Marx and Chayanov at the margins: understanding agrarian change in Java

ABSTRACT

Starting from the notes which Marx made on Java in 1853 and 1881, this contribution explores the history of research and debates on the survival, reproduction and differentiation of Java's peasant communities. Rural differentiation and concentration of landholdings are long-standing, established facts; however this has produced not a capitalist large-farmer class but growing numbers of share tenants, as the landowning ‘masters of the contemporary countryside’ parcel out their land in minuscule plots to share tenants. Understanding the continuing existence of this highly productive and pluriactive mass of micro-farmers requires concepts derived from both the Marxist and the Chayanovian traditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Java
• Marx
• Chayanov
• agrarian change
• peasants
• differentiation

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jan Breman, Hanny Wijaya and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and encouraging comments. Translations from Dutch and Indonesian sources are by the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Ben White is Emeritus Professor of rural sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. His research and teaching has focused on processes of agrarian change and the anthropology and history of childhood and youth, especially in Indonesia. He is a founding member of the Land Deal Politics Initiative (www.iss.nl/ldpi), and the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (www.iss.nl/erpi). Email: [email protected].

Notes

1 As seen in his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich – apparently suppressed for some three decades after his death – in answer to her question whether the Russian commune would inevitably disappear as Russian capitalism developed, or whether it could become the ‘element of regeneration in Russian society’ (Stedman-Jones 2016, 580, 594–95).

2 Parts of this article draw on the author’s previous publications, in particular Hüsken and White (1989); White and Wiradi (1989); White (2005, 2010, 2014); Ambarwati et al. (2016).

3 For those interested in Marx’s reading of Raffles, the pages which he copied or summarised were (all from Vol. I) pp. 135–36, 141–44, 146, 148–51, 283–86 (Tichelman 1983, 16–17). These notes are preserved in the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, and their publication is planned to be included in Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe, 2^nd series, vol. IV/3 (Anderson 2016, 252).

4 Du Bus’ report was written for him by Willem van Hogendorp, who was seconded to him during his tenure as Governor-General.

5 I am grateful to the late Frans Hüsken for drawing my attention to this study, more than 40 years ago. More details from Heyting’s study are given in White (2010).

6 This corresponds closely to the average daily work inputs of male peasants in another year-long time-allocation study in rural Java, almost 90 years later, which found adult men to be spending 7.9 hours per day in directly productive work (White 1976, 275).

7 This includes individual owners, those with a permanent share in communal land, and those with a share in periodically redistributed communal land.

8 ‘Kromo’ was Sukarno’s name for the Javanese equivalent of the Sundanese ‘Marhaen’.

9 Villages in Bali and Lampung were also included in the study, but are not discussed here.

10 Law no. 2 (1960) on Share Tenancy – still in force and universally ignored today – does not specify the proportion of the crop due to tenant and landlord, but does require that the division of the crop takes place after deducting all costs (of seed, fertilizer, draught animals, planting and harvesting wages). These costs are thus, effectively, shared 50:50 between owner and tenant.

11 Geertz lived in the house of a railroad worker in the District Capital of Kediri, and never did village fieldwork.

12 All that is available are estimates of the distribution of operated farm holdings in the sample villages (Agro-Economic Survey 1972).

13 As well as additional villages in Lampung and South Sulawesi provinces.

14 ‘[T]he main trends of peasant differentiation are one thing; the forms it assumes, depending on the different local conditions, are another’ (Lenin 1976, 145).

15 The apparent decline in the number of farms (and increase in their average size) in the most recent (2013) Agricultural Census is, we have argued, mainly due to changes in the definitions and criteria for ‘farms’ used by the Central Bureau of Statistics (Ambarwati et al. 2016, 270).