Capitalist Agriculture Research Articles

Nonhuman Labor and the Making of Resources

AbstractWith soils increasingly seen as living ecosystems, the understanding of the relationship between soils and agricultural labor is changing. A shift from working the soil to working with the soil is hoped to deliver a true ecological modernization of capitalist agriculture, making the production of ever-growing yields and the maintenance of healthy ecosystems co-constitutive. Drawing on ethnographic data from English farming, this article argues that the current trends are in fact a continuation of the logic of capitalist soil improvement in which soils are made into economic resources. By proposing a new conceptualization of labor as a material process of transformation oriented toward the generation of capital value, the author establishes a dialogue between hitherto separate literatures on the making of economic resources and on nonhuman labor. This approach transforms the debates on the relationship between nature and capital by productively collapsing the distinction between labor and resources. The author argues that acknowledging the material co-constitution of (any form of) labor and resource making allows us to better analyze the processes through which natures are rolled into capital. Today’s enrollment of soil biota as labor thus opens up the whole biosphere to the logic of improvement, and to the operations of capital.

Towards sustainable family farming and independent food co-operatives in Cuba? Possible lessons from Norway.

In the Nordic countries, agricultural co-operatives were important when family farmers organised to get access to the quickly developing markets during industrialisation in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These co-operatives were organised both as credit, insurance, processing and marketing co-operatives. Spreading at first from Denmark to the rest of Northern Europe and later reaching the new settler continent in North America, farmers’ co-operatives soon became a key element in private farming in market economies. As many co-operatives became large companies in the capitalist economies, they either became ordinary share companies, or retained their farmer-owned co-operative status like in Norway. After Marxist-inspired revolutions in Russia, China, Eastern Europe and later Vietnam and Cuba, state organised and government-controlled co-operatives were set up in socialist countries. Many of the old forms of agricultural co-operatives in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe collapsed when the centrally planned economies were abolished in the early 1990s. However, new forms of food production and distribution cooperation have emerged both in the capitalist and former socialist countries. These co-operatives were organised both among producers and consumers in order to meet the common needs of direct access to foods. While it is assumed that family farming and food markets will have to play a more important role in the Cuban food economy in the future, it will be interesting to see if small farmers in collaboration with wholesale co-operatives will be allowed to develop short and sustainable supply food chains, which could be competitive against state socialist and multinational capitalist agriculture. Cuban agricultural policy must be able to evolve along two strategies: a volume agriculture that delivers high-quality, durable basic foods to the predominantly urban population, but also delivers local traditional food with craftsmanship to tourists and a growing middle class. Both strategies will be necessary in order to address a historic challenge of the Cuban socio-economic development: to produce sufficient food and make it available to consumers at affordable prices, thus also saving scarce currency today spent on food imports.

Inside an enclave: the dynamics of capitalism and rural politics in a post-land reform context

ABSTRACT There is no doubt that Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform Program resulted in repeasantization. As several studies point out, it also resulted in accumulation from below by a majority of the resettled peasantry. Our study focuses on an area where counter-agrarian reform is in motion and accumulation from below is constrained. In this location, we argue that repeasantization is severely being contested as indicated by the re-emergence of a dual-mode of production and the subsequent ‘virtual’ dispossession and proletarianization of the land reform beneficiaries. Our findings shed more light on the dynamics of capitalism and agrarian politics in a context where land reforms are implemented under neoliberalism. In this enclave, peasants after accessing land through the land reform collectivized their land and parceled it to the downsized and nearby capitalist farming system. The capitalist farming system engages in spatio-temporal fix by moving from one rural site to another as it follows the dictates of accumulation. While the possibility of full-scale land dispossession exists, the current state ownership of land and the peasantry's resistance provided some brakes to full-scale land dispossession. At the same time, the state's limited support to land reform beneficiaries fuels this localized land dispossession. The peasantry's exploitation in this enclave ranges from corvee labor to coercion into the mini-land enclosures; these are implemented by village heads, who are local state functionaries. This study also recasts the relevance of the Marxist framework in understanding rural dynamics more specifically; it revisits Karl Kautsky's arguments on the coexistence thesis of the peasantry and capitalist farming and illustrates the Zimbabwean state's ambivalence with regards to the conditions of peasant and capitalist farming.

From a free gift of nature to a precarious commodity: Bees, pollination services, and industrial agriculture

AbstractThe growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populations in many parts of the world, the worrying implications for agriculture and ecosystems, and some of the risks of pesticides. Although this attention is important and can open a range of critical vistas, the threats to bees, other pollinators, and the future of pollination are too often framed in narrow ways. The goal of this paper is to provide a systematic way of thinking about the crisis of bee populations by examining the changing dynamics of pollination within industrial agriculture, drawing heavily on transformations in the United States and Canada. We set out a case for understanding pollination as a biophysical barrier to industrial organization and the rise of pollination services as a response that temporarily fixes (or overrides) this barrier, while containing an internal set of contradictions and overrides. We argue that these dialectic relations are continually generating further problems and hope that this lens can help inform critical education, outreach, and movement building with respect to the urgent problems of bee and pollinator health. In particular, we stress the need to connect growing bee‐related advocacy with struggles to confront industrial capitalist agriculture.

Dairying, Dispossession, Devastation

The past three-and-a-half decades of neoliberal orthodoxy in New Zealand have been marked by the rapid expansion and intensification of the New Zealand dairy industry. In the years since direct agricultural subsidies and supports were removed in the mid-1980s, the national dairy herd has more than doubled and the area given over to dairying has increased by some 750,000 hectares. This relentless drive to intensify has come at a simply enormous environmental cost: New Zealanders, present and future, are being systematically dispossessed of cherished freshwater ecosystems and endemic biodiversity. In this paper, I argue that this is but the latest episode in a long history of often-violent dispossession that has been crucial to the historical development of capitalist agriculture in New Zealand. In so doing, I draw on Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation.

Contribution to a renewed framework for analysing the interactions between family and capitalist agriculture

AbstractWe examine whether current assumptions concerning the declining resilience of family farming and the growing influence of capitalist forms of agricultural production are being confirmed in the cocoa sector of Cameroon and the coffee sector of Kenya. This study is based on surveys of 181 family and capitalist farmers. Our results indicate that the capitalist approach is being consolidated on former colonial coffee estates in Kenya and on the cocoa pioneer front in Cameroon. This study also shows that in areas with a long history of family farming, family forms are showing good resilience due to a diversification of activities and sources of income, especially nonagricultural ones, and the patrimonialization of the land. Finally, this study proposes a framework for analysing the interactions between family and capitalist agriculture and their respective multisectorial strategies. For family farming, these strategies are based on work force mobility, whereas for capitalist agriculture, they are based on financial capital mobility.

Sustainability, Ecology, and Agriculture in Women Farmers’ Voices: Culture-Centering Gender and Development

Abstract The neoliberal/neocolonial transformation of agriculture in the global South is achieved through the hegemony of expert-led interventions of privatization that erase the knowledge of agricultural practices held by subaltern communities. Neocolonial development interventions serve the privatizing logics of agro-capital through the circulation of logics of profits, efficiency, and growth through both paid and state-controlled communication channels. In this backdrop, our ethnographic description of a culture-centered intervention carried out in solidarity with dalit, women farmers organized under the umbrella of sanghams (cooperatives) points toward communication sovereignty as a theoretical anchor for re-imagining the relationships among ecology, agriculture, and sustainability in resistance to capitalist agriculture. Challenging hegemonic models of participatory engagement put forth by neocolonial structures of development, the concept of communicative justice inverts listening, radically placing power in the hands of subaltern communities. Layers of inequalities from households to community spaces to market structures are disrupted through the voices of dalit women farmers and their participation in practices that materially resist capitalist agriculture. Moreover, the co-creative work of generating theory from within subaltern struggles for sovereignty in the global South dislocates the colonial nature of abs/ex-tractive theorizing in the metropole in the North, situating the work of theorizing amidst the lifeworlds of subaltern communities performing everyday transformative practices that dismantle capitalist logics.

JOHN STUART MILL AND THE IRISH LAND QUESTION: AN ILLUSTRATION OF HIS VIEW ON SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

John Stuart Mill’s involvement with the Land Question in Ireland is analyzed from the viewpoint of his theory of institutions. I argue that, for Mill, institutions should promote progress without endangering social order. When referring to economic institutions, “progress” meant, essentially, human improvement, a rise in economic productivity, and the increase of social justice. According to Mill, the cottier system did not fulfill any of these requisites and should be abandoned. Mill also rejected transposing to Ireland the “English model” of capitalist agriculture. This institution could eventually solve the economic problem but involved the unjust eviction of tenants and would not regenerate the Irish character. Given the particularities of Ireland, Mill endorsed peasant property as the most suitable form of land appropriation. It would, at the same time, improve the character of the people, enhance productivity, and increase the social justice of the system. It would also mitigate the conflicts that jeopardized social order.

The many meanings of organic farming: framing food security and food sovereignty in Indonesia

This paper contributes to the discourse on food policy, particularly in relation to organic farming in Indonesia. Organic farming was first adopted by non-state actors in Indonesia, by faith-based organisations and then by small farmer associations, while the state support for organic agriculture followed at a later date. The three groups, represented in this study by three case studies, adopt different positions with regard to the definition of organic agriculture and its relevance to food self-sufficiency, food security and food sovereignty. For Bina Sarana Bhakti Foundation (BSB), organic farming is both a spiritual worldview and a practical philosophy. For the Indonesian Peasant Union (SPI), organic agriculture foremost is a political tool to resist global capitalist agriculture. Despite their very different outlooks, both these two civil society organisations see organic agriculture as a post-materialist enterprise directed towards explicitly social-political goals. By contrast, the government’s engagement in organic agriculture, although laced with evocative phrases such as “back to nature”, is driven primarily by visions of developing a new niche market for Indonesian exports. The Indonesian State adopts a one-dimensional productivist definition that excludes different meanings and traditions of organic farming. The reduction of the meaning of ‘organic’ to ‘organically certified products’ excludes farmers who consider that they are practicing organic agriculture. We conclude that there is a strong case to be made that the State should relax its regulatory grip on the organic sector, to create room for sorely needed innovation and cooperation among the different actors involved.

Land outsourcing and labour contracting: Labour management in China's capitalist farms

AbstractDifficulty in labour supervision has been considered to be one of the obstacles to the development of capitalist agriculture. This paper presents two distinctive labour management strategies in China's large‐scale agriculture, which contribute to the development of agrarian capitalism in China. As shown in these cases, agribusiness companies engaged in grain crop production retreat from direct labour management by outsourcing crop cultivation, while acquiring profits from upstream and downstream activities. On the other hand, capitalist producers, who are involved in the labour‐intensive and capital‐intensive crop production, tend to mobilize local elites to manage the farmworkers. Although independent labour contracting services have not emerged, a specialized group of labour contractors is being cultivated. Rural social resources are utilized in labour recruitment and supervision to minimize the labour management costs in both strategies. However, the conflicts between capital and labour are covered or replaced instead of being settled.

Agrarian Marxism and the proletariat: a palm oil manifesto

ABSTRACT This article attempts to re-integrate a Marxist perspective of the collective agency of the proletariat into the analysis of the corporate food regime. The article first summarises Marx’s key ideas on the proletariat and then discusses their relevance for capitalist agriculture today, arguing that labour makes up an important part of the contested social relations of production in contemporary agrarian capitalism. Drawing on ongoing empirical research with plantation workers and labour activists in Indonesia and Malaysia, it then appraises the current state of class struggle in the palm oil sector, arguing that it is characterised by everyday class struggles and an emerging trade union movement. The article concludes – and this is the ‘manifesto’ element – by suggesting that a reorientation towards labour in the ‘agrarian question’ could overcome some of the limitations of the food sovereignty movement and open up new perspectives for the social-ecological transformation of capitalist agriculture.

Notes from the Editors, November 2019

buy this issue
 Immanuel Wallerstein, the celebrated world-systems theorist and longtime contributor to Monthly Review and Monthly Review Press, died on August 31, 2019. Wallerstein first achieved international fame with the publication in 1974 of his The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (the first in a four-volume masterwork on the Modern World-System. We pay tribute to Wallerstein in this new issue of Monthly Review.

Peasant Farming in the Southern Tracts of the Amazon: the Reluctant Alterity of Agribusiness

Abstract This article examines the main tendencies and perspectives of peasant family farming (PFF) in agricultural frontiers such as the Amazon. The ontological features of PFF are discussed, in particular the multiple associations with, and subsumption to, agribusiness. Due to national politico-economic pressures, the Amazon was reinvented half a century ago as a vibrant agricultural frontier that attracted a vast contingent of migrants due to coordinated government plans and, in more recent years, the cultivation of export-oriented crops. One very intriguing feature of this dynamic geography is that small family farming represents the Other of capitalist agriculture, but it functions as a hesitant form of alterity that both resists and fulfils agribusiness.

Farm Size, Capitalism, and Overuse of Agricultural Chemicals in China

ABSTRACT China’s environment suffers from severe overuse of agricultural chemicals in recent decades. A popular opinion among policymakers and researchers is that land consolidation and larger farms will be instrumental in bringing down the consumption of fertilizer and improve the environment. By examining the relationship between farm size, capitalist production, and fertilizer intensity, we argue that larger and more capitalist farms in China do not necessarily have lower fertilizer intensity. I further argue that under capitalism a lower fertilizer intensity often induces an even higher level of fertilizer consumption. A substantial reduction in fertilizer consumption runs against the vested interest of capitalism. The problem of chemical overuse lies in the capitalist market economy which pushes both small and large farms to keep increasing fertilizer consumption. Only a society free from profit motive and exploitation can provide space for a truly sustainable and “rational” agriculture.

Project-Based State Intervention and Agrarian Change in Contemporary China: The Case of Rice Production in Pingwan County, Hunan

This article analyzes the role of the state in the development of capitalist agriculture in contemporary China by focusing on the implementation of the central-government-sponsored National Grain Security Project and Agricultural Industrialization Project in Pingwan county of Hunan province since 2009. It demonstrates that by providing significant (formal and informal) subsidies and transferring large tracts of farmland to large farmers and agribusinesses, the Chinese government has made the capitalist transformation of rice production possible. We stress that in the absence of private property rights, the local governments’ strong control over farmland transactions makes it relatively easy to transfer large tracts quickly, helping agribusinesses and large farmers avoid significant transaction costs they would otherwise have to face under a system of private landownership. The article also shows that existing policies support the transfer of farmland in regions with favorable geographic and climatic conditions over other regions and therefore lack the capacity to significantly decrease regional inequalities.

FROM SUBSISTENCE TO FINANCIAL ASSET: THE APPROPRIATION OF THE BRAZILIAN CERRADO LANDS AS A RESOURCE/ De subsistência à ativo financeiro: a apropriação como recurso das terras do Cerrado brasileiro/ la subsistencia a los activos financieros: apropiación como recurso de tierras del Cerrado brasileño

This article proposes a typology of the appropriation of Brazilian Cerrado lands as a resource—ranging from subsistence for local peoples, to the current attempt by institutional investors to transform the land into a financial asset—without disregarding its use as a source of power and accumulation by large capitalist farmers. A resource is considered as any product of a relationship mediated by appropriation of a specific natural material by a particular agent. Until 1970s, Cerrado lands were used almost exclusively as a means of subsistence by peasants and indigenous populations. Since then, under a violent expropriation process, land has become a resource for capitalist accumulation and patrimonialist power for large-scale immigrant farmers, with the expansion of the agricultural frontier. Within the context of land grabbing in the 21st century, the arrival of representatives of international financial capital has added to the complexity of the appropriation strategies in which Cerrado lands are considered financial assets. These different perspectives of using land as a resource has increased the number of conflicts and contradictions, with profound negative effects on peasant communities in agricultural frontier areas.

Beyond ecological synergies: examining the impact of participatory agroecology on social capital in smallholder farming communities

ABSTRACTThe pivotal role of social capital in smallholder agriculture is widely acknowledged. The growth effect of social capital manifests in how networks and trust facilitate access to productive resources and knowledge sharing among farmers. While sub-Saharan Africa is considered a storehouse of rich social capital, recent literature indicates its rapid depletion due mainly to the rise of capitalist agriculture and concomitant reorganization of the relations of production that characterize smallholder agriculture. Agroecology is an alternative approach to agriculture aimed at addressing the adverse impacts of capitalist agriculture, including improving farmer-to-farmer networks. In this paper, we draw on longitudinal data from a five-year participatory agroecology intervention in Malawi using Difference-in-Difference (DID) to compare the social capital endowment of agroecology-practicing households (n = 514) and a control group of non-agroecology households (n = 400). We further employed linear regression to examine the relationship between social capital and agroecology adoption. Results from the DID analysis show a positive and statistically significant change in mean social capital for participatory agroecology households (β = 0.325, p< 0.001) compared to non-agroecology households (β = 0.108) after accounting for theoretically relevant factors. Overall, the average treatment effect of the intervention on social capital was positive (β = 0.217, p< 0.01). We also found a bidirectional relationship between social capital and adoption of agroecology practices (β = 0.12, p< 0.001). These findings reveal the positive inroads of agroecology beyond the farm-level and demonstrate the potential for policymakers to leverage these benefits to promote sustainable agriculture.

Socio‐economic differentiation from a class‐analytic perspective: The case of smallholder tree‐crop farmers in Limpopo, South Africa

AbstractSouth African agrarian policy aims to integrate smallholder tree‐crop farmers into high‐end value chains with growth and employment potential, generally neglecting socio‐economic differentiation amongst them. This paper aims to analyse socio‐economic differentiation amongst tree‐crop farmers in Vhembe District, Limpopo, using a class‐based analysis based on livelihood diversification and accumulation. Cluster analysis of survey data and semi‐structured interviews reveals that most tree‐crop farmers engage in petty commodity production, internally differentiated by their combination of income sources and livelihood strategies. Farmers' ability to engage in accumulation and upward class mobility is generally severely constrained by limited access to capital. Agricultural diversification offers livelihood potential but limited possibility for accumulation, whereas salaried nonfarm work offers more promising prospects for accumulation but limited livelihood opportunities. A minority demonstrated characteristics of small‐scale capitalist farmers, internally differentiated by their reliance on salaried employment or agricultural production. The findings challenge the notion of an undifferentiated class of market‐oriented smallholders.

Vegetable Gardens versus Cash Crops: Science and Political Economy in the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, 1820–40

Abstract The goal of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India (founded in 1820) was to create a science for the cultivation of plants in India and use this science to increase agricultural production. This article tracks the ideas of this society in its early decades as it created a highly contested and changing discourse regarding agriculture in India. As the society was based in Calcutta, it had Bengali members who appropriated and modified these ideas according to their own social circumstances. In the first decade of its life, many members envisioned the project of ‘agricultural improvement’ as increasing the production of food and medicine for local consumption as well as agricultural commodities for export. Yet beginning in 1829, this mixed agri-horticultural vision began to change. British members complained that local gardening activities were not remunerative and so the society should focus more on agriculture for export. As a result, agriculture began to be more clearly defined as the large-scale production of commodities for export, separate from the science of horticulture, which concerned growing fruits and vegetables for local consumption. Horticulture increasingly became the lesser science and the society’s focus went towards agriculture for export. Many Bengali members remained more interested in the activities associated with horticulture, proceeding to develop an agri-horticultural knowledge which appropriated new ideas about gardening promoted by the society and combined them in new ways with gardening knowledge from other North Indian networks. This episode reveals the complex world of knowledge about plant cultivation even as the British created an English-language discourse of global capitalist agriculture.

Semi-private Landownership and Capitalist Agriculture in Contemporary China

Although the existing scholarship on the capitalist transformation of Chinese agriculture uses the concepts of the Marxist political economy to analyze class differentiation, it has not systematically analyzed the role of the Chinese state (as manifested in the current semi-private land system) in this transformation with reference to Marx’s theory of agricultural rent. Capitalist transformation of Chinese agriculture in the context of continuing strong government control over farmland provides a unique opportunity to assess the validity of Marx’s hypothesis that private landownership is a barrier to capitalist development in agriculture and that state ownership of land is a possible way to overcome it. Analysis highlights two advantages of the current system for the capitalist transformation of Chinese agriculture. First, by enabling local governments to transfer large and consolidated tracts of farmland to agribusiness companies and large farmers and relieving them from the burden of dealing with each and every private owner for land access, the semi-private landownership system minimizes the transaction costs incurred by agrarian capital. Second, farm workers are guaranteed access to small plots of land and this subsidizes agrarian capital by reducing the costs of the reproduction of labor power, thereby putting downward pressure on wages. JEL Classification: P32, P1