The geopolitics of passive revolution and the ghost of Malthus in the American Century

Abstract

In this article, I argue that the re-emergence of Malthusian limits in the post-war period was universally accepted as a principal challenge to the integrity of the American Century, yet whose solution was refracted through competing ideological frameworks among development experts. In mobilising Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals and passive revolution, I offer an in-depth empirical analysis of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Rockefeller Foundation, both of which largely converged around the consensus on land reform as a means of attenuating the revolutionary potential of peasant grievance. Yet this solution to Malthusian limits became steadily eroded as a function of the contingent outcomes of class struggle and state-formation across the Global South. Through a focused examination of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Program, I show how the eventual decline of land reform in favour of more muscular modes of productivism in the guise of ‘Green Revolution’ technologies did not follow a straight path from networks of Western scientific knowledge to the fields of the Global South but resulted from the contingent transformations across Mexico’s state/society complex, and the ideological contestation among a network of ‘mobile experts’ comprising the fabric of the American Century.