Petty Commodity Research Articles

Class and Gender in Older People Care in Rural Yogyakarta

This article explores care arrangements for older people in rural Yogyakarta, comparing and contrasting the experiences of older people in three agrarian classes: significant landowners, petty commodity producers and ‘classes of labour’. The study was conducted in two villages in Kulon Progo and Sleman Regencies. Qualitative interviews, observations, life histories and information on the changing social and economic contexts are used to analyse older people’s roles in social reproduction, the dynamics of intergenerational dependency, and the practicesof older-people care. We found great variation in the age at which engagement in productive and reproductive work declines and people enter the state of dependency. Older people may be receivers, or providers of care for younger dependents. As older people live longer, complex tri- and even quadri-generational care arrangements become more common. Class, gender and intergenerational relations shape care relations and practices. State and community programmes for older people, when functioning properly, can be of great importance to poorer households,even though the access is uneven and they do not always match older people’s care needs. Commodified (purchased) care provision is found in some relatively prosperous households, but rarely in the ‘classes of labour’, the landless and near-landless peasants, and worker households that make up the majority of the population.

‘Women stay behind and grow the food’: Agricultural productivity and the interstices of petty commodity production and reproductive labour in Tanzania

AbstractInspired by the work of Carmen Diana Deere, this paper examines how an analysis of the work of rural production, even when gendered, is compromised if it does not incorporate reproductive labour. The paper presents estimates of the gender yield gap in agricultural crop productivity in Tanzania, along with the statistical causes of the gender yield gap, in order to demonstrate what is and why it matters. The paper then shows that the gender yield gap cannot be understood without interrogating how the reproductive labour of unpaid care and domestic work limits the time for productive activities available to women who have day‐to‐day decision‐making managerial control over plots of land. In this light, the paper suggests a way of rethinking the basic analytical frameworks of agrarian political economy in ways that are consistent with and incorporate the theoretical insights of Carmen Diana Deere. The implications of the analysis are stark: it should not be assumed that all members of an agrarian household share an identical class location, as remains far too often the default assumption in agrarian political economy.

Exploitation, patriarchy and petty commodity production: class, gender and neocolonialism in rural eastern Uganda

Processes of gendered exploitation within villages are integral to world-historical capitalism. Analysing them informs pathways to change. This article illustrates three forms of ‘everyday exploitation’: ‘direct’ exploitation of labour by petty capital, ‘indirect’ exploitation through petty commodity production, and the ‘triple exploitation’ of labouring class women through the interplay of capitalism and patriarchy. This is done through detailed data on class, gender and generational relations within agriculture and brickmaking in an Ugandan village facing a ‘neo-colonial absence’ of public services. Increasing out-migration, meanwhile, underlines a growing crisis of simple reproduction amid pauperising petty commodity production and scarce wage-labour.

Political economy of input–output markets of groundnut: A case from the groundnut value chain of Turkey

AbstractMainstream economics argues that value chains provide farmers better prices and incomes, thus aiding development. However, this study contradicts this consensus, revealing that the value chain generates the status of petty commodity producers for farmers. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the value chain keeps downstream actors, such as merchants, processors, wholesalers, and retailers, in a powerful position against farmers. The study delves into these phenomena by considering the historical relationship between the market, the commodification of agriculture, the state, the interconnection of markets, the value chain, and neoliberalism. This research focuses on the political economy of groundnut input–output markets in Turkey through value chain analysis. Based on thorough primary field research, the paper demonstrates that the functioning of the value chain strengthens the position of downstream actors against farmers. Additionally, it shows that the value chain creates interlinking between farmers and merchants and makes small farmers the most disadvantaged actor. Moreover, the study highlights that groundnut production costs have risen at a higher rate than incomes under neoliberal policies. Finally, the article demonstrates that mechanization in groundnut farming, while increasing productivity by meeting the chain demands, fails to significantly improve farmers' incomes and profits due to the impact of neoliberal policies on other input costs.

“Strategic, dual sense of place” among middle-aged migrants in the diaspora

PurposeCompared to younger and older generation migrants, middle-aged migrants in the diaspora seem to be more conflicted regarding their belonging. This paper aims to explore how middle-aged migrants in the diaspora define themselves in space and time.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork done among Malawian migrants (herein referred to as Lydiatians) settled at Lydiate informal settlement in peri-urban Zimbabwe.FindingsThe paper reveals that, while younger migrants have a “radical transnational stance”, and older migrants regard their place of settlement as their final home, middle-aged migrants prefer to maintain a “strategic dual sense of place” regarding their place of settlement in the diaspora. These middle-aged migrants can be entrepreneurs considering their current settlement as a strategic place for petty commodity trading or those who find informal settlements to provide needed opportunities for cheap housing as the migrants pursue work in the nearby towns.Practical implicationsThe paper offers a deeper understanding of how middle-aged migrants navigate their sense of place and contribute to host nations by functioning as key resources, dynamizing local economies through entrepreneurial activities and labour provision for various industries. The implications of this research should encourage states to positively interact with migrants, leveraging their potential for societal and economic development.Originality/valueThe finding that migrants in the diaspora have a dual, strategic view of their settlements is fascinating, if not new. Before this, scholars presented migrants as transnational figures, successively moving to a better place, which finally becomes home. However, the data presented in this paper suggests that this characterization associating migrants with maintaining a “stable, sedentary, bounded and fixed perception of home” is oversimplified. This is because migrants can sometimes continue to cherish the idea of informal settlements in the diaspora as home, just as the migrants also entertain the nearby established towns as useful places in their life.

The social reproduction of natural resource extraction and gendered labour regimes in rural Turkey

AbstractIn recent decades, rural livelihood has been restructured dramatically in the Global South as a result of neoliberal transformations such as the removal of state subsidies for small‐scale farmers, privatization of agricultural state economic enterprises, rising control of global agribusiness firms on agricultural production, expropriation of rural commons and private farmland for mega‐investments in natural resources. Under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) governments, Turkey has been a prime example of these patterns of accumulation and dispossession. Additionally, the country has been facing coal rush policies of the AKP governments with the aim of utilizing domestic coal to overcome the problem of energy supply security. In this paper, I argue that rural change and patterns of proletarianization in the rural extractive regions are inherently gendered and women assume a central role in the production and social reproduction of the classes of extractive labour. Drawing on 3‐year research conducted in the Soma Coal Basin, Western Anatolia, Turkey, the paper examines the transformation of women's (i) petty commodity production as unpaid family farmers, (ii) agricultural wage work and (iii) reproductive work as miners' wives and subsistence farmers as a result of rising private sector coal investments since the mid‐2000s.

Fossil food: landed property as a hidden abode of global warming

This article analyzes the relation between climate change and the globalization of food systems. Although the corporate food regime made possible by the logistics revolution has been deemed highly intensive in its use of fossil fuels, the political economy of its energy foundations is yet to be deciphered. Based on EDGAR-FOOD, a global database that measures carbon emissions in the food system, we built a sample of nine South American economies to assess the extent to which capital mobility triggers emissions across different sectors. Findings from our study reveal that although food distribution was the most dynamic sector during the period in assessment, land-based emissions remained overwhelmingly larger in absolute terms. This, the paper concludes, highlights the definitive role that landed property – and the structural heterogeneity of agrarian capitalism more broadly – performs in the politics of carbon emissions. Accordingly, our findings lay bare a hidden abode of heterogeneous relations of production – chief of which are unpaid work, petty commodity production, and rent – that lies at the basis of a polarizing, hierarchically-structured international division of labor.

Rice Farmers’ Agrarian Dynamics, a Historical Perspective

Abstract: As the staple food of Indonesians, rice has become an economic and political commodity in the country. This study aims to analyze the agrarian dynamics of rice farmers from a historical perspective, focusing on studying how the agrarian change affected the rice production mode in the present situation. The historiography approach used to produce critical analysis was complemented by tracing literature studies, especially in West Java, one of the main rice producers in Indonesia. The results showed that the structure of land tenure and ownership in rice farming had undergone a fundamental change. The dynamics that appear in rice can be seen at the level of agricultural technology intervention and local and national policies, which have experienced changes due to pressure from the agricultural production input sub-system. This pressure led to a change in peasant institutions that shifted from informal to formal, which was not in line with the structure of land tenure and ownership, which was still dominated by petty commodity producers. Keywords: Agrarian dynamics, farmers, historical, paddy

Progressive politics and populism: Classes of labour and rural–urban political sociology—An introduction to the special issue

AbstractThis special issue analyses the prospects for a progressive politics against right‐wing populism and capitalism. Taken as a whole, its articles underline the need to understand progressive movements as encompassing agrarian, rural, and urban settings and as socially rooted among labourers and petty commodity producers that do not accumulate (classes of labour), which includes the majority of farmers. Most of the world's rural population now reproduce themselves to some degree in towns and cities, which necessitates further development of a rural–urban political sociology. Articles in the special issue discuss existing and potential organizations and networks of classes of labour. They point to the political potential of migrant populations to erode the social divisions of race, ethnicity, and nationality that capitalism and right‐wing populism construct to defend their interests. They contribute to understanding of why some members of classes of labour support racist nationalist populisms that pit them against fellow members of classes of labour. And they show why national contexts matter. Forms of capitalist government, including varieties of populism, are linked to world‐historical dynamics of accumulation and reproduction, as well as racialized class relations, and constrain routes to progressive politics in different ways. Analysis of them can inform counter‐strategies.

Awkward Classes and India’s Rural Development

Marx’s model of capital and labour, dynamised by contradictions and the compulsion to accumulate, leaves deviations from the polar classes of capital and labour ignored, regarded as precapitalist outliers, or as headed for extinction. But the two considered here, petty commodity production (and trade and services) and merchant’s or commercial capital, persist widely. Here in tribute to the major contributions to political economy of Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, their structure and dynamics are discussed in general and in the contemporary Indian case. They are argued to be awkward both analytically and politically. Petty production overlaps with both wage labour and small capitalist firms; it reproduces and expands by multiplication, not accumulation; it does not mobilise in a politically coherent way. Commercial capital is in turn suffused with productive activity; it encompasses petty trade and accumulating enterprises which pursue a reactive opportunistic politics which preserves their independence. Further awkwardness results from the disjuncture between analytically useful categories and the policy concepts used by the state.

Perceptual Differences of the Multidimensional Value of a Relationship with Agribusiness in South Mozambique: A Multi-group Confirmatory Factor Analysis

In developing countries, the integration of family farmers and wage earners (WEs) into petty commodity producers (PCPs) in global value chains linked to international agribusiness is evident. These forms of production were driven by colonial governments and were associated with the plantation sector. Currently, these forms of integration are encouraged by the state, development agencies, and agribusiness. This study investigated the invariance in the perceived value (PV) between WEs and PCPs about their relationship with Xinavane Sugarcane (ADX), a foreign multinational capital agribusiness in Maputo Province, Mozambique. The reduced 12-item PERVAL scale related to four first order latent constructs of PV underlying the concept was explored: functional value (FV), emotional value (EV), social value (SV), and monetary value (MV). The perceptual differences between the groups were assessed using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MCFA). The results indicated no statistically significant differences regarding the groups’ perceptions of MV, while the remaining perceptual differences can be partly explained by the PCPs’ characteristics. Future research should compare both groups’ PV, according to the modalities of integration, functions and the type of partnership agreement established with ADX. The study highlighted cognitive-economic judgment as a crucial factor in relational value creation in the agricultural context, and the dependence of the affective and social aspects on cognitive-utilitarian aspects of the relationship. The study also served to gauge the benefits and sacrifices perceived by the PCPs’ and WEs’ decision whether or not to continue their relationship with ADX. The PV was applied in the context of a relationship in the provision of agricultural services. The study captured the PV from a multidimensional perspective which encompassed cognitive-utilitarian and hedonic aspects in emotional terms as well as social consequences derived from the relationship, in a comparative approach of groups with distinct characteristics evaluated simultaneously.

Embedding the poor into the industrial system: what we can learn from poverty alleviation through industrial development in China

ABSTRACT Poverty alleviation through industrial development in China contributes to the long-standing debate on how the poor could benefit from the development. It creates four industrial organizing approaches (i.e. households operating independently, intermediary organizations providing linkages, modern enterprise leading and asset income distribution) and three ways of participation for the rural poor (i.e. participating as petty commodity producers, wage workers and shareholders), in which productivity has been improved and production relations adjusted. While highlighting the specificity of China’s situation, this paper argues for the more general implications of China’s case for other developing countries due to its theoretical hybridity in addressing poverty alleviation and development.

Narratives and practices of pesticide removal in the Andean valleys of Chile and Argentina

The hegemony of the agribusiness model in Latin America has consolidated the implementation of the Green Revolution technological package in which pesticides play a fundamental role. Yet in the face of its negative social, economic, and environmental effects, many medium-capitalized producers, petty commodity producers, and peasants have developed various food production strategies beyond extensive pesticide use. Drawing from the convergence between rural sociology and agroecology, we address the narratives and practices of farming families that are constructing alternatives to pesticides. Our analysis focuses not only on the productive dimension but also on the political and cultural aspects of the strategies that the subjects deploy when distancing themselves from the hegemonic practices of agribusiness. To approach this objective, we combine an analysis of in-depth interviews and ethnographic notes carried out in the municipality of Putaendo (Valparaiso, Chile) and the Antinaco-Los Colorados valley (La Rioja, Argentina). The article contributes to previous theoretical work on alternative agriculture by analyzing practices and narratives as seen from four different levels: microeconomics, macroeconomics, politics, and family labor. Drawing from a combination of these perspectives, the agrarian producers in our study explain and exemplify the growth, deployment, threats and staying power of practices distinct to or in opposition to agribusiness. Additionally, the research confirms that the analysis of alternatives for changing agriculture should consider the interaction between technical components, such as the reduction or elimination of chemical pesticides, economic balance, such as providing an “adequate” level of income, and cultural elements, such as the co-existence of economic systems.

Resisting agrarian neoliberalism and authoritarianism: Struggles towards a progressive rural future in Mozambique

AbstractAfter nearly two and a half decades with a Land Law widely considered progressive, Mozambique is preparing to revise its legal framework for land. Land activists accuse the government of pursuing an authoritarian approach, excluding civil society participation, and falsifying public consultations. The revision would mark a major shift in Mozambique's land policy towards an even more neoliberal framework to allow the transfer of individual land titles. This turning point is a crucial moment for popular movements to mobilize against the consolidation of agrarian neoliberalism and fight for pro‐poor land policy that benefits small‐scale food producers and rural communities at large. While recognizing different rural and agrarian class formations and interests in Mozambique, I argue that embryonic forms of a cross‐class alliance are becoming apparent. As deagrarianization proceeds, the National Union of Peasants (UNAC) plays a key role in mobilizing the rural poor — petty commodity producers, farm workers, fishermen, small agrarian capitalists, and agrarian civil society at large — using left‐wing populism to oppose agrarian neoliberalism, which takes authoritarian forms.

Petty commodity production

ABSTRACT Petty commodity production (PCP) is a key reality of contemporary capitalism. Deceptively simple, it is shrouded in synonyms, debates and neglect. This essay covers its definitions and roles in agrarian change. Four aspects relevant to critical agrarian studies are introduced: its gendering, persistence, ‘unviability' and roles in the wider economy. Three debates are summarised: PCP versus peasants, exploitation versus conflict over appropriated surplus, simple reproduction and PCP expansion. Last, PCPs’ relations to the state and PCP politics are reviewed with material mostly drawn from South Asia. PCP remains a form of contemporary capitalism that must not be ignored either analytically or politically.

Social differentiation of the peasantry (Marxist)

ABSTRACT Marxist understandings of the peasantry focus largely on class relations and seek to locate rural households within wider sets of class structures and dynamics. This article reviews debates and controversies amongst Marxists on the classic agrarian question, class differentiation within processes of transition from pre-capitalist to fully capitalist societies, land reform and class relations, whether or not to characterize peasants as petty commodity producers, the relationship between class and other forms of social differentiation such as gender, race, ethnicity and caste, and the role of class differentiation in peasant politics.

Hybrid livelihoods: Maize and agrarian transformation in Southeast Asia's uplands

Hybrid maize farming has boomed across upland Southeast Asia in the past three decades. Recent studies suggest that the boom has resulted in diverse outcomes across countries. In Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos, the introduction of hybrid maize has often initially been linked to rising incomes and living standards, with little loss or concentration of landholdings. In contrast, recent studies from Myanmar argue that exploitative trader-farmer credit relations are driving rapid agrarian differentiation and dispossession. We analyze patterns of agrarian change associated with hybrid maize farming in southern Shan State, Myanmar, using data from a representative survey of 1562 rural households. Widespread farmer engagement in maize cultivation has contributed to deepening petty commodity production and some economic differentiation, but with little dispossession or negative impacts on food security. Credit provision by traders may benefit some larger farmers but does not actively penalize smaller producers. Hybrid maize is a ‘moderate risk, moderate reward’ crop that households integrate strategically into a broader patchwork of subsistence farming, higher risk cash crop production, and a growing mix of off-farm activities. Employment in non-farm enterprises, salaried work, and migration have significant potential to modify trajectories of differentiation associated with agriculture.

Reviewing Petty Commodity Production: Toward a Unified Marxist Conception

This article reviews three veins of contributions on contemporary petty commodity production in Marxian political economy, with reference to India. Through a comparative analysis of the works of Henry Bernstein, Kalyan Sanyal, and Barbara Harriss-White, the article maps areas of commonality and contestation between the three theoretical constructions and makes a case for the merits of Harriss-White’s framework over others. JEL Classification: B510, O170

Class and Vulnerability to Debt in Rural India: A Statistical Overview*

AbstractRural indebtedness is a major development challenge confronting India. In 2018, scores of farmers protested rising household debt, and the popular coverage of the time asserted that farmers were under crushing debt. Combining data from the All‐India Debt and Investment Survey with other sources and using a class analysis, I interrogate this “crushing debt” narrative. Rural households, depending on the socioeconomic and contextual vulnerabilities that they experience, are indebted in different ways. The rural elite borrow more loans and have higher loan amounts, while asset‐poor households are more dependent on informal credit sources and also pay higher rates of interest. Households from the wage worker class are more likely to be over‐indebted relative to others. I further find that petty commodity producers bear less debt burden and are less likely to be over‐indebted relative to other classes. These findings underscore the fact that rural indebtedness is a nuanced problem that manifests in a multitude of ways across India.

Introduction: Covid-19 and the conditions and struggles of agrarian classes of labour.

Covid‐19 generated a crisis in capitalism, but not of capitalism. Capitalism reproduces itself in crisis and in ways that have significant but uneven impacts on the conditions and struggles of agrarian classes of labour. This article explores preliminary studies of how Covid‐19 has affected agrarian social formations in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the farmers, petty commodity producers, labourers and agribusinesses who populate them. It considers some of the implications for wage‐labour, agriculture, accumulation and social reproduction including care work. And it briefly considers Covid‐19's political impacts—in terms of the role of the state and possibilities for challenging capitalism, its violence and its ecological crisis.