Henry Bernstein

Those who can afford the new crops make all the money

Sharecropping is tantamount to slavery

Women do most of the work, but the men keep the money and beat the women

Capitalism removes the option of having communal land and land rights

1 How can farming growth be achieved?

2 What paths of agrarian change are characteristic of capitalism?

3 What are their effects for accumulation by agrarian classes?

4 Effects on the countryside?

Landed Property And Labour

p 42 - British path - Marx’s analysis indicated that through ‘primitive accumulation’ the transition was made form a feudal society to a capitalist one and in this protracted and violent change the peasants were ‘freed’ form the land to seek jobs in a competitive environment

p 42 - transformation to private property and the use of capital - formation of the proletariat

p 43 - Lenin points out two other paths: American - slow transition through need to invest in mechanization, i.e. competition, and Prussian - dictatorial forced labour

p 43 - American plan - get the land to the people

p 43 - Lenin wanted to use agricultural reform as a way to get to industrialization

p 44 - Only by getting the peasants to work on their own land do you get to real accumulation of capital - other systems (serfdom, colonization) only put the money back into agriculture, not industry

Agrarian Transitions/Colonial Trajectories

p 44 - Byres said there were many more ways to make the transition than just a few ‘paths’ and that these depended on the state at the time

p 45 - Far East - Japan - exploitation of the peasant farmers to feed industry

p 45 - The European colonies did not try to make the farmers more productive by investing in them the way the Japanese did

p 45 - ‘Industrial Plantations’ used by Europe

p 45 - Japan - increased use of peasants in the production of export crops, migrant labour

p 48 - In Latin America there were already quasi-feudalistic structures in the form of the haciendas which made the transition to primitive accumulation at the expense of the peasants

p 49 - the colonistic transition to private land ownership let a few landlords get all the money, hurt the peasants, and resulted in all the capital being taken out of the area rather than being re-invested - done forcibly failed to form any development

Capitalist Farming/Capitalist Agriculture

p 50 - the non-capitalist subsistence and commodity farmers have survived in Europe much longer than Marx predicted

p 51 - farming is different form industry in that it depends on the weather

p 52 - investment in farmeing was possibly lower because of the increased risk, the fact that it didn’t get any faster, and that labour was harder to manage in the field than in the factory

p 52 - farms all over have a greater degree of difference in application of technology, scale, and management than factories because they are less controllable

Fates of the Peasantry

p 54 - the less capitalistic peasant farming is, the less likely it is to induce technological innovation

p 54 - it’s not that the peasants don’t want to be capitalistic, but rather that some link in the system (land ownership, social, transportation control, etc.) prohibits them from acting that way

p 55 - Petty Commodity Production occurs when the peasants can’t get the necessities of life

p 55 - the social interconnections are very important in making something truly capitalistic - this depends a lot on the history of the location

p 55 - Petty Commodity Production is destroyed by the mass production of industry, but it pops up again in other areas

p 56 - farming gives way to the more market integrated and hence more predictable and controllable agribuisness

p 56 - The poor peasants lose their land because they can’t survive off it, the medium ones keep it, and the rich ones get more land -- concentration of land ownership

p 57 - argues that virtually everyone was a PCP at the end of colonialism

p 57 - some backwards practices may in fact be pre-capitalist rather than post-feudalist

p 58 - rich peasants often help out politically but their goals are to imprve their chances

p 57 - trends towards differentiation in PCP

p 58 - Differentiation is reached when the farmers have to buy tools -- seeds, machines -- because they can’t make them themselves

p 58 - risks are not evenly spread out

p 58 - entry costs to differentiation go up at the expense of the poorer peasants who can’t get in and thus fall further behind

p 59 - "peasants are petty commodity producers constituted by capitalist relations of production" -- i.e. the belief that capitalism destroys the middle class peasants ignores the fact that they are inherently capitalistic

p 60 - all peasants have diversified outside activities to increase/insure their income (poor - crafts, hunting, rich - education, machines)

p 60 - landholding size isn’t always a good measure of class, as the richer peasants will invest more in their land (agriculture)

p 60 - external or state programs can lock the peasants into the state’s plan

p 61 - much contract/tenant farming in the Third World represents an extension of the first world agribuisness rather than local or regional demand

p 61 - the Green Revolution proved to be more ‘scale neutral’ than ‘resource neutral’ -- which meant it heavily favored the richer peasants who could not only afford it but who had more land on which to try it

p 61 - richer peasants have more political influence and are therefore more likely to benefit from state sponsored plans

p 62 - net effect: peasants are largely becoming marginalized as they are forced to spend more and more of their time working for others

Agrarian Transitions and Class Struggle

p 62 - many different forms of capitalist (larger scale) and PCP farmers (smaller scale) in the third world as well as the first

p 62 - the differentiation is from the histories and historical trends of the areas more than anything else

p 63 - private property has been the cause of much of the abuse of labour seen in the third world -- this is a step in capitalism

p 63 - ability to control farming more exactly and remove the more uncontrollable input of labour has been at the center of the movement to mechanization (as well as increase output)

p 63 - massive movements towards reduced levels of agrarian employment, but not enough good city jobs -> PCP

p 64 - need to be able to strike for their rights for free labour for the system to work -- i.e. no debt bondage

p 64 - need to encourage the peasants to accumulate money to drive a home market, and need to make sure that the money accumulated at the top gets invested in industry