Surveying the agrarian question (part 1): unearthing foundations, exploring diversity

Abstract

This two-part article surveys the origin, development, and current meaning of the ‘agrarian question’. Part one of the survey explores the history of the agrarian question, elaborating its origin in the work of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin, and its development in the work of Preobrazhensky, Dobb, Brenner, and others. Part two of the survey identifies seven current variants of the agrarian question and critically interrogates these variants in order to understand whether, and if so, how, the location of small-scale petty commodity food and farm production within contemporary capitalism has been reconfigured during the era of neoliberal globalisation. Together, the two parts of the survey argue that the agrarian question continues to offer a rigorously flexible framework by which to undertake a historically-informed and country-specific analysis of the material conditions governing rural production, reproduction, and the process of agrarian accumulation or its lack thereof, a process that can now be located within the law of value and market imperatives that operate on a world scale.

Keywords:

• agrarian question
• agrarian change
• rural development
• rural transformation
• peasant studies
• globalisation

Notes

¹Critical overviews of globalisation are provided by Hirst and Thompson (1996), Weiss (1997), and Chernomas and Sepehri (2005).

²Hobsbawm's (1994, 289) obituary has been challenged by Otero (1999), Bryceson et al. (2000), Bernstein (2000), Watts (2002), Johnson (2004), McMichael (2006a, 2006b), and Kay (2008b).

³Furthermore, as Marx (1971, orig. 1852, 230) characterised the French peasantry at the time: ‘Their field of production, the small-holding, admits of no division of labour in its cultivation, no application of science and, therefore, no diversity of development, no variety of talent, no wealth of social relationships.’

⁴Southeast Asia, and particularly Thailand and Vietnam, spring to mind.

⁵For materialist analyses of the emergence of the global food system, see Friedmann (1993), Bonnano et al. (1994), McMichael (1994), Goodman and Watts (1997), Davis (2001), Weis (2007), and Watts (2009).

⁶The comparative merits of small- versus large-scale agricultural production or peasant versus capitalist agriculture were intensely debated by Kautsky and other members of the German Social Democratic party at the turn of the nineteenth century, and are discussed in Hussain and Tribe (1984). This remains an ongoing debate of great importance; recent contributions include Griffin et al. (2002, 2004), Byres (2004a, 2004b), and others. The World Bank (2007) has re-entered this debate, arguing about the advantages of large-scale farming in an era of neoliberal globalisation (Akram-Lodhi 2008, Oya 2009). Our own position is that the technical conditions governing farm production can only be understood when set within the social relations of production.

⁷Preobrazhensky was himself a victim of Stalin's purges.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi

Preliminary versions of this article were presented to the XVth World Economic History Congress, Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands, August 2009 and the International Conference on the Global Food Crisis, Universidad Autonóma de Zacatecas, Zacatecas, Mexico, August 2009. Our thanks to Eric Vanhaute, Cormac Ó Gráda, Henry Veltmeyer, and Jun Borras. We also acknowledge the contribution made by two anonymous reviewers, who must be commended for the diligence with which they worked: they have significantly improved the article.