Land, markets and neoliberal enclosure: an agrarian political economy perspective

Abstract

Market-led agrarian reform is a part of neoliberal agrarian restructuring. It is premised on assumptions that fail to recognise the socially embedded character of land transfers. Agrarian political economy offers an understanding of the processes surrounding land transfers that emphasises social embeddedness. As a consequence of the specific characteristics of neoliberal enclosure market imperatives are now used to deepen capitalist social property relations in the South. Neoliberal enclosure is in turn facilitating the reconfiguration of a ‘bifurcated’ agrarian structure in which emergent export-oriented capitalist farming sits alongside peasant subsistence-oriented farming. This is part of an ongoing process of expanded commodification of both rural products and rural labour, the latter of which is seen in widespread semi-proletarianisation.

Notes

I would like to offer my thanks to Henry Bernstein, Saturnino M Borras, Jr, James K Boyce, Cristóbal Kay, Edward Lahiff and an anonymous referee for their comments on earlier versions. The undoubted errors that remain are mine.

1 AH Akram-Lodhi, S Borras & C Kay (eds), Land, Poverty and Livelihoods in an Era of Globalization: Perspectives from Developing and Transition Countries, London: Routledge, 2007; P Rosset, R Patel & M Courville (eds), Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform, Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2006; and A de Janvry, G Gordillo, JP Platteau & E Sadoulet (eds), Access to Land, Rural Poverty and Public Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

2 S Borras, ‘The Philippine land reform experience in comparative perspective: some theoretical and methodological implications’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 6 (1), 2006, pp 69 – 101.

3 K Deininger & H Binswanger, ‘The evolution of the World Bank's land policy: principles, experience and future challenges’, World Bank Research Observer, 14 (2), 1999, pp 247 – 276; World Bank, Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction, Washington, DC: World Bank/Oxford University Press, 2003; World Bank, World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp 156 – 175; and World Bank, World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development in a Changing World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

4 Albeit one that is fictitious, according to Polanyi. K Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001.

5 AH Akram-Lodhi, ‘A bitter pill? Peasants and sugarcane markets in northern Pakistan’, European Journal of Development Research, 12 (1), 2000, pp 206 – 228.

6 A Evans, ‘Gender issues in rural household economics’, ids Bulletin, 22, 1991, pp 51 – 59.

7 A Bhaduri, ‘Forced commerce and agrarian growth’, World Development, 14 (2), 1986, pp 267 – 272.

8 W Gerrard, Theory of the Capitalist Economy: Towards a Post-Classical Synthesis, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

9 FCvN Fourie, ‘The nature of firms and markets: do transactions approaches help?’, South African Journal of Economics, 57 (3), 1989, pp 142 – 160.

10 M Sawyer, ‘The nature and role of the market’, in C Pitelis (ed), Transactions Costs, Markets and Hierarchies, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993.

11 Polanyi, The Great Transformation.

12 TJ Byres (ed), ‘Sharecroppers and sharecropping’, special issue of Journal of Peasant Studies, 10 (2 – 3), 1983.

13 K Marx, Capital, Vol I, London: Penguin Books, 1976, pp 279 – 280.

14 M Mackintosh, ‘Abstract markets and real needs’, in H Bernstein, B Crow, M Mackintosh & C Martin (eds), The Food Question: Profits versus People?, London: Earthscan Publications, 1990.

15 H Bernstein, ‘The political economy of the maize filière’, in Bernstein (ed), The Agrarian Question in South Africa, London: Frank Cass, 1996.

16 K Kautsky, The Agrarian Question, two vols, London: Zwan Publications, 1988.

17 J Banaji, ‘Summary of selected parts of Kautsky's The Agrarian Question’, in H Wolpe (ed), The Articulation of Modes of Production: Essays from Economy and Society, London: Routledge, 1980, p 46.

18 Marx, Capital.

19 Ibid, p 876.

20 Key contributions on the transition from feudalism to capitalism include M Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, New York: International Publishers, 1964; P Sweezy, ‘A critique’, in Paul Sweezy et al, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, London: Verso, 1976; Sweezy et al, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, London: Verso, 1976; RH Hilton, ‘Introduction’, in Sweezy et al, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism; R Brenner, ‘The origins of capitalist development: a critique of neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review (first series), 104, 1977, pp 25 – 92; and TH Aston & CHE Philpin (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. More recent texts include TJ Byres, ‘The agrarian question and differing forms of capitalist transition: an essay with reference to Asia’, in J Breman & S Mundle (eds), Rural Transformation in Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991; and Byres, Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below: An Essay in Comparative Political Economy, London: Macmillan, 1996.

21 D Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

22 E Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, London: Verso, 2002.

23 M De Angelis, ‘Marx and primitive accumulation: the continuous character of capital's “enclosures”‘, The Commoner, 2, 2001; and De Angelis, ‘Separating the doing and the deed: capital and the continuous character of enclosures’, Historical Materialism, 12 (2), 2004, pp 57 – 87.

24 De Angelis, ‘Separating the doing and the deed’, p 63.

25 Marx, Capital, pp 874 – 875.

26 K Marx, Theories of Surplus-value, Vol 3, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971, p 271.

27 W Bonefeld, ‘The permanence of primitive accumulation: commodity fetishism and social constitution’, The Commoner, 2, 2001.

28 De Angelis ‘Separating the doing and the deed’, pp 60, 65.

29 Marx, Capital, pp 899 – 900.

30 De Angelis ‘Separating the doing and the deed’, p 69.

31 Ibid, pp 72, 73, 80.

32 M Wuyts, ‘Deprivation and public need’, in M Wuyts, M Mackintosh & T Hewitt (eds), Development Policy and Public Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

33 De Angelis, ‘Separating the doing and the deed’, p 61.

34 Ibid, pp 75, 77.

35 Ibid, p 78.

36 E Holt-Giménez, ‘Territorial restructuring and the grounding of agrarian reform: indigenous communities, gold mining and the World Bank’, paper presented to the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development Annual Congress, University of Saskatchewan, 1 June 2007, p 2; and W Assies, ‘Land tenure legislation in a pluri-cultural and multi-ethnic society: the case of Bolivia’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 33 (4), 2007, pp 569 – 611.

37 De Angelis, ‘Separating the doing and the deed’, pp 65, 57.

38 Ibid, p 73.

39 S Borras, ‘La Via Campesina: an evolving transnational social movement’, Transnational Institute Briefing Series no 2004/6, 2004; T Brass (ed), New Farmers' Movements in India, London: Frank Cass, 1995; Brass (ed), Latin American Peasants, London: Frank Cass, 2003; A Desmarais, La Via Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants, London: Pluto, 2007; and J Petras & H Veltmeyer, ‘Are Latin American peasant movements still a force for change?’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 28 (2), 2001, pp 83 – 118.

40 F Araghi, ‘The great global enclosure of our times: peasants and the agrarian question at the end of the twentieth century’, in F Magdoff, JB Foster & F Buttel (eds), Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food and the Environment, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

41 AH Akram-Lodhi, ‘Neoconservative economic policy, governance and alternative budgets’, in AH Akram-Lodhi, R Chernomas & A Sepehri (eds), Globalization, Neoconservative Policies and Democratic Alternatives, Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2005; Akram-Lodhi, ‘What's in a name? Neo-conservative ideology, neoliberalism and globalisation’, in R Robison (ed), The Neoliberal Revolution: Forging the Market State, London: Palgrave 2006.

42 De Angelis, ‘Separating the doing and the deed’, p 80.

43 M De Angelis, ‘Reflections on alternatives, commons and communities, or building a new world from the bottom up’, The Commoner, 6, 2003, p 1.

44 China is a key actor in world food markets, both in terms of its domestic production and its international trade, but it is important not to underestimate the role of agro-food transnational capital in the internationalisation of Chinese agricultural production and markets.

45 TJ Byres, ‘Paths of capitalist agrarian transition in the past and in the contemporary world’, in VK Ramachandran & M Swaminathan (eds), Agrarian Studies: Essays on Agrarian Relations in Less-Developed Countries, London: Zed Press, 2003.

46 F Araghi, ‘Food regimes and the production of value: some methodological issues’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 30 (2), 2003, pp 41 – 70.

47 Araghi, ‘The great global enclosure of our times’, p 151.

48 This process is described, in the Latin American context in C Kay, ‘Latin America's agrarian transformation: peasantization and proletarianization’, in DF Bryceson, C Kay & J Mooij (eds), Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America, London: ITDG Publishing, 2000.

49 DF Bryceson, ‘Peasant theories and smallholder policies: past and present’, in Bryceson et al, Disappearing Peasantries?.

50 Araghi, ‘The great global enclosure of our times’, p 146.

51 VI Lenin, ‘Preliminary draft theses on the agrarian question’, in Collected Works, Vol XXXI, Moscow: Progress Publishers, p 153.

52 H Bernstein, ‘Is there an agrarian question in the 21st century?’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 27 (4), 2006, pp 449 – 460.

53 De Angelis, ‘Separating the doing and the deed’, p 76.