Introduction: Peasant, state and class

Abstract

In the light of a renewed interest in the development role of the state, examined here are the three main themes informing the discussions by contributors to this volume. The first concerns the different forms taken by state interventions on behalf of capital, and their impact on the peasantry. A second examines the other side of this same coin, and looks at the way peasants have opposed and subverted government action/activities, with particular reference to the nature and effectiveness of grassroots resistance to the state. The third addresses the ideological underpinnings of political action undertaken by peasants in their conflict with the state, especially the efficacy of mobilization and resistance confined to particular localities.

Notes

1 See Best and Kellner 1991, and for critical comments on Foucault's notion of power and the state see Poulantzas 1978.

2 The keywords used to conduct the search were ‘state’ and ‘peasant’. The Social Sciences Citation Index database was used.

3 For Marxist theory about the state, see Aronowitz and Bratsis 2002, Barrow 1993, Das 1996; 2006, Hoffman 1995, and Jessop 1990, 2002.

4 Arguing for the relative autonomy of the different levels/instances of a mode of production, Althussarianism paved the way for this sort of theorization, which Poulantzas popularized.

5 Many studies of the local state and the ‘every-day state’ fall into this category [Fuller and Benei, 2001.

6 See, for example, the work of Althusser 1971, Poulantzas 1968; 1969; 1978 and Miliband 1970; 1973; 1977.

7 There were a few exceptions, including Alavi 1972 and Saul 1974 which directly spoke to the state debate on state power and class/capitalist power in the West. See also Carnoy 1984 for a review of the discussion of the Third World state. There is, of course, a lot of literature on the developmental state [Leftwich, 2000, but its concerns are state intervention. The issue of state power in relation to class power in the Third World, one which epistemologically precedes the fact of state power, has not attracted the attention it deserves in the western debate on the capitalist state.

8 Among two important gaps in Marx's own works are the state and peasants, which Lenin 1977 and Kautsky 1988, among others, sought to address. One might have expected the debate on the mode of production in India to include a discussion about the state, but it did not. A reason for this absence is that many participants were economists who, although Marxist, still tended to follow mainstream economists in not policitizing the economic. Since the mode of production was defined as a household/local/regional phenomenon in these debates, and consequently forgetting that the dynamic of the capitalist mode of production is predominantly not local, this interpretation of the mode of production is inconsistent with the reality of the state: the latter is a national-level class-organization, with local/regional branches.

9 This tendency is in keeping with current optimism, in that oppressive/exploitative structures – such as imperialism, the market, and patron/client relations between rich (state elites) and poor (as in the literature on social capital) are seen as benign. The exploited/oppressed are therefore seen as a diffuse and incoherent subaltern/multitude/mass, lacking solidarity and incapable of challenging the power of the state.

10 On this, see Engels 1972, and also Draper 1977 for a detailed discussion. This means that any theory that is Marxist must have a view about the class nature of the state generally, and of the capitalist state in particular. Much of the post-1960 discussion has been about the latter, and this is perhaps one reason why peasants-as-‘non-capitalist’-classes have tended not to feature.

11 This autonomy is necessary for the state to flexibly meet varying needs of capitalist fractions, or – as Miliband has said – the affairs of common interest to the whole bourgeoisie. The limit to the autonomy of the state is its having to reproduce capitalist property rights. Within this limit, says Poulantzas, how autonomous it is varies, depending on concrete conditions [Das, 1996: 34]. These empirical conditions include sharp class conflicts, disputes between dominant class-fractions, the weakness of local proprietary classes, military threat from abroad [Richards, 1986, and the degree of political unawareness on the part of the electorate [Decanio, 2000.

12 This is seen, for example, when some political leaders or government officials from humble backgrounds amass huge fortunes and become capitalists.

13 An implication of this is that, as different groups lobby for different kinds of policies, contradictions are manifested at the level of budget and/or balance of payments [Richards, 1986.

14 It should also be noted that the introduction of the Green Revolution programme led to a new round of global-level inequality: between most of Africa, which did not have the strong state-promoted infrastructure, and other parts of the Third World – including Mexico, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia – which did.

15 Hence the continuing significance in Green Revolution areas of attached labour, a relational form covering not just permanent but also seasonal and migrant workers [Brass, 1990. This kind of production relation enables capitalist farmers to appropriate absolute surplus, in addition to relative surplus generated through the use of technology.

16 Also important were neoliberal policies aimed at the introduction of user fees by the central government, as occurred in the so-called former-socialist countries such as China (So and Wegren, this volume).

17 That Mohammad Yunis, the economist who popularized micro-credit (and Grameen Bank) was awarded a Nobel prize for peace – just as Borlaugh, the scientist who invented HYV seeds was awarded a Nobel peace prize earlier – is not without significance. It says a lot about the political character of things like social capital, micro-credit as well as technological change and of the development researchers, both postmodern and more mainstream scholars including neo-Malthusians. In short, all those who celebrate these development strategies in terms of how they help create a safe political climate for global capital, by weaning angry peasants thus apparently empowered by these strategies from anything remotely connected to revolutionary changes. These twin awards also underline the importance both of science (as a strategy of accumulation) and of peace (stability being a political condition for accumulation) for global capital.

18 On this, see Bobrow-Strain 2004, Ghimire 2005, Levin 2002, and the contribution to this volume by Petras and Veltmeyer. As the latter have pointed out, not the least of the ideological difficulties with the conjunction of ‘market-led’ and ‘reform’ is the inference that what the market delivers to ‘those below’ is designed to improve the lot of peasants and workers. Not merely is this not true – the market delivers resources only to those who can afford them – but the effect of this conceptual repositioning (market-led = reform) is to depict neoliberal policy as benign. It is, in short, designed to generate false consciousness at the rural grassroots.

19 This was the fate of the European peasantry when Kautsky was writing. In his view, the biggest changes in the condition of European agriculture were the result of competition by cheap grain imported from America, the Argentine, India, and Russia.

20 The observation by Kautsky 1988 that small peasants are frequently worse off than labourers may be relevant here.

21 In Egypt, the state sought to undermine the old landlord class, where military officers of more humble origin destroyed the power of their main opponent [Waterbury, 1983; Hopkins, 1987. In Iran the aim was to make landlords become agrarian and industrial capitalists [Hooglund, 1982 as in South Korea.

22 On this, see also Mason 2004.

23 On the role of peasants in agrarian movements, see among many others, Wolf 1969, Paige 1970, Anderson and Seligson 1994, Boswell and Dixon 1993, and Cronin 2005. Marx, Trotsky, and to some extent even Lenin, were much less sanguine about the revolutionary potential of an undifferentiated peasantry, while, as widely known, Mao had a positive view. One can agree with Trotsky 1905: the upper stratum of the peasantry, composed of rich elements, go along with the big bourgeoisie in all decisive cases, especially in war and in revolution. By contrast, the lower stratum, consisting of poor peasants, is found in the camp of the proletariat. The middle peasantry, as always, is a conundrum in a political sense, and can be found in either camp – or both – depending on the historical circumstances.

24 Fox hastens to add, however, that defensive campaigns are much more common than the alternative institution-building initiatives.

25 This ideological dichotomy is also found among the rural population in many Indian contexts, as noted by Das in this volume. Peasants tend to believe that higher-level state institutions really want to help the rural poor, and that it is only local officials/politicians who prevent this, by mismanaging the resources.

26 ‘Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, … this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself’[Marx, 1978: 159–160].

27 ‘In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not form a class (-for-itself)’[Marx, 2003: 347; italics added]. This view of Marx is consistent with his argument that the mode of production and appropriation are class processes, and that the state promotes these, are predominantly national and international dynamics.

28 A recent contribution to ‘resistance studies’ mistakenly claims that Scott's framework is a bridge between Marxist and post-structuralist approaches to agency [Fletcher, 2007: xi; xiii]. One immediate reaction of Marxists would be that the political practice that follows from Marxist theory is not resistance against extant structures – although that may be included in limited ways – but much rather their transcendence.

29 See also Brass 2007.

30 With regard to the dominated classes, an important function of the state ‘is to prevent their political organization’[Poulantzas, 1968: 188; 1978: 127]. It does this by presenting itself to these classes as representing the general interests of juridically equal citizens and by making some concessions.

31 Emblematic here is the forming of the Labour, Peasant, Social and Popular Front (fscsp)—founded in 2002 to oppose the effects of the neoliberal agenda in Mexico. The FSCSP has organized demonstrations and work stoppages against the privatization of the social security system and of the energy sector, and against the proposed reform of the Federal Labour Law to increase flexibilization and employers' rights.