourse (on which see Brass [2000 Brass, Tom. 2000. Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth, London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass. [Google Scholar]; 2003 Brass, Tom. 2003. “‘On Which Side of What Barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere’”. In Latin American Peasants, Edited by: Brass, Tom. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass. [Google Scholar]; 2006 Brass, Tom. 2006. ‘Subaltern Resistance and the (“Bad”) Politics of Culture: A Response to John Beverley’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 33(No.2)[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]]). An inability on the part of its editor to spot this difference augurs badly for the rest of A Radical History of Development Studies, a misgiving that is indeed borne out. 9 In the case of Moyo, this difficulty is prefigured in an earlier paper on the land question in Africa, where he incorrectly cites the editors of a special issue of this journal. In the bibliography of that paper [Moyo, 2003 Moyo, Sam. . ‘The Land Question in Africa: Research Perspectives and Questions’. paper presented at Conferences in Botswana and Senegal (October–December). [Google Scholar]: 30], he mistakenly attributes the production of the special issue in question to one editor, Bernstein, whereas it actually had two [Bernstein and Brass, 1996/97 Bernstein, Henry. 1996/97. “‘Agrarian Questions’”. Edited by: Brass, Tom. a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.24, Nos.1 & 2 [Google Scholar]]. 10 This criticism applies also to other accounts of the development debate published recently. Among the more questionable assertions rebutted in this journal of late are claims to have participated in the critique of the Asian subaltern studies project, to have argued all along that postmodernism was politically reactionary, and to have insisted from the outset that capitalism was compatible with unfree labour. 11 Although unintended, the effect is to replicate post-1924 historiography in the USSR about the Russian Revolution, based on the absence of a narrative distinction between those who had been peripheral figures and those who had actually discharged heroic roles. 12 One remedy lies with publishers generally, the editors of which should seek to tighten up their refereeing procedures so as henceforth to ensure that contributors to edited volumes possess at least a basic level of competence where the relevant literature on development studies is concerned. 13 Although their remit is populist discourse with particular reference to Africa, Woodhouse and Chimhowu somehow manage to overlook not just earlier texts on this subject [Kofi, 1978 Kofi, Tetteh A. 1978. “‘Peasants and Economic Development: Populist Lessons for Africa’”. Edited by: Smith, Alan K. and Welch, Claude E. Jr. [1978] [Google Scholar]], but also the classic article on African populism by Saul [1969 Saul, John S. 1969. “‘Africa’”. In Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics, Edited by: Ionescu, Ghiţa and Gellner, Ernest. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. [Google Scholar]]. Unsurprisingly, much of what is found in the latter analysis is encountered also in (but not transcended by) their own contribution. Similarly absent is another seminal text, published over a decade ago in this journal: that by Jackson [1993 Jackson, Cecile. 1993. ‘Women/Nature or Gender/History? A Critique of Ecofeminist “Development”’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 20(No.3)[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]] dealing with environmentalism, gender and populism. That such lacunae occur in a volume the stated intention of which is ‘to stimulate new thinking on where the discipline may be moving’ is scarcely credible. It also invites a riposte that – on this evidence – development studies shows no sign of movement, never mind travelling with a particular destination in mind. 14 The claim to be ‘the first ever student of development’ accurately captures the flavour of this contribution. Its egocentric focus and narrow timeframe result in a corresponding failure to recognize that the study of socio-economic development, its causes and effects, has a very long lineage, stretching far back into history. To confine the study of development to the formally constituted academic rubric of development studies is rather like saying that the study of art and literature had no existence before the foundation of art colleges and university literature departments. 15 Much development theory of the kind Harriss currently favours assumes that the causes of underdevelopment and rural poverty are basically ones of knowledge. If only those in the state apparatus of capitalist nations really understood the true nature of the problem, this discourse proclaims, they would very quickly change policies for the better. Such a view is naïf, in that it overlooks or downplays the main reason why the capitalist state fails either to promulgate or – where promulgated – to implement plans/policies that actually are advantageous to poor peasants and agricultural labourers: namely, the political power in national or international contexts of those classes that own/control the means of production/distribution/exchange. For Harriss [2002b Harriss, John. 2002b. Depoliticizing Development: The World Bank and Social Capital, London: Wimbledon Publishing Company. [Google Scholar]], therefore, the capitalist state remains a potentially disinterested – and thus benign – agent in the development process, capable/desirous of and indeed willing to engineer fundamental transformation. What adherents of this approach fail to realize is that without the expropriation of landowners and agribusiness enterprises on the one hand, and the capture of state power by workers and poor peasants on the other, fundamental transformation is either off the political agenda or stays only on paper. Much the same point has been made in an interesting article by Das [2005 Das, Raju. 2005. ‘Rural Society, the State and Social Capital in Eastern India: A Critical Investigation’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 32(No.1)[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]] on the state and social capital in India. 16 This very point was made in a critical review article published a decade ago [Brass, 1995 Brass, Tom. 1995. ‘Old Conservatism in “New” Clothes’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 22(No.3)[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]: 517–18], and strangely is the only argument in that critique which Harriss chose not to heed. However, this same misplaced faith in the efficacy of piecemeal solutions has found a new champion. In his contribution to the volume edited by Kothari, it is Bernstein (p.111, original emphasis) who now advocates the importance to development studies of ‘applied knowledge of practical benefit in the formulation and implementation of development policies and interventions’. In this regard, still relevant are the comments made by Common [1992 Common, Jack. 1992/[1933]. Fake Left, London: Working Press. [Google Scholar]: 3, 5] of the pressures to conform brought to bear on certain groups/individuals belonging to the political left in the 1930s: ‘The socialist has the special problem of holding onto his vision of a world which is not yet, while maintaining himself in an environment which makes vision a handicap and tempts him to abandon it. What is behind the socialist parties and what assures their final victory is this vision of a new world; what ruins them all is that they must prove practical utility in the present capitalist day if they are to live at all. … Hence we have in this country a nominal Left which is incapable of supplying ideas of a revolutionizing character, Marxist and revolutionary though it is in its literature and in a literary way’. 17 When considering the same issue elsewhere in the collection edited by Kothari – namely, why was it that the study of development ‘has not only survived the current period of neo-liberal ascendancy … but has prospered in British universities’ – Bernstein (p.115) also overlooks this simple explanation. Development studies thrived in part because of a willingness on the part of its practitioners to apply market ‘solutions’ to problems of underdevelopment. The extent to which this connection eludes Bernstein is evident from a subsequent observation that, although the ‘wider intellectual, and political, understanding of development as a process of struggle and conflict’ has been ‘lost’, ‘such oppositional thinking thrives outside the institutional spheres and practices of development studies’ (pp.119, 134 note 17). The unintended irony structuring this observation – that political dissent vanished from the academy only to reappear on the streets – underlines as precisely as possible the point being made here (the rightwards turn taken by development studies), and thus requires no further comment. 18 See, for example, Harriss [1982a Harriss, John. 1982a. Capitalism and Peasant Farming: Agrarian Structure and Ideology in Northern Tamil Nadu, Bombay: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]; 1982b Harriss, John. 1982b. “‘Introduction’”. In Rural Development: Theories of Peasant Economy and Agrarian Change, Edited by: Harriss, John. London: Hutchinson University Library. [Google Scholar]]. At this period, therefore, one encounters the application by Harriss [1982 Harriss, John. 1982b. “‘Introduction’”. In Rural Development: Theories of Peasant Economy and Agrarian Change, Edited by: Harriss, John. London: Hutchinson University Library. [Google Scholar]: 204ff., 282ff.] to rural Tamil Nadu of a Marxist analytical framework. Elsewhere his view [Harriss, 1982b Harriss, John. 1982b. “‘Introduction’”. In Rural Development: Theories of Peasant Economy and Agrarian Change, Edited by: Harriss, John. London: Hutchinson University Library. [Google Scholar]: 23] was that Marxism ‘seems to be most appropriate for studies relating to rural development (both as policy and process) because it is inherently inter-disciplinary, and because of all the approaches that we have reviewed it is the one which is most centrally concerned with issues of distribution and with poverty.’ In his contribution to the volume edited by Kothari under review here, Harriss (p.24) accepts that initially he subscribed to ‘a self-conscious project of restoring the unity of social science, around a broadly Marxist perspective’. 19 Details about this particular shift are set out in a critical review of the ‘impasse’ position [Brass, 1995 Brass, Tom. 1995. ‘Old Conservatism in “New” Clothes’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 22(No.3)[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]]. Despite having contributed to a volume [Booth, 1994 Booth, David, ed. 1994. Rethinking Social Development: Theory, Research and Practice, Harlow, Essex: Longman Scientific & Technical. [Google Scholar]] espousing the notion of a development ‘impasse’, and arguing strongly [Harriss, 1994 Harriss, John. 1994. “‘Between Economism and Post-modernism: Reflections on Research on “Agrarian Change” in India’”. Edited by: Booth, David. [1994] [Google Scholar]: 173] that the debate about agrarian change in India was indeed at an ‘impasse’, Harriss nevertheless felt able to write about the ‘impasse’ debate shortly thereafter [Harriss, 1998 Harriss, John. 1998. ‘Development Studies and the Development of India: An Awkward Case?’. Oxford Development Studies, 26(No.3)[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]: 294–5] almost as though it had nothing to do with him. 20 This emerges most clearly in two contributions by Harriss, both published in the early 1990s. ‘The study of agrarian change’, Harriss [1994 Harriss, John. 1994. “‘Between Economism and Post-modernism: Reflections on Research on “Agrarian Change” in India’”. Edited by: Booth, David. [1994] [Google Scholar]: 180–81] proclaimed at that conjuncture, ‘thus points to the limitations of conventional Marxian political economy because of the way in which, by its reduction of politics to economics, it consistently fails to account for politics.’ His own position, he accepted [Harriss, 1994 Harriss, John. 1994. “‘Between Economism and Post-modernism: Reflections on Research on “Agrarian Change” in India’”. Edited by: Booth, David. [1994] [Google Scholar]: 192], now had ‘explicit continuities with the work of some members of the Subaltern School of Indian historians and with that of James Scott.’ Allegiance to the ‘new’ populist postmodernism is stated finally and unequivocally [Harriss, 1994 Harriss, John. 1994. “‘Between Economism and Post-modernism: Reflections on Research on “Agrarian Change” in India’”. Edited by: Booth, David. [1994] [Google Scholar]: 193] when agreeing that his interpretation ‘owes something to the influence of post-modernist “deconstruction” of concepts such as that of class.’ In another edited volume [Harriss, Hunter, and Lewis, 1995 Harriss, John, Hunter, Janet and Lewis, Colin M., eds. 1995. The New Institutional Economics and Third World Development, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]], he declares a new-found enthusiasm for the ‘new institutional economics’ (NIE), a choice-theoretic, scarcity-assuming development paradigm associated with the work of the neo-classical economists such as Douglass North (see North [1990 North, Douglass C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; 1997 North, Douglass C. 1997. “‘Understanding Economic Change’”. In Transforming Post-Communist Political Economies, Edited by: Nelson, Joan M., Tilly, Charles and Walker, Lee. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. [Google Scholar]] and Wallis and North [1986 Wallis, John J. and North, Douglass C. 1986. “‘Measuring the Transaction Sector in the American Economy, 1870–1970’”. In Income and Wealth: Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth, Edited by: Engermann, Stanley M. and Gallman, Robert. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]]). 21 Those Marxists of the ‘I told you so’ variety who – against the grain – wrote critiques during the early 1990s of the ‘new’ populist postmodernism were Petras [1990 Petras, James. 1990. ‘Retreat of the Intellectuals’. Economic and Political Weekly, 25(No.38) [Google Scholar]] and Brass [1991 Brass, Tom. 1991. ‘Moral Economists, Subalterns, New Social Movements and the (Re-) Emergence of a (Post-) Modernized Middle Peasant’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 18(No.2)[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; 1995 Brass, Tom. 1995. ‘Old Conservatism in “New” Clothes’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 22(No.3)[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]]. For the epistemological link between on the one hand postmodernism, and on the other the subaltern studies project, the new social movements framework and the ‘everyday forms of resistance’ theory associated with James Scott, see Brass [2000 Brass, Tom. 2000. Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth, London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass. [Google Scholar]]. 22 For this particular identity, see Harriss [2002a Harriss, John. . ‘Reactionary Reinventions of Indian Democracy’. unpublished paper presented at the Centre for Development and Environment. October18. Copenhagen: University of Oslo. [Google Scholar]] and – especially – Corbridge and Harriss [2000 Corbridge, Stuart and Harriss, John. 2000. Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy, Oxford: Polity Press. [Google Scholar]]. A critical analysis of all the claims made in the latter text, and especially those about having been a long-standing critic of the ‘new’ populist postmodernism, can be found in a review published in this journal (JPS, Vol.29, No.1, October 2001, pp.182–91). The extent of the shift can be gauged from a simple comparison of two statements. One, made in the mid-1990s and already cited (see above), was the acceptance by Harriss [1994 Harriss, John. 1994. “‘Between Economism and Post-modernism: Reflections on Research on “Agrarian Change” in India’”. Edited by: Booth, David. [1994] [Google Scholar]: 192, 193] that his view exhibited ‘explicit continuities with the work of some members of the Subaltern School of Indian historians and with that of James Scott [and] owes something to the influence of post-modernist “deconstruction”’. The other, made eight years later, was the belated recognition by Harriss [2002a Harriss, John. . ‘Reactionary Reinventions of Indian Democracy’. unpublished paper presented at the Centre for Development and Environment. October18. Copenhagen: University of Oslo. [Google Scholar]: 9] that ‘a post-modern refusal to accept “external” guidelines for political action or negotiation leaves the armoury of anti-secularism bare when it comes to the adjudication of disputes between religious and ethnic groups.’ 23 There is abundant evidence of such confusion. In Harriss and Harriss [1989 Harriss, John and Barbara, Harriss. 1989. “‘Agrarian Transformation in the Third World’”. In Horizons in Human Geography, Edited by: Gregory, Derek and Walford, Rex. London: Macmillan. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]], for example, references to the existence of rich, middle and poor peasants (that is, Marxist concepts) jostle alongside endorsements of (neo-populist) Chayanovian theory. 24 Pace Moyo and Yeros, it is not the case that Bernstein argued – let alone initiated the argument – that agribusiness reproduced peasant economy for its own purposes. What he did claim was much rather the reverse: that petty commodity production was capable of reproducing itself, even where capitalism was already present. This, as all those who write about the peasantry ought by now to recognize, combines the theory about peasant family farming long associated with the work of Chayanov [1966 Chayanov, A. V. 1966. The Theory of Peasant Economy, Edited by: Thorner, Daniel, Kerblay, Basile and Smith, R. E. F. Homewood, IL: The American Economic Association. [Google Scholar]] with the everyday-forms-of-peasant-resistance framework associated more recently with James Scott [1985 Scott, J. C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]]. Both are exemplars of agrarian populism, as was Bernstein until his volte face. 25 An input from the same source to their other contribution is also acknowledged by Moyo and Yeros (p.202, note 1). 26 M