10

The Agrarian Question Under Globalization 1

[Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobel Kay]

Where Do We Begin?
More than a century ago, for Karl Kautsky the agrarian question
meant ‘whether and how capital is seizing hold of agriculture,
revolutionizing it, making old forms of production and property
untenable and creating the necessity for new ones’ (Kautsky, 1889.
See summary in this volume). A century later, for Terence J. Byres
(1996. strike down), it was the ‘continued existence of obstacles in
rural areas in a substantive sense, (preventing) accumulation both
within agriculture and outside in industry’ that was the core of
the agrarian question. In the age of globalization, does capital still
transform the peasantry as national capital did at certain historical
junctures, or do peasants continue to survive as petty commodity
producers? AL and K argue that globalization produces a complex
dynamic that integrates the peasantry within global markets,
intensifying their crisis beyond relegating them to reserve an army
of labour. For the authors, it is peasant resistance to the logic and
imperative of their marginalization by capital that constitutes the
core of the contemporary agrarian question.

The Peasant Question in Classical Marxism: Differentiation

and Transformation
AL and K begin by charting the important trajectories of capitalism’s
entry into European societies, as theorized by Marx, Engels,
110 The Agrarian Question: A Reader

Kautsky and Lenin. This entry transformed the organization of

agrarian production and the lives of peasants in different ways.
Multiple political regimes and the imperialist expansion through
colonization led to multiple trajectories of capitalist transition in
agriculture. The authors contest the popular understanding that
Marx viewed peasantry as ‘a pre-capitalist remnant that will be
dragged into modernity by the capitalist mode of production’.
They direct our attention to the better and more fully developed
view of Marx, which appeared in Capital, Vol. I:
All revolutions are epoch making that act as levers for the
capitalist class in course of formation. But this is also true for
those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and
forcibly separated from their means of subsistence and hurled
into the labour market as free, unprotected and rightless
proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer
or the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process.
The history of this expropriation assumes a different order of
succession and at different historical epochs. Only in England
which we therefore take our example, has it in the classic form
[Marx 1976, 876].
AL and K also direct our attention to the observation of
Marx that capital does not destroy peasant classes in some
regions, but subsumes the labour of peasant classes using ‘hybrid’
modes of surplus extraction. Reading Marx’s (1881) letters to his
correspondent Vera Zasulich (https://www.marxists.org/archive/
marx/works/1881/zasulich/) on the fate of the Russian peasantry in
rapidly industrializing Russia enables us to see his deep insight into
the possibilities of multiple resolutions of the agrarian question for
small-scale peasant producters.
What is interesting and useful in Akram-Lodhi and Kay’s
method is their attention to the historical context of each theoretical
formulation.
They note that Engels examined the agrarian question in the
context of the internationalization of the food regime, resulting from
European imperialist expansion, which began to undermine peasant
livelihoods in Europe (See Engels in this volume for more details).
The Agrarian Question Under Globalization 111

Kautsky (1880) and Lenin (1889), who arrived later in the century,
focused on the continuing transformation of agriculture in the
wake of industrial capitalism. They saw capitalist industrialization
breaking the traditional link between agricultural and rural petty
manufacturing by commodifying the former and linking it to distant
markets (See Kautsky in this volume for more details). For them,
industrial capitalism thus propelled agrarian capitalism.
Next, AL and K also delineate the distinct ways in which these
classical thinkers identified the coping and surviving mechanisms
of the peasantry under industrial capitalism. They note Marx’s
identification of social differentiation between households, which
transform into accumulating households and those which fail and
struggle to sustain their subsistence; Kautsky’s identification of self-
exploitation of the small peasantry and the intensification of rural
production under industrial capitalism, where the agrarian question
gets linked to imperialist world markets; and Lenin’s identification
of class differentiation in agriculture between exploiting big
landlords and rich capitalist farmers and exploited classes of small
tillers and landless labour. For both Kautsky and Lenin, they
point out, agrarian capital need not rely on dispossessing petty
commodity producing peasants.

The Peasant Question in Planned Economies: Socialist

Primitive Accumulation
If industrial capitalism the world over made accumulation faster
by repressing the relative prices of farm products, created through
unfettered competition among peasants and the opening up of
market for imports, what the countries that embarked on planned
growth did is another question that AL and K explore. The obvious
case for them is the Soviet Union.
AL and K note that a situation arose after the formation of
the Soviet Union when the planners had to make a decision on the
role of agriculture and the peasantry. Under the New Economic
Policy peasants began to enjoy favourable prices from rising
urban demand. Industrialization and shortages of agricultural
goods led to a sharp rise in agricultural prices. Such an increase
112 The Agrarian Question: A Reader

vis-a-vis manufactured goods prices slowed down accumulation

in industry. Even as Bukharin argued against imposing any curbs
on food prices, favouring a long-term balance of prices, Evegy
Preobrazensky, a Marxist economist in Russia and a contemporary
of Bukharin, argued that for the modern industrial sector to
accumulate, agricultural prices had to be kept relatively low. The
industrial sector was seen as a harbinger of development that
would accommodate the surplus labour evicted from agriculture as
relative prices moved against agriculture. Preobrazensky called this
“socialist primitive accumulation”. This advice was implemented
through forced collectivization which involved violence, the
incarceration of resisting farmers, and widespread death.

The Agrarian Question After Lenin: A Debate Among

Historians
AL and K note that after Lenin it was primarily historians who
debated capitalist transition. The focus was on two issues. The first
was to understand what led to the fall of feudalism in Europe;
and the second was to understand the rise of capitalism as a
different form of surplus creation and appropriation. Maurice
Dobb in 1963 argued that feudalism ended in England because
of conflicting social relations between feudal lords and peasants:
feudal exaction in the form of rents led to violent clashes with
peasantry. Eventually, the small peasantry were expropriated from
their holdings through land enclosures established by the landlords,
and were reduced to wage labour, while a better off class of free
peasants emerged as capitalist tenants to lease in the lands of lords.
Rodney Hilton (1976) marshalled archival evidence for the conflict
which is described as class struggle by Dobb. The class struggle led
to a change in production relations to allow the productive forces
to grow. However, Paul Sweezy (1976) contended that it was the
emergence of long distance trade towards the middle of the 15th
century that enabled change to happen, suggesting that external
factors in the sphere of exchange played the key role.
In 1976, Robert Brenner reopened the debate after studying
the European transition more comprehensively and produced a
The Agrarian Question Under Globalization 113

much more rounded explanation within historical materialism.

Brenner identified the development of private property rights and
class differentiation as crucial moments that brought a resolution
to the conflict. Private property rights, granted by the state, created
incentives to lords to make improvements to their lands and enter
clear contractual relations with the free peasantry leasing their
lands. Thus, it was the changes in class structure, and in class
relations, that, in Brenner’s view, brought a resolution to the class
struggle of feudalism.

The Agrarian Question in the Late the 20 th Century2

Noting that by the end of the 20th century, a new understanding
of the agrarian question developed, extending the classical account,
AL and K draw attention to the important analytical distinctions
made by Bernstein in the agrarian question along the lines of three
‘problematics’, before moving on to outline what they think are the
crucial agrarian problematics for the 21st century. Bernstein made
these distinctions while reviewing the corpus of T.J. Byres’ writings
on multiple capitalist transitions in Europe, Asia and North America.
AQ1 the problematic of ‘accumulation’ (the ‘agrarian question’ is called
AQ in general in this essay) is derived from Preobrazhensky’s theory of
socialist primitive accumulation. This analyses agriculture’s potential
ability to generate ‘surplus output’ and a ‘financial surplus’ over
and above its own requirements. This supports industrialization,
structural transformation, accumulation and the emergence of
capital both within and beyond agriculture.
AQ2 the problematic of ‘production’ has its origin in Kautksy,
Marx and Lenin’s works. This analyses the extent of capitalist
development in the countryside, the form that it takes and the
barriers to its development. It looks at the micro political economy
issues affecting the structural transformation of petty commodity
producing peasant labour into its commodified form through rural
labour processes [the large body of empirical work in the ‘mode of
production debate in India’ falls into this category].
AQ3 the problematic of ‘politics’ is drawn from the theoretical
works of Engels. The dynamics between structures of dominance,
114 The Agrarian Question: A Reader

subordination and surplus appropriation and the agency of social

classes in the transformation lie at the centre of this problem. So
the political struggles against feudal oppression for resources which
eventually contribute to agrarian transition constitute the question
of politics [The classical debate about the balance of class forces,
the debate between Dobb and Sweezy, and later Brenner’s critique,
falls under this question].
This increasing analytical clarity provided by Bernstein on
the agrarian question, AL and K note, had made it possible to
imagine multiple transformatory possibilities by the end of 1990s.
One could have transformation, non-transformation, or the
partial-transformation of petty commodity producers into wage
labour. Hence, labour power was created through complex forces
of dispossession. Once peasants or other rural petty commodity
producers were unable to produce a sufficient fraction of their
consumption needs, they had to start selling their labour power to
buy basic needs (food or other needs) that they previously produced
themselves. Such wage labour would be sold to an urban employer,
a rural capitalist farmer, or rural non-farm enterprises. Thus, rural
petty commodity producers (peasants, artisans, service providers)
are transformed into wage labour or agrarian proto-capitalists. This
happens under a market that works with its own logic and which
becomes a necessary destination for their products and labour.
In short, it is the commodification of labour which underpins
the deeper process of generalized commodity production as well as
the concomitant transformation in the process of production—from
production for use to production for exchange and accumulation.
The agrarian transition is hence a process by which this does or
does not occur, as well as its implications for accumulation and the
emergence of capital. In this sense, AL and K argue, Bernstein (2004)
framed the agrarian question of capital initially as the emergence of
capital and later expanded it to the reproduction of capital, which
is predicated on appropriation. It is also important to examine the
way in which accumulation, production and politics contribute to
or are constrain the agrarian transition.
The Agrarian Question Under Globalization 115

The Agrarian Question Under Globalization

AL and K argue that globalization has transformed the development
of the forces and relations of production on a world scale. How then
has globalization changed the conditions for agrarian transition in
the late 20th century?
In the heydays of Keynesianism during the 1950s and 1960s,
land reforms and the distributional interventions of the state were
seen in line with boosting the aggregate demand. By the 1980s,
a home market-based state-led capitalist development strategy
was replaced with export-led market-led strategies of production.
By encouraging agricultural exports in Africa, Asia and Latin
America through varieties of policy-conditionality based on loans,
international agencies like the IMF and World Bank have managed
a reintegration of agricultural production with global markets. By
facilitating international repayment mechanisms, giving access to
investments and promoting technical change, new strategies have
managed to enhance productivity, production and profits [World
Bank 2007, Akram-Lodhi 2008, Veltmeyer 2009].
In this context, AL and K find it imperative to ask, as with
Bernstein (1996), whether, under neoliberal globalization, agrarian
transition is possible or even relevant for contemporary poor
countries?
The first key issue is that over the second half of the 20th century,
agriculture was effectively ‘decoupled’ from the problem of capital
accumulation. The authors note that capital accumulation in the
periphery is today driven by manufacturing and services on a world
scale. Capital, now globalized and connected with transnational
capital, does not require access to surplus agricultural resources
in order to facilitate accumulation. It therefore no longer needs
to reorganize agricultural production. Agrarian transition is no
longer the necessary pre-condition for development of capitalism.
Rather, transnational capital requires the technical capacity
to ever more efficiently allocate resources on a global scale to
enhance the mass and rate of surplus value and its realization
(Araghi 2009).
116 The Agrarian Question: A Reader

The second key issue is implicitly embedded in the first.

The internationalization of capital has ‘decoupled’ transnational
capital from national labour regimes, which are becoming
ever more fragmented. They become helpless in providing a
livelihood. It is not that agriculture does not matter for global
capital accumulation; but by segmenting labour on a global
scale, enlarging the global reserve army and fostering a crisis of
reproduction among the fragmented classes, it can appear that
transnational capital has made the agrarian question redundant
in the old sense. Agrarian question needs to be reconfigured for
the contemporary conditions.
In this context, AL and K identify seven different and competing
analytical approaches that are being followed and used by theorists
to frame the contemporary agrarian question.

Seven Agrarian Questions in Globalization?

AQ1: The Agrarian Question of Class Forces
It is argued here that the articulation of forces and relations of
production can take place in complex and multifaceted ways.
Transition is contingent and subject to diversity even on a global
level. By implication, it becomes necessary to understand the
diverse and uneven ways in which rural production processes are
transforming (or not) into the capitalist mode of production. These
processes must be globally contextualized. Social differentiation,
the nature of the landlord class, market imperatives and the severity
of law of value, and the character of the state all matter in the
framework of this mode of formulating the agrarian question.
In short, AQ1 investigates ongoing peasant differentiation and
the emergence of rural capitalism,

AQ2: The Path-Dependent Agrarian Question

Articulated by Bill Warren this approach argues that imperialism
through colonialism introduced capitalist relations of production
throughout the world. Even though this process was uneven across
time and space, it has unleashed an inexorable, if contingent and
dynamic, process of labour commodification across developing
The Agrarian Question Under Globalization 117

countries. Thus the ongoing expansion of wage labour signals that

the capitalist mode of production is deepening in rural worlds and
transforming agrarian production systems. No part has been left
untransformed.
AQ2 focuses on the struggle to resist de-peasantization and
later that of wage labour under rural capitalism.

AQ3: The Global Reserve Army of Labour Agrarian Question

Farshad Araghi (2009) initiated this question by arguing that
the unchallenged neoliberal globalization of today is the direct
continuation of liberal imperialism witnessed in the 19th century.
So the periods 1834 to 1870 and 1973 to the present have the
following in common: economic liberalism, anti-welfarism,
free-market fetishism, and a global division of labour through
‘workshops of the world’. Araghi argues that the modern forms of
neoliberal globalization have constructed an ‘enclosure food regime’
that produces, transfers and distributes value on a world scale. The
enclosure food regime has established subsidized consumption and
overconsumption among the classes of the global North. This also
created global ‘slums’ and an global unemployed reserve army, who
migrate globally for their livelihood. Thus the agrarian question is
reproduced under more demanding terms.
AQ3 adopts a capital-centric perspective over protracted
struggles to dispossess small producers from the realm of farm
production.

AQ4: The Decoupled’ Agrarian Question of Labour

This question, raised by Bernstein, argues that under the globalized
capitalist regime that reintegrates national capital with transnational
capital, the capitalist transformation of agriculture has become
irrelevant and redundant for broader capitalist transformation in
the developing countries. Agrarian capital is a subordinated entity
and has limited influence on the alignment of class forces in the
countryside, even though it influences and changes production
relations. Thus, Bernstein prioritizes a ‘rural politics problematic’
over a ‘production and accumulation problematic’.
118 The Agrarian Question: A Reader

AQ4 sees a struggle between globalizing capitalism and peasants

pauperized within global value chains.

AQ5: The Corporate Food Regime Agrarian Question

This is associated with Phillip McMichael (2009). Like Araghi,
McMichael argues that the agrarian question should be reconfigured
within the global context. Unlike Araghi, McMichael stresses the
specific historical condition of financialization, neoliberalization
and the creation of a ‘global food regime’ that fosters a commodity
accumulation ‘fetish’ in agriculture. Corporate food regimes
operate in an enclosed space of high-end markets, excluding the
poorer masses. Global capital movements organize these corporate
food regimes. The peasant economy is reproduced by the terms
dictated by the corporate food regime.
AQ5 also uses a world historic perspective on the agrarian
question of food as a struggle over rural livelihoods and globalizing
generalized commodity production of labour and capital.

AQ6: The Agrarian Question of Gender

This is a variation of the earlier problematic raised by Bridget
O’Laughlin (2009), who argued that the accumulation, production
and politics have considerable gender dimensions. The non-
commodified unpaid labour of women for families makes a
considerable contribution to the creation of value. The politics of
the agrarian question should at least understand and raise the issue
of gendered division of labour.
AQ6 is critical of the conception of prevaling notions of
struggle, bringing in a gender dimension.

AQ7: The Agrarian Question of Ecology and Environment

The agrarian production, accumulation and rural politic problematics
have another dimension, namely the biophysical agro-ecological
setting, which influences the assets, production process and class
formation. The myopic commercial regime that uses up agro­
ecological resources through unsustainable technologies will begin
posing limits on the rate of accumulation. The agrarian question
The Agrarian Question Under Globalization 119

must address, in light of the ecological degradation caused

by corporate agricultural practices, the character of ecological
relationships and contradictions of class and ecology. (Pearse 1985,
Tony Weis 2007 and Bellamy Foster 2009)
AQ7 suggests that the political ecology of struggle is shaped
by biophysical contradictions in capitalism that are integral to
understanding the agrarian question.
To arrive at the the contemporary relevance of the agrarian
question, AL and K argue, one has to assess the complementarities
and conflicts embedded between and among the seven agrarian
questions, all of which are capable of offering insights into
transformation.

The Agrarian Question in the 21 st Century

AL and K argue that neoliberal globalization and the global
agricultural export regimes that are produced have led to more
capital-intensive production. It has increased peasant differentiation,
pulling some petty commodity producers into global supply chains,
while getting many entangled in a viability crisis of indebtedness,
poverty and semi-proletarianization. This has occurred throughout
the developing countries as export markets have replaced home
markets.
Tropical products like cocoa, tea, coffee, spices, maize, and
sugar, and temperate products like milk, cheese, edible oils, animal
feeds, fish, sea foods, fruits and vegetables, tobacco and cotton, are
all linked to global supply chains. Global agro-business corporations
coordinate the supply chain management through extending
backend infrastructure, cold chains, and contract farming. All this
reorientation is aiding rural accumulation among capitalist farms
as well as distress among the petty commodity producers. When
capital restructures globally, the mobilization of the agricultural
surplus is also being globalized.
AL and K further argue that despite the ongoing systemic global
subsistence crisis of the 21st century, there is not going to be the
‘death of peasantry,’ as historian Eric Hobsbawm predicted. There
are other trends at work: decollectivization and repeasantization in
120 The Agrarian Question: A Reader

post-socialist countries like Vietnam, and Central Asia, on the one

hand; and semi-proletarianization and fragmentation without full
polarization on the other. All these represent a reconfiguration of
livelihoods, deepening market imperatives, the deepening of the
law of value across the world capitalist economy, and the expanded
commodification of natural resources as a global restructuring
of farm production takes place. This has raised several political
questions on the agrarian front which are connected with the
peasant question.
For AL and K, all these are not aspects of a linear process, but
form a dynamic, multi-faceted and contradictory set of patterns.
The agrarian question appears to have lost the role that it played
in the classical transitions, in building accumulation. But now its
role has shifted in building global industrial capital. This becomes
apparent the moment the question is reconfigured to the global
context. While the process of globalization has brought more and
more petty commodity producers under the law of value than
before, the consequences of differentiation and pauperization are
manifest now in more complex ways. The peasant question has
not disappeared but re-emerged as the global peasant question with
multiple sub-questions within it.

NOTES
1. Summarized from A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay,
“Agrarian Question: Unearthing Foundations” (Part I) in The
Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1, January 2010, 177-202.
2. Summarized from Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay’s Surveying
the Agrarian Question Part II.

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