Peasant Labor Research Articles

Containing Indeterminacy

Outside (though not completely so) the circuit of the international division of labor, there are people whose consciousness we cannot grasp if we close off our benevolence by constructing a homogeneous Other referring only to our own place in the seat of the Same or the Self. Here are subsistence farmers, unorganized peasant labor, the tribals, and the communities of zero workers on the street or in the countryside. To confront them is not to represent (vertreten) them but to learn to represent (darstellen) ourselves. Spivak (1988, 288-9)

Allotments, enclosure, and proletarianization in early nineteenth-century southern England

Few issues have provoked as much controversy among economic historians as that of enclosure. One line of thought, often identified with the Hammonds and E. P. Thompson, sees the enclosure movement as 'a plain enough case of class robbery'.2 In this view, enclosure impoverished the masses of rural England, destroyed the communal values inherent in the institutions of common property, and created a rural proletariat of landless labourers completely dependent on capitalist farmers for their livelihood. Opposing this, the revisionist school beginning with Chambers3 argues that the move towards capitalist farming was a consequence of population growth, and that enclosure led to higher and more regular employment, and thus to rising living standards for the rural poor. This controversy remains largely unresolved. One recent insight, however, comes from the work of Humphries, who argues that the simplistic division between peasant and proletarian labour is largely unrealistic: 'rather than pushing families out of one category (propertied/peasant) into another (proletarian), parliamentary enclosure eroded non-wage sources of subsistence available to semi-proletarian families and left them increasingly dependent on wages'.' Enclosure should perhaps be seen as just one part of a lengthy and essentially continuous transition which starts from the pre-capitalist institutions of common property and relatively unspecialized labour, and ends with a purely capitalist agriculture in twentieth-century England. Although enclosure certainly abolished the commons, its effect in restricting non-wage activities was only partial. This article studies one of the few post-enclosure alternatives/supplements to wage labour available to agricultural labourers in nineteenth-century England, the system of 'allotments', that is 'pieces of land detached from cottages, and hired or owned by labouring men to supplement their main income'.' Contemporary observers often saw the rise of allotments as a

Rationality and Socialist Collective Farming

The incentive and monitoring problems in Chinese collective farming are theoretically reformulated so that the uneasy position of collective managers concerning the adequate levels of work compensation and collective accumulation can be taken fully into account in determining the quantitative intensity of labor mobilization. It is argued that there was a motive for collective managers not to engage themselves in excessive mobilization of peasant labor if they were at all concerned about maintaining adequate wage levels, collective accumulation, and even their own income and positional benefits. The rationality of the managerial behavior on Chinese collective farms should thus be judged in view of the specific conditions imposed by the state on peasant interests.

The Chinese Work Unit and Transient Labor in the Transition from Socialism

With the coming of economic reform in China, migrant peasant labor has entered industry in large numbers. Unlike such workers in the past-who served as temporaries from the communes contracted to produce in urban state firms, or who remained in the rural areas, toiling for their units in small industries (see Walder, 1986: 48-56)-this section of today's floating population' is working full-time, and in large numbers, as wage-compensated, individually contracted employees in factories.2 Neither the hiring of these peasants by state firms nor their employment by enterprises in the countryside is new, but today the scale is far larger and the procedures more regularized than before the economic reforms; moreover, there is one element that is altogether novel in the People's Republic of China (PRC): people from the fields are now also finding jobs in the foreign-funded firms (FFFs) that began to appear in China in the 1980s.3 So today we find once(and sometime-)4 farmers in factories of two gross types: those within the state sector, in the old urban state-owned industrial factories, called the danwei (or work unit),5 with its well-known panoply of welfare benefits; and those in several types of units outside it: the so-called collective town and village enterprises

From collectives to markets: Restructured agriculture‐industry linkages in rural China: Some micro‐level evidence

The article attempts to put together micro‐evidence for constructing an initial sketch of the emergent structure of linkages between agriculture and rural industry. It focuses mainly on three aspects : (i) the transfer of land from peasants to industrial and other enterprises, (ii) mechanisms and practices for absorbing peasant labour into the rural non‐farm sector, especially in the form of wage labour, and (iii) the forms and relative dimensions of various direct and indirect financial flows between rural enterprises and the agricultural sector. The article also offers some observations concerning the likely implications of the restructuring of rural economic relationships for rural (and agricultural) accumulation, for the efficiency of resource use, for equity and welfare in the rural sector, and for social processes in the countryside. The article provides a comparative perspective, whereby the post‐reform forms, pattern and nature of rural agriculture‐industry linkages are set against the lapsed context of the rural people's commune.

Polish Lords and Ukrainian Peasants: Conflict, Deference, and Accommodation in Eastern Galicia in the Late Nineteenth Century

Some aspects of the relationship between the Polish aristocracy and the Ukrainian peasantry in Eastern Galicia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century have been treated by many scholars over the years. This relationship has been seen primarily as one of class and then national conflict, played out in the economic and political spheres of Galician life. The traditional picture has been one of discrimination against and exploitation of the peasants by the numerically small class of Polish magnates and gentry. The emphasis has been on forced peasant labor, on inequities in the size of landholdings, on the brutality of the landlords and oppression by their stewards, on beatings, on the illegal annexation of peasant lands, and on the expected and automatic obedience and subservience of the peasant to the manorial lord. All of these elements were certainly part of the relationship in pre-1848 Galicia, though even in this respect one may ask questions about the growing number of Ukrainian village schools, and so on.

Labeur and Paresse: Ideological Representations of Medieval Peasant Labor

Images of peasants laboring in medieval Calendar cycles are here contrasted not only with images of the pastimes of the aristocracy, but with images of the idle peasant. This makes clear the ideological function within later medieval society of the Calendar cycle. In particular, the negative images of the peasants in the Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry, are argued to embody a shift in attitude, which has a historical context in the economic and social crises of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

Labeur and Paresse: Ideological Representations of Medieval Peasant Labor

Images of peasants laboring in medieval Calendar cycles are here contrasted not only with images of the pastimes of the aristocracy, but with images of the idle peasant. This makes clear the ideological function within later medieval society of the Calendar cycle. In particular, the negative images of the peasants in the Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry, are argued to embody a shift in attitude, which has a historical context in the economic and social crises of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

Development and the State In Post-Colonial Algeria

This article analyses the role of Algerian bureaucracy in development. It shows that the Algerian state owns the significant means of production and has used the bureaucracy to implement its statist model of development. In doing so it has emphasized the development of heavy industry and the use of the most advanced technology available to promote it. It was hoped that with this model of development and the help of a skilled and trained bureaucracy, rapid industrial growth would transform the country's socio-economic structure sufficiently to absorb the masses of peasant labour and allow Algeria to produce anything it chooses. This model, however, failed to create jobs for the bulk of the Algerian population, led to heavy reliance on foreign capital, and created large pools of unemployed and under-employed. For two decades these problems were staved off when high oil prices shaped the relationship between bureaucracy and development. When oil prices went down drastically in the 1980s, they caused unrest and turmoil in Algeria and created an economic crisis which the State and its bureaucracy are currently trying to manage.

Peasant Labour and Capitalist Production in Late Colonial Indonesia: The ‘Campaign’ at a North Java Sugar Factory, 1840–70

The mid-nineteenth century saw the establishment in Java of one of the world's major sugar industries. Indeed, prior to the Great Depression of the 1930's, which reduced it to a shadow of its former opulance, the Java industry was second only to that of Cuba as a producer of cane sugar for the world's markets. It was essentially the creation of nineteenth-century Dutch colonialism. Sugar manufacture on a commercial scale had already been underway in Java a full two centuries earlier. However, the modern industry of large, centralized units of production and a massive ‘peasant’ workforce dated only from the inauguration of the state-sponsored Cultivation System by Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch in the 1830's. From then on, progress was rapid. Within less than a quarter century, some hundred or so sugar ‘factories’, solid stone places full of European machinery and Javanese ‘coolies’, had been established in the lowlands of Eastern and Central Java, and twenty-seven thousand hectares of peasant farmland requisitioned to provide them with cane. The whole enterprise dug deep into the innards of rural Java. As well as peasant land, the labour of the rural population was commandeered in unprecedented quantities. By the early 1860's, when sugar production under the auspices of the Cultivation System was reaching its peak, some 100,000 Javanese peasants were engaged in growing cane for the industry, and nearly that many again employed for between three and five months of the year, as cane-cutters, carters and factory hands during the manufacturing season or ‘Campaign’.

The value of Peasant labour power in a prolonged transition to capitalism

Like peasant populations in many areas of the world, the Aymara of southern Peru have been subjected to a variety of social, political and economic pressures that have radically altered relations of production and exchange. However, in spite of being altered, precapitalist social relations persist in juxtaposition with increased participation in the expanding capitalist economy. By comparing the average return to labour power in subsistence production with the return associated with participation in the capitalist economy, this article highlights some of the relationships that exist between capitalist and pre‐capitalist production, and seeks to offer a partial explanation for an arrested transition to capitalism.

Les fondements territoriaux de la persistance de l'agriculture familiale en Chine

The spatial basis of the persistance of familial agriculture in China. — The analysis of the alienation of work has generally done without any consideration of the specific nature of peasant labour, namely its territoriality. However, it seems that the understanding of the capacity shown by peasants to resist alienation of work must take into consideration the potential of this territoriality. Such a proposition is illustrated through the study of two work teams belonging to two different Peoples' Communes in the Shanghai region. The capacity of the State to manipulate this potential is also illustrated.

The German agricultural worker, 1815–1914

This paper examines the history of the German agricultural worker from the early nineteenth‐century abolition of serfdom up to 1914. Initially, peasant labour services and the compulsory farm service of peasant youth on Junker farms were replaced by contractually hired farm servants and the cottager system. The latter involved the exchange of labour for an allocation of the land, whereby the worker become a petty commodity producer and also an employer of labour, in the form of the ancillary workers (Hofgänger) he was obliged to provide. Subsequently, from the middle decades of the century, this form of labour was increasingly replaced by confined labourers living in tied cottages, who were virtually landless and paid largely in kind; and were therefore effectively economic objects. At the same time, especially from the 1870s, conditions necessitated increasing reliance upon labourers receiving cash wages. However, this category remained relatively small, and largely impervious to socialist ideology, on account of a growing dependence of German agriculture on foreign (Polish) seasonal migrants.

‘By‐day’ boys and dariga Men: casual labour versus Agrarian capital in Northern Ghana

The development of agrarian capitalism in Africa has accelerated in recent years and is taking several forms. In some areas, peasant labour is managed by state and international agencies and exploited on irrigation and settlement schemes; multinational agribusiness is frequently involved. Elsewhere private entrepreneurship by Africans, often subsidised by the state, is prominent, and the hire of wage labour by such entrepreneurs is widespread and expanding. It is with the latter form of capitalist agriculture that this paper is concerned. In many parts of Africa the development of capitalist agriculture has led to immiseration among rural people and increased their exploitation. But this has not always been the case and it is not inevitable. In northern Ghana the rural population has not succumbed to the all‐powerful, rampant capitalism of the orthodox Marxist model. The real activity of rural labour has constrained the emergence of capitalist rice farming from the late 1960s. Through their struggles, labourers have done relatively well. This paper will examine how capitalist farmers attempted to mobilise labour, to induce workers’ commitment to capitalist production and how exploitation is carried on. All three processes involve struggles between capital and labour which have shaped agricultural development in the north.

Peasant labour for urban industry: Temporary contract labour, urban-rural balance and class relations in a Chinese county

Urban-rural relations in China have a dual character: while a higher level of urban-rural economic balance than most other countries has been achieved, a sharp structural cleavage between workers and peasants has been maintained, based mainly on strict household registrations. Peasants are prevented from migrating to towns and gaining employment there, except under specially approved contracts arranged to resolve local shortages of industrial labour. Contract labour has complex and important effects on rural and urban industrial development. It also embodies the duality of urban-rural relations in China: at the same time as it redistributes wage funds from urban to rural areas, it reinforces the class cleavage between workers and peasants (including contract workers). It also opens up a complex web of inequalities and cleavages among those peasants with contract work and those without. Contract workers have been placed in a contradictory class position which has been a flashpoint of political conflict. The relationships of contract labour to urban industrial and rural development, urbanization, urban-rural balance and structural cleavage, class structure and political conflict are examined through a study of Shulu County, an ordinary rural area with agrowing industrial centre in which over half of the industrial labour force is comprised of peasant contract workers.

A Note on the Relationship between Peasant Economy and Seasonal Wage Labour in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba

In the light of current theories of peasant economy and also of some contempory evidence from various Latin American countries, the agrarian structure of pre-revolutionary Cuba presents something of a paradox. We know of massive seasonal fluctuations in the demand for labour, especially in the cane sector, and we also know that of the people who worked in the peak seasons a high proportion were not by any means fully employed during the rest of the year;' on thq other hand, the smallholding units of production in agriculture did not exhibit the extreme fragmentation or the large numbers (compared to larger units) which we find in, say, contemporary North-East Brazil. Current theories,2 after all, would lead us to believe that there is a complementarity between the proliferation of non-viable smallholding units and the seasonal requirements of large-scale units-that is, that the 'peasant economy' acts as a reproducer of cheap labour for capitalist farms, and wage labour complements the meagre livelihood afforded by small units. Another view would explain the proliferation of smallholdings as a 'refuge against poverty'.3 The second, and related, point which arises concerns the source of seasonal labour in cane and other crops with highly fluctuating seasonal demand for labour. I will show that much of this labour must have come not from the

Grey and Black: The Hidden Economy of Rural China

A HIDDEN ECONOMY of very substantial size exists in the Chinese countryside, lying beyond the reaches of state plans and official statistics. At its outermost margins, this hidden economy includes blackmarketing and criminal activities. But most of the hidden economy has tended to occupy a considerable zone of semi-legality: though illegal on paper, it has been important to the rural economy's smooth functioning and, therefore, has been openly tolerated by the authorities. At the same time, however, government policy has shifted over the years, depending upon the leaders' priorities of the moment. During radical periods like the early 1970s, many of the peasantry's undertakings became ideologically unacceptable and were forced underground; the grey zone was narrowed. Since the re-emergence of Deng Xiaoping, however, with China's economic development now receiving top priority, many of these same activities have been allowed to resurface-and the grey economy permitted to expand. Our discussion in this article will span this decade-long shift of government policy. We shall examine, in turn, agricultural production; the marketing of farm produce; the sales of village-factory products; the procurement of needed goods; and peasant labor outside the villages. For each of these major spheres of economic activity, we shall describe those activities which the government considers perfectly legal, those which normally occupy the sector of the economic spectrum, and those which edge off into the black. Through this examination, we

Capitalism and peasant productivity

This article is a response to comments upon and criticisms of the author's two books, and especially to N. Mouzelis’ critique published in this journal. The central thesis is that family farming is the most successful form of production for putting the maximum volume of surplus peasant labour at the disposal of urban capitalism and constitutes the most efficient way of keeping down the prices of agricultural products. The argument is developed in general terms (i.e. theoretically rather than empirically) and must be judged or countered in those terms. It is, however, illustrated with respect to Greece and to other countries of Southern and of Eastern Europe.

My Father's Country is the Poor

about my father. He died in the winter of 1973; but my dreams of him before were solely about an absence of something I observed, sometimes, in his eyes. My father, near his death, was a gaunt, coffee-colored man, with a fine large nose and immense dark and intelligent eyes. All his life he worked for other people; rough, unpleasant labor that forced him (along with a wife and eight children) to subsist on as little as three hundred dollars a year. My father was then, a poor man, exploited by the rural middle-class rich, like millions of peasant laborers the world over. But as a child I was not aware of any others. I thought it was my father's own peculiar failing that we were poor. My excitement over going finally to

Notes on the Revolution in China

No honest and reasonably alert visitor to China can fail to be impressed by the remarkable changes in the country and the people. The material advances shown by the new system since so recent a year as 1952 leap to the eye. New factories, mines, oilfields, steel works, dams, cooperatives, roads, buses, hospitals, schools, cultural palaces, theaters, have sprouted almost overnight. The language is being reformed. The rise in the general standard of living is equally remarkable. The normal noonday meal even of the unskilled laborer now compares with his rare holiday feast in the old days. Conditions of work have improved out of all recognition. Coal mines in whose untimbered pits eight or ten famished peasant laborers dropped dead, or were killed by accident every day, now have death rates among the lowest in the world, and are pleasant places to work in, with excellent automatic machinery for the bulk of the production. The former incredible stench and filth have disappeared from the workers' slums, once the most dreadful in the whole world, and even the older hutments are free of vermin.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.