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Class dynamics of agrarian changeMichael Watts aa University of California, BerkeleyVersion of record first published: 01 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Michael Watts (2012): Class dynamics of agrarian change, The Journal ofPeasant Studies, 39:1, 199-204

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Kuhn, C.M. 2011. Globalizing the South at mid-century: the case of Arthur Raper. Paperdelivered at the Agricultural History Society annual meeting, Springfield, IL, June.

Lappe, F.M. and J. Collins 1977. Food first: beyond the myth of scarcity. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

McNamara, R. 1968. The essence of security: reflections in office. New York: Harper & Row.Pearse, A. 1980. Seeds of plenty, seeds of want: social and economic implications of the green

revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Putzel, J. 1992. A captive land: the politics of agrarian reform in the Philippines. London:

Catholic Institute for International Relations and New York: Monthly Review Press.Sen, A. 1981. Poverty and famines: an essay on entitlement and deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon

Press.

Class dynamics of agrarian change, by Henry Bernstein, Halifax, FernwoodPublishing, 2010, xiiþ 142 pp., CAD$17.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-55266-349-3

There are few people as well positioned to write a book about the class dynamics ofagrarian change as Henry Bernstein. For more than three decades he has been acentral figure in the ‘peasant studies boom’ that emerged in the wake of the Vietnamwar. Not least there is his, dare I say it, entrepreneurial role, along with Terry Byres,in providing a rich and wide-ranging intellectual space for the study of agrariantransitions through The Journal of Peasant Studies (and subsequently the Journal ofAgrarian Change), an internationalist forum of the highest rank. In my own case, Irecall vividly the intellectual excitement in first reading his now classic piece oncommodification and the peasantry entitled ‘Notes on Capital and Peasantry’ –penned in 1977 and published in the Review of African Political Economy –composed in that terse, dense, propositional form as though he were bringing a doseof Wittgenstein to the Third World peasants. Bernstein is acutely aware of the task athand: the ‘immense variety of types of farming and their social relations’. All of thatsaid, it is nevertheless a slightly mad undertaking to assess ‘the social relations ofproduction and reproduction, property and power in agrarian formations and theirprocesses of change, both historical and contemporary’ in a such a little book – afterall, in Marxist terms, which provides the theoretical frame for the book, this wouldbe nothing short of an account of the origins and development of capitalism (and, inprinciple, of socialist agricultures too). Production and productivity, the origins anddevelopment of capitalism, colonialism, local and global agro-food systems, foodregimes, neoliberalism, property and livelihood, technology, international markets,capitalist agrarian relations, class formation and political movements (to name someof the key themes) are all covered in a book which checks in at little more than 100pages.

Naturally, the express intention of the book is not to provide a full synthesis orencomium of agrarian studies, but rather a ‘state of the art small book on bigissues’ (which is part, incidentally, of an excellent series developed by Jun Borras).Writing a small book of this sort is no easy matter, but the same might be said ofreviewing it. Many very big issues are passed over quickly, every generalization issubject to immediate qualification and proviso. We are in any case talkingminimally about a sector constituted by at least 20% of the world’s populationright now – to say nothing of what it represented in 1700, 1880 or 1945. There are,for example, six short paragraphs on ‘Industrial Capitalism and ModernImperialism’ (I am reminded here of a colleague who was asked to contribute a100 word entry on the origins of universe to an on-line encyclopedia). Most

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frustrating of all is the truncated discussion on topics about which Bernstein isclearly itching to say more and about which any reader would want him to opineat length. Reading between the lines he clearly has much more to say of a quitecritical nature on so-called ‘global agrarian resistance’ in Chapter 8 or on ‘globaldepeasantization’ in Chapter 6.

In short, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change is a bit of a taster or asmorgasbord – with, it needs to be said, some very rich and flavorful dishes tochoose from. Nevertheless, the experience for the reader is to be alert to theabsences: why nothing on agrarian socialisms, why so little on gender or financecapital, why is the retail sector passed over so quickly? It is, in short, hard to resistthe temptation to be a little peeved that our own pet topics, books and conceptsare not part of the mix (why no reference to the feminist household debate, why solittle on the rich literature on peasant revolution and insurgency, why not more onthe complex political ecologies of agrarian change?). Bernstein is always attentiveto the temporal in his account of agrarian change but much less to space. For allof that, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change is a little gem, and some parts of thebook – particularly those speaking to the Bernstein’s strong suits such as agrariantransitions, the agrarian question of labor, and the relations of petty commodityproducers to capital – are magisterial in their analytical insight and brevity.Perhaps the way to see this book is as a Marxian haiku on agrariantransformation.

Bernstein’s approach to agrarian change is, broadly construed, Marxist – as heputs it, how Marx’s theory of capitalism can make sense of diverse and complexagrarian histories of the modern world (p.9). The primacy of the social relationsbetween capital and labor is understood as a structured totality but one sensitive towhat Marx calls ‘the concentration of many determinations’. Bernstein is attentivetoo to the fact that such a task is ‘challenging’, that the strongest areas ofdisagreement and debate are often among Marxists themselves, and that there is nosuggestion that Marx or Marxism provides ‘everything we need to know’. But all ofthat said and done, the central conundrum remains: what are Marxism’s limits, or toput it differently what gets included and what is excluded, and can Bernstein’s sixthemes which provide the red threads running through the book (class and gender,divisions of access and labor, property, colonial legacies, paths of agrarian andmarket development, and relations of power) be fully or even properly addressedwith the toolkit provided.

Bernstein commences his journey, not surprisingly, with the linked questions ofhow we think about agrarian production and productivity, which turns on laborunderstood as acts of human agency. Productivity can be measured in a variety ofways, of course – Bernstein cites the mildly astonishing figure that the Americanfarmer’s labor productivity is two thousands times that of the modal Africanfarmer – and may indeed be in conflict with one another. He distinguishes betweenlabor quantity and quality, the relations between the energetics of agriculture andwhat one might call agro-ecological capital (soil fertility, water, germ plasm and soon). The technical conditions of production are naturally to be distinguished fromthe social conditions of production, which leads Bernstein into an accounting ofdivisions of labor and co-operation in agriculture (economies of scale, complemen-tation and timing effects) and the social conditions of reproduction. On the latterBernstein draws on the foundational work of Eric Wolf on peasant ‘funds’

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(consumption, replacement, rent and ceremonial) which provides the occasion forBernstein to flag the centrality of both gender and the domestic divisions of labor onthe one side, and the forms of appropriation of surplus labor (which is to sayrelations of exploitation and the capacity for accumulation) on the other. [OddlyBernstein does not refer here to what is surely the path-breaking formalization ofthis sort of agrarian political economy formulated by Alain de Janvry and CarmenDiana Deere (1979)]. All of this leads to his quartet of key political economicquestions: who owns what (property), who does what (social organization of work),who gets what (the distribution of income), and what do they do with it (the socialrelations of consumption, reproduction and accumulation).

In the following two chapters, Bernstein wades into the thickets of capitalism’sorigins and early development and the relations between colonialism andcapitalism (all in 30 pages, which is no mean defeat of intellectual compression).It is an impossible task to summarise what Bernstein accomplishes here. Suffice tosay that he explores the genesis of generalized commodity production, including oflabor as a commodity, and the conditions of possibility for pre-capitalist societiesto undergo transitions to capitalism (primitive accumulation in short – which ofcourse has been the object of considerable scrutiny of late following the work ofThe Commoner, Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey). He distinguishes betweentwo ‘origins’: the classic agrarian questions and its various paths (English,Prussian, American and a rather unconvincing, and in my view analyticallyincoherent, account of East Asian transitions) and ‘the long march of commercialcapitalism’ (here he links together some theoretically uncomfortable bedfellowsincluding Jairus Banaji, Giovanni Arrighi and Jason Moore). At base, thedistinction between the two turns on (i) a presumption that the English model isuniquely definitive of agrarian capitalism, and (ii) a presumption that capital cantake hold of labor through a wide range of social arrangements (i.e. a rejection of aunitary theory of a purportedly pure agrarian capitalism) which, as Bernsteinproperly notes, has the distinct advantage of seeing agrarian capitalism as a worldhistorical process. Inevitably this leads Bernstein to a series of provocativequestions well beyond the perimeter of agriculture per se but rather with thechallenges of Marxist analysis tout court: distinctions between capital invested inproduction versus circulation, which forms of capital are capitalist, is labor powerlimited to proletarians? One wants, of course, to hear what Bernstein has to sayabout these things. . .. . .but he has to move on colonialism.

In Chapter 3 Bernstein covers ‘the histories of when and how capitalismdeveloped as a world system’ [p. 39] (three phases of accumulation are identified:commercial capitalism in the sixteenth century, slave plantations and merchant’scapital in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and industrial capitalism andmodern imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth) and how capital transformedagriculture regionally through different ‘patterns of agrarian change’. He makesexcellent use of his own foundational work on labor regimes and concludes withseveral important ‘qualifications’ (pp. 54–56) pertaining to how we think about fullor partial proletarianization, free and unfree labor and forced commercialization (hemight also have added here gender, on which he has little to say). He rightlyconcludes with a short discussion of the complexities of determining whethercolonialism was necessary for the emergence of capitalism and whether and howimperial primitive accumulation did or did not make significant contributions

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economic growth in Europe. It is less clear how these questions and others associatedwith capitalism’s early history resonate with contemporary debates over agrariantransformations (peasant persistence? the peasant way to development? the existenceof pre-capitalist agrarian communities?) in the global south.

In the two following chapters Bernstein provides a synoptic account of the rise ofa global (and industrial) agriculture, especially after the 1870s. Central to thisdiscussion is the industrial basis of technical change, the formation of globalagricultural markets and the centrality of an agrarian sector as an object of nationaland international policy. This story is, of course, well-trodden territory. It covers theAmerican technical revolution in agriculture (Bernstein makes good use of Cronon’s(1991) Nature’s Metropolis) and the agro-industrial treadmill that was to underwritethe Green Revolution strategies of 1950s and 1960s agricultural modernization, andthe rise (and periodization) of serial food regimes (using the well known work ofHarriet Friedmann and Phil McMichael). Bernstein properly points to theimportance of the post-1945 moment of agricultural modernization in the globalsouth and the intersection of both technical innovation (important but uneven greenrevolutionary strategies and the commodification of subsistence) and state-centereddevelopmentalist strategies, which simultaneously created captured ‘state peasan-tries’ and an array of mechanisms for taxing peasants (for purposes of ‘develop-ment’, which often meant agrarian surpluses being diverted into political parties andpersonal accumulation by militaries and the political classes). All of this was blownwide-open, of course, by the neo-liberal ‘counter-revolution’ of the 1980s andthereafter, which Bernstein encapsulates nicely as regards the agro-food sector (whathe calls ‘the ongoing and intensifying commodification of subsistence’ (p. 87)) andthe collapse of the Second International Food Regime.

There is much that could be said here. The food regime literature is used (in myview) in an uncritical way; the Green Revolution entailed a political and geopoliticalundercurrent, which is not explored; indeed the Green Revolution itself is a bigger andmore complex (and changeable) phenomenon than Bernstein suggests. After all, therecent International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Develop-ment (IAASTD) is a full-frontal assault on the Green Revolution model from withinthe ranks of the international agricultural establishment. There is no question thatneo-liberalism has, and is, transforming the agro-food order – the World Bank’s 2008report, Agriculture for Development, made this crystal clear – but precisely what sortof ‘order’ it is – other than pointing to its de-regulated and corporate form –remains achallenging question. (Bernstein’s discussion of the ‘end of the peasantry’ and of thediversity of forms and dynamics associated with high value commodities, the revivalof ‘traditionals’, the multiplication of contracting, the soy boom and new patterns ofbilateral (China-Brazil) and multilateral trade suggests as much.) Whether what weare currently witnessing is a massive series of ‘global enclosures’ (Bernstein citesAraghi’s work, but there is a raft of interest currently in ‘global land grabs’) strikesme as rather dubious. What gets folded into land grab is enormously variegated(sovereign wealth funds, retail capital, large scale infrastructure development, con-servation schemes) and while the global climate change-energy/biofuels-food crisissince 2008 is important, it is not at all clear whether this is a purely conjecturalphenomena – a result of capital piling into commodity markets (and, more generally,of the transformation of the intersection of finance capital and commodity markets).Yet this is an arena that is hardly mentioned in Class Dynamics of Agrarian Changeand barely understood within the field of agrarian political economy. At the very

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least, if one wanted to look at agriculture and global land grabs, would we not startwith China? You-tien Hsing’s (2010) remarkable new book The Great UrbanTransformation suggests that 15% of the cultivable area has been lost to urban growthand the distinctively Chinese dynamics of real estate speculation.

The final two chapters – for me the best in the book – address the knottyproblems of capitalist and non-capitalist farmers and, relatedly, of class dynamics inthe countryside. Bernstein provides a careful and sophisticated analysis of thepeasant ‘persistence’ question linking the debate to Chayanov and Kautsky on self-exploitation and the domestic labor process, to what he has called ‘the agrarianquestion of labor’. He demonstrates convincingly the ways in which family labor canbe harnessed under a variety of conditions (from local supermarkets to industrialpoultry integrators) but emphasizes the key role played by politics (whether peasantresistance or at the level of class forces) and their contingencies which shapeparticular outcomes. There is an all too brief discussion of land reforms – again onemight have expected reference to Alain de Janvry’s (1981) important theorization ofLatin American land reforms in his The Agrarian Question and to the more recentresurgence of land politics – making the point that reformism is a contradictoryeffort to stabilize small farmers as viable commodity producers (now, of course,draped in the neoliberal discourse of entrepreneurship and market vitality).Bernstein then turns to whether small farmers as commodity producers can beconstrued as a class or classes of labor. Differentiation within commodity producersis treated in a nuanced way, doing justice to Bernstein’s claim that tendencies todifferentiation are rooted in the multiple determinations of the contradictory unity ofclass places in petty commodity production. Drawing upon Mike Davis’s (2006)brilliant account of the informal working class in the slum world in Planet of theSlums, Bernstein draws provocative parallels with the fluid social boundaries linkingon- and off-farm labor and complex combinations of wage and self employment inagriculture in the global south.

Bernstein’s concludes with a brief meditation on the complexities of class in thecountryside. He wants to assert the importance of the fact that class relations areuniversal but not excusive determinations and yet retain, or keep in tension, the factthat forms of agrarian mobilization and movement formation are prismatic andoften contradictory. It is pity that Bernstein did not have occasion to enter furtherinto the robust literature on peasant revolutions, agrarian insurgencies and rebellion– one thinks of the exciting new work of Paul Richards, Stathis Kalyvas and JeremyWeinstein (to say nothing of the World Bank’s 2011 Report). Bernstein is, in myview, somewhat skeptical of the grandiose claims made about a global agrariancounter-movement and of a ‘peasant way’, questioning the conceptual foundationsof any claims of a purported unity of landed peoples, and problematising how acommon political project is constructed from the heterogeneous shards of newfarmer movements. His critique, for me, opens up still larger questions about classand politics: not the least of which is what the dominance of finance implies for laboror for class politics more generally.

Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change seeks to demonstrate that class is theindispensable starting point for a robust political economy of agriculture. Bernsteinhas staked out this ground in a sweeping and compelling way. It is evitable that areader ends the book with more questions than he or she started with – and perhapswith a sense of frustration at what little Bernstein sometimes has to say about theintriguing and challenging questions he poses. But it is a measure of the breadth,

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sophistication and brilliance of Bernstein’s analysis that his theoretical projectremains so compelling.

Michael WattsUniversity of California, Berkeley

Email: mwatts@berkeley.edu� 2012, Michael Watts

References

Bernstein, H. 1977. Notes on capital and peasantry. Review of African Political Economy,4(10), 60–73.

Cronon, W. 1991. Nature’s metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W.Norton.

Davis, M. 2001. Planet of slums. London: Verso.Deere, C.D. and A. de Janvry. 1979. A conceptual framework for the empirical analysis of

peasants. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 61(4), 601–11.Hsing, Y. 2010. The great urban transformation: politics, land, and property in China. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.de Janvry, A. 1981. The agrarian question and reformism in Latin America. Baltimore and

London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.World Bank. 2011. World development report 2011: conflict, security, and development.

Washington, DC: World Bank.World Bank. 2007. World development report 2008: agriculture for development. Washington,

DC: World Bank.

Gender and agrarian reforms, by Susie Jacobs, New York and London, Routledge,2010, viii þ 256 pp., £70.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-415-37648-8

This comprehensive account of land and agrarian reforms worldwide provides auseful overview at a time when agricultural systems and productivity are comingback in focus with rising food prices, and environmental and social concernsassociated with large scale agribusiness. Jacobs did original work in the 1980s inZimbabwe, giving her first-hand experience with one sort of state-led attempt atequitable reform. This book, however, draws on an extensive review of existingresearch on reforms around the world in an attempt to provide a macro picture ofdifferent models and contexts from which broad trends, trajectories andtheoretical implications can be drawn. Jacobs’ particular focus is on the outcomesof reforms for women and gender relations, but this is anchored firmly in abroader discussion of the practical and ideological aims of reforms in variouscontexts.

The book is divided into three parts and nine chapters. Part I engages withtheoretical perspectives and debates relating both to agrarian reforms and feministstudies of rural women’s status. Land reforms worldwide are classified as eithercollective or household/family types of programs, with the former associatedmostly with states having undergone socialist or communist revolutions, and thelatter both after failed collectivizations, and elsewhere as original models ofreform. Debates have centred on issues of productivity and efficiency, optimal sizesof land-holdings and public-vs-private tenure. History has taught clear lessons onsome of these issues, for example showing that the Soviet assumption that

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