Agrarian Marxism and the proletariat: a palm oil manifesto

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to re-integrate a Marxist perspective of the collective agency of the proletariat into the analysis of the corporate food regime. The article first summarises Marx’s key ideas on the proletariat and then discusses their relevance for capitalist agriculture today, arguing that labour makes up an important part of the contested social relations of production in contemporary agrarian capitalism. Drawing on ongoing empirical research with plantation workers and labour activists in Indonesia and Malaysia, it then appraises the current state of class struggle in the palm oil sector, arguing that it is characterised by everyday class struggles and an emerging trade union movement. The article concludes – and this is the ‘manifesto’ element – by suggesting that a reorientation towards labour in the ‘agrarian question’ could overcome some of the limitations of the food sovereignty movement and open up new perspectives for the social-ecological transformation of capitalist agriculture.

KEYWORDS:

• Agrarian Marxism
• labour
• plantation
• palm oil
• corporate food regime

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the workers and activists who, by their praxis and many discussions contributed to this article. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their painstaking and patient comments, and the German Research Foundation and the Robert Bosch Foundation for funding research and civil society activities on which this article is partly based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The article does not attempt to ‘prove’ that Marx was right to see the proletariat as a potentially revolutionary class, nor to discuss in detail the question of how ‘revolutionary consciousness’ develops or not. This would require a close look at the many revolutionary upheavals of the 20th Century and the role of the proletariat within them, a discussion of Stalinism, Maoism and the experience of state capitalism, and also an engagement with theories of ideology and class consciousness (see Eagelton 1994, among others).

2 Schneider and McMichael (2010) tend to reduce Marx’s argument to the technical one about the nutrient cycle but the more important underlying argument is the metabolic rift within the work process itself.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Grant Number GZ PY 76/2-1].

Notes on contributors

Oliver Pye

Oliver Pye is a lecturer in Southeast Asian Studies at Bonn University, with a research focus on political ecology and social movements. He has been working with and on labour in the palm oil industry since 2009, including in-depth research with Indonesian migrant workers in plantations and mills in Malaysia. As a scholar-activist, he is involved in a network of trade unions and NGOs that is developing transnational organizing strategies for the palm oil sector.