From peasants to petty commodity production in Southeast Asia

Abstract

This paper represents a preliminary attempt to deal with transformations of the peasant economy in specific regions of Southeast Asia. I shall argue that the change is not simply the result of the incorporation of peasants within a world economy, but one that considerably predates the modern period. Nor can the change be viewed as part of a transition to capitalist forms of production. On the contrary the forms of production which have emerged differ in significant ways from those that developed in the capitalist core as merchant capital and feudal landed property gave way to industrial capital and capitalist relations of production. Accordingly, it would be unwise to assume that the existing situation represents some step in a necessary transition which will mirror changes that took place in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. As a consequence there is a need for forms of economic and political analysis not easily derivable from Marxist theories of the capitalist mode of production, or from theories of the “articulation” of modes of production in which the modes subordinated to capital are deduced directly from the functional prerequisites of capitalism conceived as an abstract, global structure.

Notes

Thus, for example, the line of the Latin American Communist Parties so effectively criticized by Frank among others that Latin America must first pass through a capitalist stage before becoming socialist—the argument that you first need a bourgeois revolution before a socialist one is of course not restricted to Latin America—is premised on a unilinear view of economic development of the sort I mean when I talk about changes mirroring those that took place in Britain. However, such a teleological notion of evolution could also be attributed to Frank and other of the dependency writers, a point made in a slightly different way by Taylor recently. J. Taylor, From Modernization to Modes of Production (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1979).