Bernstein - Agrarian Problems in Capitalism Today - Journal of Peasant Studies

190 Henry Bernstein

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres 2004.

‘Changing Before Our Very Eyes’: AgrarianQuestions and the Politics of Land in

Capitalism Today

HENRY BERNSTEIN

This paper endorses the criticisms of neo-classical populism and its advocacy ofredistributive land reform provided by other contributions to this special issueof the Journal, to which it adds several further points. If GKI propose aversion of an agrarian question of ‘small’ or ‘family’ farming, and its resolutionthrough a familiar (Chayanovian) path of development, much of the critiquerests, in one way or another, on the ‘classic’ agrarian question in capitalist transi-tion, in effect the agrarian question of capital in which the agrarian question oflabour was once subsumed. Here the question is posed whether, in the conditionsof contemporary ‘globalization’ and its tendency to the ‘fragmentation’ of labour,there might be a new agrarian question of labour, now detached from that ofcapital, and which generates a new politics of struggles over land (and itsdistribution). Even to conceive of this question is beyond the analytical andpolitical field of vision of neo-classical populism. Some of the dimensions ofan agrarian question of labour are illustrated in a brief consideration of recent,and highly contradictory, events in Zimbabwe: a unique case of comprehensive,regime-sanctioned, confiscatory land redistribution in the world today.

Keywords: agrarian question, capitalism, land reform, Zimbabwe

INTRODUCTION

At the core of current debates about land reform are diverging ideas about pro-ductivity and productivity growth in farming; rural poverty and its reduction;employment and employment generation in the countryside – and the linksbetween these concerns as well as, to varying degrees, their (inter-sectoral) linkswith accumulation and growth in the wider economy. Positions in these debatesare registered in contestations of the coherence and plausibility of differenttheoretical approaches and arguments, the methodologies of their testing,and evaluation of the evidence they deploy. All this is evident in the article on‘Poverty and the Distribution of Land’ by Keith Griffin, Azizur Rahman Khan

Henry Bernstein, Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies(SOAS), University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK.e-mail: [email protected]

I am grateful to T.J. Byres for comments that prevented certain errors and improved presentation;problems that remain are entirely (and obstinately) of my own making.

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 4 Nos. 1 and 2, January and April 2004, pp. 190– 225.

Agrarian Questions and the Politics of Land in Capitalism Today 191

and Amy Ickowitz (2002; hereafter GKI) and the various responses to it presentedin this special issue.

While the object of current debate, land reform, of course, has a much longerhistory in relation to agrarian questions in transitions to capitalism and transfor-mations of capitalism, and the times and places of these ‘world-historical’processes (Bernstein 2002), it also has a ‘broader’ history in the sense that theeconomic concerns noted are intimately, and inevitably, bound up with ideasabout inequality and social (in)justice and the political struggles informed bysuch ideas. The potency of ‘models’ inspired by particular historical experiencesconsists in how they are generalized and applied, explicitly or implicitly; whethersuch application facilitates or hinders analysis of the dynamics of other timesand places, including what may be ‘changing before our very eyes’;1 and theimplications of such analysis for the real worlds of politics.

THE AGRARIAN QUESTION OF THE ‘FAMILY’ FARM(ER)

Déjà Vu

The basic continuity of GKI with Griffin’s work of three decades ago is traced byT.J. Byres in his contribution to this special issue, as are aspects of its longerhistorical lineage. Griffin’s The Political Economy of Agrarian Change appeared in1974, a few years before Michael Lipton’s highly influential Why Poor People StayPoor in 1977. The apt term ‘neo-classical populism’ was coined in a review ofGriffin (1974) by Scott (1977), and Byres (1979) subjected Lipton (1977) to anextensive and powerful critique that remains a landmark in the trajectory of thedebate. Griffin (1974) and Lipton (1977) converged in much of their analysis,argument and advocacy, and still do. GKI’s recent (re)statement of the case forredistributive land reform is the stimulus to this special issue; Lipton’s voice,more anonymously but no less recognizably, permeates the International Fundfor Agricultural Development’s global Rural Poverty Report 2001 (IFAD 2001), ofwhich he was the intellectual architect (see also Sender and Johnston).

To a large extent then, so far so familiar: the déjà vu observed by Byres. As hesummarizes the core of neo-classical populism:

The emphasis upon unequal distribution of land, other productive resourcesand political power, and the preoccupation with egalitarian solutions,is archetypally populist; the stress upon factor market imperfections and‘efficiency’ is quintessentially neo-classical. (p. 25)

The theoretical model, analytical methods, and use of evidence by GKI aresubjected to wide-ranging criticism in other contributions to this special issue.Here I add some additional comments.

1 This phrase is adapted from T.J. Byres’s paper in this special issue; hereafter citations withoutdates of Bramall, Byres, Dyer, Karshenas, Khan, Kitching and Sender and Johnston, refer to theircontributions to this special issue of the Journal.

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Some Twists and Turns

Griffin (1974) and Lipton (1977) were published in a particular conjuncture in thecareer of modern development discourse, a moment towards the end of the‘golden age’ of post-war ‘developmentalism’, whose presumption (across a wideideological spectrum) of state-led development was about to give way to thesubsequent, and gathering, ascendancy of neo-liberalism. How then have theyadapted, or shaded, recent versions of their argument for redistributive landreform in today’s conditions of the hegemony of neo-liberalism? As noted else-where (Bernstein 2002, 448, 458 note 64), and whether for reasons of expediencyor conviction, Lipton’s adaptation appears more extensive, not least in embracingthe World Bank’s current stance on the benefits of ‘new wave’ market-led landredistribution (and its associated baggage): ‘Previous land reform programmeshave been unduly confiscatory. “New wave” land reform . . . is decentralized,market-friendly and involves civil society action and consensus’ (IFAD 2001,75); Lipton likewise envisaged ‘a consensual reduction of the world’s mostsevere (and most racialized) inequality’ through (‘new wave’) land reform inpost-apartheid South Africa (Lipton et al. 1996b, x).2 GKI present an apparentlymore radical political stance. They recognize that major land reforms in modernhistory have typically resulted from social and political upheavals; they rejectnotions that reform on the scale they advocate can result from market-drivenprocesses; they recommend the necessity of confiscation, or otherwise low-costacquisition, of large-scale landholdings in many circumstances; indeed, theypresent their conception of land reform as a redistribution of wealth (assets)effected by political means.3

Nonetheless, what is wrapped in this more radical cloth is a package offamiliar argument from neo-classical economics, and claiming the support ofevidence which is strongly contested by most of the contributions presentedhere, not least in relation to the inverse relationship (between farm size and landproductivity) that features so centrally in contemporary neo-populism (see Byres,Dyer, Khan and Sender and Johnston, in particular). The key point is thathaving invoked more radical political means for effecting land reform to establishan egalitarian agrarian structure of small (‘family’) farms, with appropriate meas-ures of support (principally removing ‘urban bias’ and ‘industrialization bias’),the future of small-scale farming is then projected as a seamless reproduction ofthe virtuous equilibrium established – especially, as GKI (2002, 315) stress, ‘where

2 On ‘new wave’ land reform see Deere and León (2001) and Borras (2003), and the many referencestherein; also Sender and Johnston.3 These positions resonate more oppositional currents in the populist tradition manifested, forexample, in GKI’s declaration that ‘Land reform is not a technocratic exercise; it is a transformingpolitical event’ (2002, 317). GKI combine this stance with more technocratic currents, based inneo-classical economics, and in which Lipton is evidently located (Bernstein 2002, 449–50). It isalso interesting that their theoretical case for land redistribution focuses so strongly not just on its(self-) employment and income benefits (as does Lipton’s), but also on an argument about agricul-tural labour markets and labour regimes, if hardly consistently or convincingly so (see Khan, andfurther below).


market forces are given considerable room to operate’. This, of course, resonatesthe rationale of a Chayanovian path of development (the resolution of theagrarian question of the small/‘family’ farm).

And timeless as well as seamless, one expression of the notably static qualityof their model emphasized by Byres and Dyer to which I would add thisobservation. Apparently robust forms of ‘family farming’ (petty commodityproduction, ‘middle peasantry’, etc.) in contemporary capitalism, where theyexist – and which most approximate the ideal advocated by GKI – are themselvesone kind of outcome of processes of class differentiation.4 This outcome, andthe conditions and prospects of reproduction of such ‘family farming’ – which,moreover (and uncomfortably for neo-classical populism), typically include rurallabour markets and labour hiring5 – always require investigation of their specifichistorical circumstances.

Another crucial problem is GKI’s treatment of the central categories oflanded property, farm enterprise and rural/agrarian labour.6 This is an effectof the characteristic tendency of neo-classical populism to abstract the size oflanded property/farming enterprise from any serious consideration of thesocial conditions of existence (relations of production, social divisions oflabour, labour processes etc.) of forms of landed property and production indifferent times and places – and processes of change/transition. Thus their manyreferences to ‘large’ (typically large landholdings rather than farms) consistentlyignore, hence conceal, differences between pre-capitalist landed property,capitalist landed property and ‘large’ farm enterprises that may be establishedon either.7

For example, the overview of ‘the four main types of tenure contractor land tenure systems . . . throughout the world’ with which their analysisbegins (2002, 280–4) can be summarized as follows (and according to theirnumbering):

4 As is well-known, agrarian populism tends to ‘naturalize’ as well as idealize a ‘middlepeasant’ model, as both definitive of an antecedent natural economy (with a ‘subsistence ethic’ etc.)and able to adapt successfully to subsequent ‘market’ (commodity) production, in effect to ‘modern-ize’ – the specifically Chayanovian notion of a ‘small farm’ path of development, noted above andevident in GKI, as in Lipton. When this path of development is not realized, for neo-classicalpopulism this is an effect of market and/or policy ‘distortions’. The observation also has implicationsfor materialist analysis, to the extent that some applications of Lenin’s schema of peasant classdifferentiation view ‘middle peasants’ as the residual of an antecedent pre-capitalism, whose transfor-mation into, first, rich and poor peasants, and subsequently into (fully-fledged) agrarian capitaland wage labour, has yet to be accomplished or completed, rather than investigating whetherparticular ‘middle peasantries’ are the outcome of specific processes of historical change in capitalism(Bernstein 2000).5 Also observed by Khan and Sender and Johnston.6 Not least as manifested in their lack of any determinate concept of capitalist agriculture, as Byresand Dyer emphasize.7 See Banaji (1976, 2001) on large-scale commodity production on pre-capitalist landed property, onagrarian estates in European feudalism and in Roman Egypt in late antiquity (fourth to seventhcenturies), respectively.

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Small-scale production

Large-scale production

Small-scale property

1. Owner-operatedwith household labour

Large-scale property

3. Household labour farmon rented land with fixed rent4. Household labour farm onrented land with fixed shareof output2. Landowner farm withhired labour

8 Collective farms would constitute another type in the cell ‘large-scale property/large-scale produc-tion’ but, presumably, are now deemed historically obsolete with decollectivization and the happyoutcomes it has produced in China and Vietnam, by GKI’s account, if not in Russia. What of theblank cell in the matrix (‘small-scale property/large-scale production’)? I suspect that this ‘could notbe thought’ (to use an Althusserian expression) in their framework because of the ways in which GKIboth separate and conflate the distribution of property in land and the organization of production. Leninobserved practices of poor peasants, who lacked other means of production needed to farm, renting outland in late nineteenth-century Russia. The syndrome of those who have rights to land but are ‘toopoor to farm’ is widespread in Asia and Africa today; Dyer and Khan note instances of renting out ofland by smaller/poorer ‘peasants’ to larger/richer farmers in Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively.

It is evident that ‘land tenure systems’ thus designated combine aspects ofform and size of property with form and scale of production in ways thatobscure more than illuminate, as well as eliding (different types of ) pre-capitalistand capitalist landed property and agrarian production.8 Tenure types 3 and 4 arealready farmed as small enterprises with household labour, hence redistributiveland reform entails only the transfer of property rights from large landowners tothose small farm(er)s, thereby both relieving them of the burdens of rentand tenure insecurity and presenting them with much improved incentives toinvestment and productivity. This corresponds most closely to those historicland reforms directed against predatory pre-capitalist landed property, and theiremblematic notion of ‘land to the tiller’. For GKI, in three of their East Asian‘land reform successes’, namely Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, ‘absentee ornon-cultivating ownership was high’, ‘operational holdings appear to havebeen evenly distributed’ and ‘the incidence of wage labour was low’ (2002, 309; myemphasis). In fact, the absence of a rural labour question – and of a class of labour(rural proletariat) – is, as GKI tell it, a strongly positive feature of the preconditionsof all five of their East Asian ‘successes’ (the other two following decollectivizationin China and Vietnam).

In short, GKI’s ‘success stories’ of land reform apply to circumstances thatare completely different from those for which their theoretical model – linking(monopolistic) landed property, large-scale production and the conditions ofrural wage employment (tenure of type 4) – makes its principal claims:

The agrarian problem arises from the monopolization of land, the mostimportant factor of production, and the consequences of this monopolizationfor the labour market.


The purpose of land reform is to rupture the system of labour controls andbring to an end the monopoly and monopsony powers of large landowners.(2002, 283–4, 291, emphases added)

The inescapable conclusion is that only a transcendental notion of size oflandholding can hold together the rationale of GKI’s case, necessarily divorcedfrom all those determinations of scale shaped by the social organization ofproduction and reproduction, its relations and contradictions, central to any prop-erly dynamic study of agrarian change. It also helps to deflect attention from thefact that, by contrast with reforms of types 3 and 4 tenure arrangements,redistributive land reform of type 2 tenure arrangements would require thedivision of large-farm enterprises as well as of large-scale property.9

Times and Places

I use this term as a shorthand for those historical specificities through which theexploration of more general themes/questions/issues is pursued and against whichthey are tested. Elements of particular historical experiences are easily incorpo-rated, if often implicitly, in versions of more general themes in ways that shapetheir emphases and silences, and how well they travel, so to speak. GKI claim theuniversal relevance of their argument for redistributive land reform across the‘South’ and the former Soviet bloc. In an important sense, then, this universalismsupercedes what they term ‘varieties of regional experience’ (2002, 292–302),although their selection of regions, uneven coverage of them, and some of theirspecific observations, are of symptomatic interest, perhaps those concerning LatinAmerica above all (pp. 295–7).

First, this is a region that Keith Griffin studied extensively earlier in his career,and at a time of land reforms and rural political volatility that inspired muchcommentary and analysis from a range of (and combinations of ) radical populistand materialist perspectives.10 Second, GKI recognize the role of land reforms insome Latin American countries in spurring a transition from (predatory) latifundiato large-scale capitalist farming. This is their only direct reference to capitalistagriculture (see note 6 above) and hints at a kind of Latin American exceptionalismthat signals a fate the rest of the ‘South’ can still escape. Ironically, then, LatinAmerica registered both a failure of the kind of (‘pro-poor’) redistributive landreform they advocate and a realization of the logic of transition of the ‘classic’agrarian question (outlined below): ‘land reform in Latin America altered theagrarian structure, not by raising the economic status of the rural poor, but by

9 And in opposition to which the critics of GKI are perhaps most united, although only Sender andJohnston confront this head on in the context of Southern Africa (see further below).10 And political aspirations; see Griffin (1969). Other works of the same conjuncture focused onagrarian structures and struggles in Latin America included Stavenhagen (1970), Feder (1971), Petrasand LaPorte (1971), Barraclough (1973) and Huizer (1973); see also Veltmeyer (forthcoming), whostates that in the wake of the Cuban revolution ‘the struggle for land and land reform was at the veryepicentre of the class struggle in Central and South America’.

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putting the fear of expropriation into the minds of the rural rich’ (p. 297).Thereafter, GKI are notably reticent about dividing large capitalist farms in LatinAmerica by any redistributive programme, but transpose the (lost) hopes of thatearlier time and place of land reform to their prescriptions for the former Sovietbloc, in which (quasi-)privatized state and collective farms and their individual‘household plots’ are presented as analogues of Latin American latifundia andminifundia – and analogues that do not travel well as Kitching makes clear.

GKI’s ‘land reform successes’ are all from East Asia: the transfer of propertyrights to small-scale farmers from large-scale landed property, both private( Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) and collective (China and Vietnam).11 One strik-ing feature of the conditions of these exemplary ‘successes’, already noted, is thatall lacked large-scale production deploying coerced labour: the case on whichGKI’s model centres its claims – and which is itself haunted by the ghost ofthe (pre-reform) Latin American latifundia?

Another striking feature is a different kind of silence related to issues traversing,and connecting, times and places. GKI provide no examples, as well as very littlediscussion, of redistributive land reform that entails the division of large-scaleagricultural enterprises. The moment of redistributive land reform in LatinAmerica appears déjà passé. Their account of Latin America is, in effect, aretrospective of that lost moment, while that of sub-Saharan Africa is mostlyconcerned to caution against land-titling programmes in areas of ‘communaltenure’ as ‘Western-style land privatization’ that ‘may be unnecessary . . . (andalso) undesirable’ (2002, 294).12 The only candidate today that is targeted explicitlyfor breaking up large farms – and symptomatically so? – is Russia. Given theemphasis on East Asian ‘success’, why did GKI not concentrate their attentionon the obvious comparable (and near adjacent) region of South Asia? This wouldseem the most appropriate candidate to test the ‘lessons’ of their model, givenboth the salience of ‘ancient, densely populated agrarian heartlands’ (Davis 2001,239) in East and South Asia and the dramatic contrasts of recent economichistory, structure and performance between the two regions.

And a final silence: having readily acknowledged the role of social and politicalupheaval in the major redistributive land reforms of the past, why are they soreticent about land struggles ‘from below’ today, of which Latin America (aselsewhere) provides many examples, notably the MST (Movimento Rural SemTerra) in Brazil?

11 Karshenas’s discussion of ‘urban bias’ in GKI’s model (in which it lacks benefit – or burden? – ofeconomic history) is an exemplary demonstration of how place means little without time: the whenas well as where (and how) of change.12 GKI’s section on sub-Saharan Africa is ill informed as well as thin. For example, they say thatunder colonialism ‘European notions of private property rights were gradually introduced, displac-ing African tenure systems based on communal ownership rights’ (2002, 293), in apparent ignorancethat much of the intense debates about land rights in sub-Saharan Africa hinges on the ways in whichcolonial administrations tried to define and administer land tenure according to their own (typicallymisconceived) notions of ‘communal ownership’ in Africa and their desire (selectively) to preserveAfrican ‘tradition’ and ‘custom’ in the interests of social stability and cheap government (indirectrule). For excellent reviews of these debates, see Peters (2002, forthcoming).


Beyond Critique

The critique of GKI’s economic model – in both the precise argument ofKhan, and the broader terms deployed by Byres and Dyer – is convincing, asare the criticisms by Bramall, Dyer, Khan and Sender and Johnston of GKI’s(and similar) uses of evidence. The methodological critique mostly centres,in one way or another, on the kinds of aggregation and other devices usedto support claims for the inverse relationship. These include how the intervals offarm class sizes are determined, and what is excluded at either or both endsof possible size distributions; and aggregations across farming zones that differin their ecological, settlement and demographic patterns, across different branchesof crop and livestock production, and across farms with different compositionsof activity.13 Specifying all this is essential, but provides a primarily negativecritique. The force of that critique suggests that if neo-classical populism restson a transcendental opposition of the ‘small farm’ (and its virtues) and the‘large farm’ (and its vices), innocent of any conception or analysis of socialrelations of production and historical change, then it is not enough for analternative approach simply to reverse this allocation of productive virtue andvice by farm size.

The purpose, and outcome, of any negative critique, of course, shouldbe to identify and establish the space for alternative approaches that can dobetter. This is signposted by Dyer: ‘Clearly we must go deeper than the sizeof holding categories to the underlying social relations of production’ (p. 57).In short, farm size is better understood as an effect of social relations andtheir dynamics than as the source or cause of productive virtue and vice, as inneo-classical populism on the one hand, technicist conceptions of economiesof scale on the other hand. Understanding the determinants of farm sizes andtheir distribution, and of the relations between farm(er)s of different sizesand between farmers and agrarian labour, requires the investigation of historicalspecificities, utilizing the analytical means provided by more general theoreticalmodels.

THE AGRARIAN QUESTION OF CAPITAL

Toujours Passé

Byres suggests that GKI’s argument is déjà passé, that is, now anachronistic.However, from the viewpoint of the ‘classic’ agrarian question in historicalmaterialism, one can suggest that populist arguments for redistributive landreform, as a means of resolution of the agrarian question of small or ‘family’

13 My view concurs with that argued by Utsa Patnaik (1972, 1987): that scale – which includes typesand levels of capitalization of the means of production deployed – is a more effective criterion ofdifferentiation of farms than their size (of land holding). That farm scale, in this sense, and farm sizedo not necessarily coincide, is acknowledged in passing by Dyer and by Sender and Johnston whoobserve ‘the absence of a smooth size-productivity relationship’ (p. 150, note 9).

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farming, were always misconceived – toujours passé, in effect.14 Here is a highly‘stylized’ outline of key aspects of the classic agrarian question:

1. pre-capitalist agrarian formations are characterized, above all, by the socialrelation (‘social property relation’ in Robert Brenner’s term) between landedproperty and peasant labour: the surplus labour of the latter is appropriatedby the former through rent;

2. the transition to capitalism requires a process of ‘primitive’ or primary accumu-lation that establishes the conditions of ‘market dependence’ (again Brenner’sterm, signifying the necessity of commodity production for social reproduction);

3. this process is registered in the formation (over time) of classes – or at leastclass ‘places’ (Neocosmos 1986) – that exemplify a new (capitalist) socialproperty relation: capitalist landed property, agrarian capital and (proletarian)agrarian labour;15

4. the logic of the capitalist social property relation, not least the competitive dis-ciplines of ‘market dependence’, drives the growth of productivity of both labourand land (yields) in agriculture, especially through technical innovation and newtechnical and social divisions of labour (development of the productive forces).

Furthermore:

5. an enhanced surplus generated by agricultural productivity growth can bemobilized for industrial accumulation; whether this happens or not dependson the balance of forces between agrarian ‘surplus appropriating’ classes(agrarian capital, landed property, rich peasants) and emergent industrialcapital, with the state typically central to the contributions, whether positiveor negative, of agriculture to (initial) industrialization (Byres 1996);

6. dispossession of peasants (in primary accumulation) together with agriculturalproductivity growth ‘frees’ labour required by the development of industry(and associated non-agricultural activities/sectors);

7. productivity growth in farming – and especially in food staple production –lowers the reproduction costs of an increasing industrial and urban proletariat,thereby contributing to accumulation.

Capitalist landed property and agrarian capital (point 3 in the schema) can emergeby different paths in different historical circumstances, including: through (i) the‘internal metamorphosis’ of pre-capitalist landed property (in Lenin’s phrasefor the Prussian or Junker path), (ii) the class differentiation of peasants/pettycommodity producers, or (iii) some combination of these two dynamics; whileproletarian labour is generated from the dispossession of tenant peasantries by(capitalizing) landed property and/or from class differentiation of the peasantry.

14 An observation illuminated by Kitching’s account (1982) of the formation and re-formation ofpopulist ideas and ideologies throughout the long history of capitalist development, from nineteenth-century France and Russia to the ‘South’ in the 1970s. In fact, Byres (p. 37) refers to ‘a sense ofcircumstances, which, if they ever existed, are clearly in the past’ (my emphasis).15 Class ‘places’ that are also constitutive of petty commodity production in capitalism; see Gibbonand Neocosmos (1985).


In circumstances where pre-capitalist landed property is unable or unwilling to‘metamorphose’ itself, redistributive land reform becomes a necessary conditionof transitions to agrarian capitalism along a ‘peasant’ path (of subsequent classdifferentiation; Lenin’s American path).

Once pre-capitalist landed property – with its predatory appropriation of rent(vs productive accumulation) – is destroyed, and a fundamental condition ofcapitalist agrarian transition thereby satisfied, there remains no rationale for redis-tributive land reform. Indeed, as the capitalist social property relation establishes itselfand delivers the anticipated productivity gains, any notion of redistributiveland reform that advocates the division of larger, more productive enterprises (cap-italist and/or rich peasant farms) is ipso facto both reactionary and utopian.16 It isreactionary in seeking to turn back the clock of progress, and utopian in two ways:first, that it is unlikely to be implemented as a political programme and second,even if it were, it could not achieve its stated objective of ‘efficiency and equity’,of increasing agricultural productivity and rural employment and incomes onthe basis of an egalitarian agrarian structure of ‘family’ farms.

The World Historical of Capital

The schema of the ‘classic’ agrarian question is part of what Marx considered the‘world-historical’ nature and consequences of the emergence of capitalism, thatis, of a general logic of social change which, once established, applies to – indeedimposes itself on – all parts of a world made up of (pre-capitalist) social forma-tions destined to confront, and to follow, the schema outlined, by one route (ofprimitive accumulation) or another, more or less rapidly, with greater or lesserupheaval and violence. This is the sense of the much-quoted observations in thePreface to the first edition of Capital that ‘The country that is more developedindustrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’, andthat continental Western Europe (by contrast with Britain) ‘suffer(s) not onlyfrom the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompletenessof that development’ (Marx 1976, 91).

At the same time, Marx’s observations point towards another, and highlycharged, area of issues concerning the ‘world historical’ of capitalism, namely theways in which its uneven development on a global scale manifests not only differ-ent trajectories, mechanisms and forms of capitalist transformation but also affectsthe prospects of completing that transformation, as anticipated by Marx (above).The investigation and explanation of (as yet) incomplete capitalist development –and the suffering it generates, to invoke Marx once more – can follow the centralthrust of either of the senses of the ‘world historical’ sketched: on one hand, thepersistence (or reconfiguration) of pre-capitalist social relations and practices asbarrier to capitalist transformation (as in Dyer’s ‘semi-feudalism’) and, on the otherhand, the modes of functioning of international/global capital, and the policiesand powers of the leading capitalist states, as barrier to (‘national’) accumulation/

16 Both epithets are used in the concluding section of Byres’s paper.

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capitalist development in the ‘South’.17 Alternatively, these two perspectives canbe combined, with all the challenges of method this suggests.

Once a capitalist world economy, and its constituent international divisions oflabour and markets, started to be shaped by industrialization in the course ofthe nineteenth century, and by modern imperialism by the end of that century,this was bound to have effects for the realization, or otherwise, of the logicof capitalist development outlined above in the schema of the ‘classic’ agrarianquestion. To put it somewhat differently, the trajectories and forms of thetransition to capitalism in social formations where it is deemed yet incompleteare affected by both earlier transitions to capitalism elsewhere and subsequenttransformations within capitalism in its dominant formations and global circuits.

The ‘classic’ agrarian question, I would suggest, is the agrarian question ofcapital. To the extent that its logic of agrarian transition succeeded (and may stillsucceed?) in accomplishing the social transformation and technical developmentof agriculture (points 1–4 of the schema above), and in ways that contribute toindustrialization (points 5–7 of the schema), then the agrarian question of capitalis also that of labour as the two definitive classes of a new mode of production,representing historical progress.

Changing Before Our Very Eyes?

How might changes in capitalism (and especially in the second, ‘global’, senseof its ‘world historical’ noted) reshape the conditions of the agrarian questionof capital, and expectations of its resolution, across the times and places ofthe capitalist world? I have tried to consider this question in very broad termselsewhere (Bernstein 1996a, 2000, 2002, 2003), and here only sketch some thesesthat bear on how changing conditions may reshape expectations of the resolutionsof the agrarian question as both capitalist transformation of agriculture and itscontributions to industrialization.

Thesis 1: By the time of independence in Asia and Africa, the economies oftheir former colonial territories were permeated (like those of Latin America) bygeneralized commodity production, i.e. capitalist social relations of productionand reproduction.18

Thesis 2: Generalized commodity production includes both (i) the internalizationof capitalist social relations in the organization of economic activity (includingpeasant production)19 and (ii) how economies are located in international divisionsof labour, markets, and circuits of capital and commodities.

17 The latter was the terrain of erstwhile ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘dependency’ theories, and nowthe terrain of some theories of ‘globalization’.18 Recently Ellen Wood (2003) has argued that a properly or fully capitalist imperialism onlycommenced with, and could only commence with, the end of direct colonial rule.19 See Gibbon and Neocosmos (1985); Bernstein (2000). This does not mean that the forms ofproduction and social relations of poorer countries resemble those of an ideal-typified – ‘stereo-typical’ in Lenin’s term – (‘advanced’) capitalism. It might suggest, however, that ‘backward’agriculture is more likely to manifest ‘backward’ capitalism than ‘semi-feudalism’.


Thesis 3: Agrarian capital can have a range of sources beyond the countrysideand its ‘original’, localized (indigenous) rural classes of landed property andpeasantry; the range of non-agrarian, non-indigenous sources of agrarian capitalis likely to expand and diversify, and their significance to increase, over thehistory of capitalism.

Thesis 4: Different types of agrarian capital (in capitalist and petty commodityproduction, among different peasant classes) are increasingly likely to be combinedor articulated with forms of activity and income in non-agricultural sectors, orspaces in social divisions of labour, with (variant) effects for the specific forms oforganization, scale, economic performance and simple or expanded reproductionof farming enterprises.

Thesis 5: There are similar tendencies to the decomposition of (notionally) once‘pure’ classes of agrarian labour (including that combined with capital inpetty commodity production) that have to diversify their forms, and spaces,of employment (and self-employment) to meet their simple reproduction needsas labour (‘survival’), and in the case of petty commodity producers as capitaltoo.20

Thesis 6: The agricultural ‘sector’ in capitalism today is not simply a set ofrelations between agrarian classes (landed property, agrarian capital, labour) noran aggregation of farm enterprises of different types, but is increasingly, ifunevenly, integrated, organized and regulated by the relations between agrarianclasses and types of farms, on the one hand, and (often highly concentrated)capital upstream and downstream of farming, on the other hand; moreover, suchintegration and regulation operates through global as well as national (and morelocal) social divisions of labour, circuits of capital, commodity chains, and sourcesand types of technical change (including in transport and industrial processing aswell as farming).

Thesis 7: Important ‘globalizing’ tendencies that affect agriculture in capitalismtoday include new strategies of sourcing by transnational agribusiness; new formsof organization and regulation of global commodity chains for agricultural prod-ucts; the high profile of agricultural trade and its regulation in the agenda of,

20 As Sender and Johnston observe: ‘small scale agriculture has, in many parts of Africa, becomeimpossible without inputs purchased through labour migrant remittances’ (p. 153). Theses 3–5 moregenerally indicate the wide range of forms capitalist farming can take, as emphasized by Banaji (2002,115), who argues that there is no (single) ‘class structure that is prototypical of agrarian capitalism’.Khan notes of Bangladesh today: ‘while these large farms were not identifiably “capitalist” in theclassical sense, they had innovated new institutional forms to deal with specific management issues’(p. 90), notably concerning labour recruitment and the organization of labour processes. He contin-ues: ‘Whether this is a transitional form on the road to more recognizable “capitalist” forms must forthe time being remain an open question.’

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first, GATT from the mid-1980s and now of the WTO; and the drive oftransnational agribusiness (chemical and seed) companies to patent, monopolize,produce and sell genetic (plant and animal) material, and to lock in farmers (inboth ‘North’ and ‘South’) to its use.

The salience of the processes and tendencies sketched for particular branchesand types of agricultural production, and forms of agrarian capital and labour, indifferent times and places is a matter of investigation which, of course, is boundto reveal massive unevenness and variation. But recognition of such processesand tendencies (as of others relevant to the world of contemporary capitalism)can inform the agenda of identifying (and seeking to explain) what may bechanging before our very eyes.

Here is a further, and final, thesis: with contemporary ‘globalization’ and themassive development of the productive forces in (advanced) capitalist agricul-ture, the centrality of the ‘classic’ agrarian question to industrialization is nolonger significant for international capital. In this sense, then, there is no longer anagrarian question of capital on a world scale, even when the agrarian question – as abasis of national accumulation and industrialization – has not been resolved inmany countries of the ‘South’, and principally those poorest countries character-ized by Kitching (2001, 149) as ‘peasant economies’.21 If there is no longeran agrarian question of capital on a world scale, nor of ‘national’ capitals (and‘developmental’ states)22 in poorer countries today, might there be a (new)agrarian question of labour, separated from its historic connection to that ofcapital and manifested in struggles for land against ‘actually existing’ forms ofcapitalist landed property? This, of course, is a question that GKI are ill equippedeven to ask. The ‘golden age’ of land to the tiller via social revolution, towhich they refer, is safely in the past, at best the source of a vicarious nostalgia.Neo-populism, and especially qua policy discourse, is characteristically uneasywith ‘awkward questions of class and class struggle’ (Byres, p. 19) and especiallyhere and now.

21 Kitching observes that ‘many of today’s largest commercial agricultural economies did not haveto undergo the peasant elimination process to create a capitalist agricultural sector’ and that ‘all of thepoorest countries of the world today are peasant economies’ (2001, 149). He continues: ‘neither thecontemporary industrial technology context, nor the population growth context, nor the price orterms of trade context is anywhere near as conducive to peasant elimination as it was when theEuropean world accomplished its (demographically much smaller) transformation’ (p. 152). That apeasant path of development of capitalist agriculture (‘peasant elimination’, in Kitching’s term, byclass differentiation) has been largely absent in experiences of (successful) agrarian transition andindustrialization is supported by Byres’ seminal comparison of European, North American and EastAsian cases (Byres 1991, 1996, 2002; also Bernstein 1996a).22 Because they lack the intent or the means, or both. It is clear that while Marx and Lenin had a keensense of the international dimensions of the ‘world historical’ of capitalism, both conceived of thetransition to capitalism primarily in terms of a national framework. Thus Marx on ‘the country that ismore developed industrially . . .’ (as cited above), while the analysis of Lenin’s The Development ofCapitalism in Russia (1964) – the fullest study in classic Marxism of contemporary processes of developmentin a ‘backward’ country – proceeds with virtually no reference to the international capitalist economy inwhich late nineteenth-century Russia was located (and by which, in effect, its ‘backwardness’ wasdefined) nor to its effects for capitalist development in Russia.


AN AGRARIAN QUESTION OF LABOUR?

The ‘Golden Age’ of Land Reform

Above I suggested how the schema of the ‘classic’ agrarian question incorporatesthe ‘function’ of redistributive land reform in certain historical circumstances(i.e. as the ‘gravedigger’ of predatory landed property). That elaboration is (de-ceptively) simple because underlying it is a series of momentous social upheavalsthat traverse the history of capitalism from the French Revolution and which, Ihave suggested elsewhere (Bernstein 2002), culminated with particular intensityacross much of the world in a period from the 1910s to the 1970s: the period parexcellence of Eric Wolf ’s ‘peasant wars of the twentieth century’ (Wolf 1969).23

While communist and socialist parties allied themselves with (and sometimesled) such ‘peasant wars’ against the reactionary weight of pre-capitalist landedproperty/landlordism – and a fortiori in contexts of anti-imperialist and nationalliberation struggles – and often supported (at least initially) redistributive landreforms generated by the course of those struggles, they then confronted issuesof the subsequent path of agrarian transition/development and the growth ofscale it was deemed to require. And here is a tension of epic consequence for thepolitical programmes, practices and fortunes of parties of the Left in primarilyagrarian countries. They had allied themselves with popular sentiments, energiesand practices, often of a deeply radical character, mobilized in opposition toexploitation and oppression, extreme social inequality and injustice. Were suchconcerns to be abandoned once predatory landed property was overturned, inthe name of a path of development justified by a primarily economic theory/logic of transition like that outlined above?24 While materialism, unlike populism,does not shrink from the question ‘is structural inequality of resource access theprecondition for accelerated growth under capitalism?’ (Scott 1977, 248, as citedby Byres) nor from answering it affirmatively (Byres, p. 41), how might thepolitical formations of the Left present their answer to classes of poor peasantsand workers, whose support they seek and whose interests they claim torepresent?

A New Politics of Land?

In effect, it is on the ideological and political plane, and especially in the realworlds of politics, that agrarian populism presents materialist analysis and social-ist practice with far greater challenges than it does on the plane of intellectualcontestation. On one hand, the principal interest of the ‘classic’ agrarian questionis establishing the social conditions of the development of the productive forces

23 And which – both ‘peasant wars’ and Wolf ’s treatment of them – were key stimuli to the forma-tion of a radical ‘peasant studies’ in the 1970s (Bernstein and Byres 2001).24 In capitalist transition and its socialist analogues, the growth of the productive forces in agriculturewas typically equated with economies of scale common to large-scale property, whether private as incapitalist development or collective as in socialist construction.

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in agriculture, an end to which redistributive land reform may provide an expe-dient (temporary as well as transitional) means, according to historical circum-stances. On the other hand, populist ideologies, of various stripes and in variousways, claim to articulate the injuries of exploitation, oppression and injusticegenerated by ‘structural inequality of resource access’ in the countryside, and toaddress them through redistributive land reforms. However weak the economiclogic and evidence they deploy concerning productivity, what gives such claimstheir ideological resonance is the links they make between redistribution andrural employment/poverty. And that resonance is the more potent to the extentthat materialist analysis and socialist practice are unable to provide plausiblealternatives to the problems of employment, poverty and insecurity that definethe daily existence of the rural (and urban) majorities of the ‘South’.

Is it enough to observe, as Byres does, that ‘industrial growth . . . has beenthe means by which massive rural poverty has been eradicated in the past’ (p. 41;emphasis added)? I do not think so, and would cite in support of my scepticismthe conclusion of his own valuable international comparison of labour-forcestatistics over a long historical period: ‘Clearly, capitalist industrialization, to theextent that it is proceeding (today), is absorbing a significantly smaller share of thelabour force than in the past’ (Byres 2003, 200, emphasis added). My argument isnot that significant industrialization of poorer countries, and its prospects, isitself déjà passé, but I would make three points. First, that the times and places –the when, where and how – of past histories of comprehensive capitalistindustrialization themselves have to be specified and explained, in terms of boththeir ‘internal’ and international conditions, class dynamics and mechanismsof accumulation.25 Second, it can not be doubted that poorer countries todayconfront more formidable barriers to comprehensive industrialization – and afortiori to the generation of comparable levels of industrial employment –than did the advanced industrial countries in the past.26 Third: ‘the underlyingcontradiction of a world capitalist system that promotes the formation of a worldproletariat but cannot accommodate a generalized living wage (that is, the mostbasic of reproduction costs), far from being solved, has become more acute thanever’ (Arrighi and Moore 2001, 75).

The reverse side of the thesis that ‘globalization’ represents a new phase ofthe centralization and concentration, as well as mobility (and ‘financialization’),of capital, is that it also generates an intensification of the fragmentation oflabour. That is, the growing global army (or reserve army) of labour pursues

25 See Schwartz (2000) for a recent account, of real historical depth and illumination, of ‘theemergence of a global economy’.26 In part for reasons indicated by Kitching, as cited in note 21 above, although his recent book(2001) argues for the benefits to date and future promise of globalization in generating industrializa-tion and substantial industrial employment in the ‘South’. The two countries he cites with the(demographically) greatest burden of ‘peasant elimination’ are the evident cases of India and China,but strangely so large a proportion of new jobs in manufacturing created globally in recent times (theprincipal empirical plank of his argument) are in China.


its reproduction in conditions of increasingly insecure and oppressive wageemployment combined with a range of likewise insecure ‘informal sector’(‘survival’) activity, typically subject to its own forms of differentiation andoppression along intersecting lines of class, gender, generation, caste and ethnic-ity.27 And, of course, many of its number pursue their means of reproductionacross different sites of the social division of labour: urban and rural, agriculturaland non-agricultural, wage employment and self-employment: ‘footloose labour’indeed (Breman 1996).

It is thus the crisis of labour as a crisis of employment – certainly not uniqueto capitalism today but undoubtedly intensified by its globalizing tendencies– that compels attention. Point 6 in the schema of the ‘classic’ agrarian question,outlined earlier, is that the development of the productive forces in agricultureand its manifestation in the rising productivity of farm labour has the‘function’ (among others) of ‘releasing’/expelling labour required by thegrowth of industry (and associated urban branches of activity).28 But whatif the forms of capitalism, including industrialization (‘to the extent that itis proceeding’), in poorer countries today are incapable of generating sufficient,and sufficiently secure, employment to provide ‘a living wage’ to the greatmajority?

One response, in a marked departure from the logic of point 6 of the ‘classic’schema, is that some forms of capitalist agriculture may create net additionalemployment in farming, and thereby have at least some impact in reducing ruralpoverty. This is noted, in passing, by Dyer and Khan, and addressed moreexplicitly and assertively by Sender and Johnston who advance two arguments,one positive and one negative. The first concerns the beneficial employmenteffects of some forms of contemporary capitalist agriculture, for example,agribusiness specialized in high-value export commodities (e.g. horticulturalproducts) produced in ways that are both capital- and labour-intensive, as well asinternationally competitive. The second is that recent land reforms in SouthernAfrica have had negative consequences for employment and poverty, andespecially for the weakest groups in rural labour markets. Sender and Johnston’sposition, then, is especially interesting: it represents an attempt, unique amongthe contributions to this special issue, to marry the ‘classic’ insistence on thesuperior productivity of large-scale (capitalist) farming with a forceful argumentthat it delivers greater employment and income benefits, especially to ‘the poor-est of the (rural) poor’, than small-scale farming. In short, Sender and Johnston

27 For example, the world of ‘unorganized’ (or ‘fragmented’ as it is termed here) labour is well‘mapped’ for India by Harriss-White and Gooptu, who observe that ‘Out of India’s hugelabour force, over 390 million strong, only 7 per cent are in the organized sector’ (2000, 89; see alsoHarriss-White 2003).28 Especially emblematic of the development of the productive forces is mechanization, as a labour savingform of technology. The key historical source of the productive and symbolic potency of mech-anization was the massive expansion of wheat production in the sparsely populated late nineteenth-century farming ‘frontiers’ or ‘virgin’ prairie soils of Argentina, Australia, Canada and above all theUSA, whence it was drafted into the iconology of the Soviet collectivization of agriculture.

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take on current (neo-populist) policy discourse on the terrain that it claims as itsown, that of development that reduces rural poverty; and I come back to theirargument below.

A different response is to start from the many popular struggles over landtoday that are driven by experiences of the fragmentation of labour (includinglosses of relatively stable wage employment in manufacturing and mining, aswell as agriculture), by contestations of class inequality, and by collectivedemands and actions for better conditions of living (‘survival’, stability oflivelihood, economic security), and of which the most dramatic instances areland invasions and occupations. There is now a revival and restatement of thesignificance of struggles over land to the social dynamics and class politics of the‘South’ during the current period of globalization and neo-liberalism. While ofwider relevance, this restatement has a strong Latin American frame of referencethat can be traced in the work of James Petras (from Petras and LaPorte, 1971,for example, cited in note 10, to Petras 1997, 1998), and interestingly so giventhe massive rates of continuing rural–urban migration over the last three decadesin Latin America, as well as the continent’s generally much more developedcapitalist agriculture and industry relative to South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.Moreover, in these conditions, writers like Petras, and Veltmeyer (forthcoming),emphasize that contemporary land struggles in Latin America are significantlydifferent from the (‘classic’) peasant movements of the past, and are much morerooted in the semi-proletarian condition: that of ‘a workforce in motion, withinrural areas, across the rural–urban divide, and beyond international boundaries’(Yeros 2002b, 9; also Yeros 2002a).

It seems to me that this literature similarly contains ‘commentary and analysisfrom a range of (and combinations of ) radical populist and materialist perspec-tives’, as I remarked (above) of writing on Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.I am unconvinced by the sweeping nature of its ‘semi-proletarianization thesis’,and its political conclusion that the struggle for land is, in effect, the principalform of working-class struggle throughout the ‘South’ (for example, Moyoand Yeros, forthcoming). However, with all the exaggerations and analyticalproblems to which it is subject, this line of argument focuses attention on astrategic element of ‘what is changing before our very eyes’ in the world ofcapitalism today, on which GKI remain silent.29

Sender and Johnston on South Africa

Sender and Johnston exemplify their positive argument noted above, concerningthe employment and income benefits of capitalist agriculture and especially

29 Khan notes ‘growing violence, corruption and contestation over land’ in Bangladesh today, whichhe relates to a particular trajectory of ‘primitive accumulation’ and its politics that links countryside andtown, cuts across class divisions, and in which ‘intermediate classes’ (the urban petty-bourgeoisie,rich peasants, and middle-class professionals) play a key role due to their dominance in ‘multi-classfactional organizations’ (pp. 98–105).


agribusiness, by the Western Cape province of South Africa.30 Indeed, there is akind of ‘Western Cape effect’ at work here that, curiously, plays a similar role tothe ‘Punjab effect’ in Michael Lipton’s desire to universalize the virtues of ‘small-scale’ farming (Bernstein 1998) and that raises similar issues despite their substan-tive opposition. One issue, analogous to Lipton’s claim that the (Green Revolution)Punjab exemplifies a relatively egalitarian ‘small-scale’ farm structure, is howconvincing the ‘paradigmatic’ case is: employment trends in the Western Capeare similar to those of (advanced) capitalist agriculture almost everywhere, namelya diminishing core of permanently employed, relatively secure, skilled farmworkers; much larger (possibly growing) numbers of causally employed, insecureand poorly paid workers; and declining average real wages.31 Another problem isthe plausibility of extrapolation from the ‘paradigmatic’ case. The Western Capeis the most highly urbanized province of South Africa apart from Gauteng (whichcontains Johannesburg and Pretoria, the capital cities of business and govern-ment); capitalist agriculture has been established there (far) longer than anywhereelse in South Africa; and its ecological conditions (including a Mediterraneantype climate) and social conditions of farming are quite exceptional in SouthAfrica (let alone the African tropics and sub-tropics elsewhere).32

Sender and Johnston’s second, and negative, argument is especially importantamong the contributions here, as indicated earlier. First, because rather thansimply suggesting the reactionary character of GKI-style redistributive landreform in relation to the long historical scale (and future projection) of transitionsto a (‘fully’) capitalist economy, they assert its immediate negative effects for ruralemployment and incomes, especially of farm workers (poorest of the rural poor).Second, the context of Southern Africa is one in which large-scale capitalistfarming enterprises are already dominant, hence their employment as wellas productivity benefits (and macroeconomic benefits such as foreign exchange

30 Albeit not unique to it; other examples from the region include agribusiness in the sub-tropicalzones of Mpumalanga province in South Africa (Sender 2002), in branches of production liketobacco, as well as export horticulture, in Zimbabwe, and highly capitalized forms of ranching(especially of beef cattle) in both countries.31 Moreover, Ewert and Hamman (1996) show the ethnic segmentation of agricultural labour in theWestern Cape: ‘core’ workers are drawn from the (Afrikaans-speaking) historic ‘Coloured’ popula-tion, casual workers mostly from ‘African’ migrants from the Eastern Cape, that is, ‘footlooselabour’ driven by distress.32 For those interested in the compound ironies of this subject area: of Michael and Merle Lipton’slarge study of Land, Labour and Livelihoods in Rural South Africa, funded by the British government’s(then) Overseas Development Administration and the Development Bank of Southern Africa, thewhole of the first volume (Lipton, de Klerk and Lipton 1996) was devoted to the (exceptional)Western Cape, with the great majority of the 14 case studies failing to support the case for redistributiveland reform pushed by the Liptons. As did their co-editor, Michael de Klerk, a respected agrarianpolitical economist in South Africa, with the effect that the Introduction to the first volume waswritten by the Liptons with their co-editor of the second volume, Frank Ellis. This produces a bizarrebibliographic effect, as a glance at the list of references at the back of this article shows. The secondvolume (Lipton, Ellis and Lipton 1996a) contained nine case studies of KwaZulu-Natal and six ofNorthern Province, one of South Africa’s poorest and most rural provinces created from a number offormerly ‘white only’ farming areas and former bantustans. In sum, just six of a total of 29 commis-sioned case studies addressed South Africa’s areas of ‘deep(est) rural’ social existence and poverty.

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earnings) are under direct threat from any redistributive land reform that dividesup such enterprises.

Sender and Johnston suggest that

land distribution policies in South Africa have been strongly influenced bythe advice of the World Bank. In the early 1990s, the Bank recommendeda ‘broadly targeted’ injection of state subsidized purchasing power toallow some black South Africans to purchase land in the existing land market.(p. 156, emphasis added)

In short, this was a ‘new wave’ market-led land ‘reform’ that many inside andoutside South Africa criticized at the time and since precisely because it wasunlikely to deliver much land at all to many (if any) of the rural poor.33 This isalso, of course, the ground on which GKI express their dissatisfaction withmarket-led land ‘reform’ (and those forces, like the World Bank, which promoteit; 2002, 302). The fact that such reform in South Africa has been almost entirelygestural in terms of how much (i.e. little) land has been redistributed ought to bea cause of relief for Sender and Johnston surely, rather than of alarm?

Second, why refer to ‘black South Africans’, ‘black rural capitalists’ and ‘blackcommercial farmers’, as they do, without any mention of white landed property,agrarian capital, or economic and political power more generally, the products ofthree centuries of racialized dispossession, oppression and accumulation?

Third, in reporting (negatively) some of the results of farming on the (little)land that was redistributed, why do Sender and Johnston not give any indica-tions of the ownership, quality, uses, employment and income profiles, and soon, of that land prior to its purchase for redistribution? (What is being compared,unfavourably, with what?)

Fourth, to suggest that ‘since 1994 . . . the government’s populist pronounce-ments on land reform have resulted in a surge in wage labour shedding, moti-vated by employers’ fear of loss of control over land’ (p. 158) is to shift ground.If there was so little, if any, loss of farm jobs because so little land was redistrib-uted, then the threat – and moreover a ‘populist’ threat – of redistribution wasenough to cause a ‘surge’ in labour shedding.34 Here is an alternative view:agrarian capital in South Africa, established and supported by white minorityrule over a long period, increasingly (re)positioned itself for the end of apartheid,not least by mass evictions of (black) workers, labour tenants and ‘squatters’from the 1980s, as well as a range of other manoeuvres pursued with the

33 Inter alios Levin and Weiner (1996), Bernstein (1998), Borras (2003), and the publications of theProgramme in Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) of the University of the Western Cape, includingits latest ‘status report’ on land and agrarian reform by Turner (2002).34 Government policy in South Africa since 1994 is hardly notable for any threats to existing prop-erty rights, and indeed has embarked on a wide range of privatization with considerable enthusiasm.Even Merle Lipton – who hoped to see ‘250,000 plus (new) small-medium farmers’ establishedby redistributive land reform – commended South Africa’s first post-apartheid government for its‘caution, even diffidence’ concerning redistribution by any radical means (1996, 425, 434), displayinga similar political coyness to that of GKI noted above.


complicity of the National Party state (Pickles and Weiner 1991; Murray 1995;Bernstein 1996b). Immediately prior to and following the end of apartheid in1994, it is likely that (white) agrarian capital was equally, if not more, exercisedby the prospect of legislation protecting the rights of farm workers than by anysignificant redistribution of land, that is, fear of loss of control of labour rather than ofland. Are we to assume then that the objective of progressive policy should be toreassure capital of its property rights and control over labour, so that it can geton with what it does (accumulate, invest, develop the productive forces, createjobs, etc.)?35

Finally, one wonders if polemic has its own inverse relationship to theability to influence events and processes. The utopian pretensions of GKI arereadily apparent, as their critics make clear. What then of the recommendationof ‘policies to promote capitalist farming and the growth of decently remuner-ated agricultural wage employment in Africa’, requiring ‘far higher levels ofpublic investment and a much more interventionist state’ (Sender and Johnston,p. 159)? That would be nice but until such time as ‘these (policy) conditions areright’,36 are seizures, occupations or other redistributions of capitalist landedproperty simply to be condemned as variations on a common theme, a genericand reactionary ‘populism’ shared by GKI, Michael and Merle Lipton, the WorldBank, President Mbeki’s government in South Africa, and no doubt manyothers?

Sender and Johnston offer only brief comments on recent events in Zimbabwe,which they assimilate to their account of South Africa. In the final section of thispaper, I offer a somewhat different approach to those events which are of con-siderable, if hardly clear-cut or unambiguous, significance: a unique case ofcomprehensive, regime-sanctioned, confiscatory land redistribution in the worldtoday that bears little resemblance to the prescriptive rationale of GKI’s model ofredistributive land reform.37

35 It would be of considerable benefit if Sender and Johnston disaggregated South African agricul-tural wage employment and its trends by branch and location of production. For example, wereagribusiness enterprises in the Western Cape shedding labour, and if so at similar rates to otherbranches of capitalist production elsewhere in South Africa? If not, why not? Also it should be notedthat some white farm owners (not always themselves farmers) in some areas of the country werekeen to exploit the opportunity to sell parts or all of their property at land market prices that hadbeen maintained by National Party machinations during the political ‘transition’ of 1990–4, like thevast sums of ‘drought relief ’ disbursed by the last apartheid government (Bernstein 1996b).36 Like a change of heart in the ‘current consensus’ of neo-liberalism, and the international financialinstitutions that uphold it? That is, exactly what GKI want as well. It is one thing to argue for theability of (certain types of ) capitalist agriculture to create jobs, another to see how farm labour couldbe ‘adequately remunerated’ in conditions that prevail in Africa. Sender and Johnston (pp. 153–4) pointto the preference of large agribusiness in some parts of South Africa for foreign female migrant workers(from Lesotho and Mozambique), i.e. doubly disadvantaged by nationality and gender, ‘becauseof their relatively weak bargaining power and the ease with which they could be controlled anddisciplined’ (see also Sender 2002).37 In their section on sub-Saharan Africa, GKI refer briefly to large-scale alienation of (the best) landby settler colonialism, but offer no view of the merit or otherwise of redistributing it. One wonders,and would like to know, what they make of events in Zimbabwe.

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ZIMBABWE38

Context

Liberation from the rule of minority political regimes, whether colonial and/orof settler provenance, came later in the southern African region than in mostof the rest of the continent (and rest of the world): in Mozambique in 1975,Zimbabwe in 1980, Namibia in 1990, South Africa in 1994. For Mozambiqueand Zimbabwe, liberation was achieved in the decade when major shifts in thedynamics of international capitalism, soon to be termed ‘globalization’, werestarting to be apparent. For Namibia and South Africa, liberation came at amoment when a globalizing capitalism was more evident, and its effects furtherramified by the definitive event in the reconfiguration of its international politicalrelations, the end of the Soviet Union.

Second, the dialectic between the international conjuncture and its constituentforces and the trajectories of struggle, composition and balance of domesticpolitical forces, resulted in a far more qualified settlement of national liberation/national democratic revolution than its militants and popular base had envisaged.The possibilities of advance in independent Zimbabwe were restricted inter aliaby the provisions of the Lancaster House Agreement (in force from 1980to 1990); those in South Africa were restricted by the ‘historic compromises’of the transition of 1990–4, itself partly the product of a mutual exhaustion ofcontending forces, as Engels once put it.

Third, then, while the political importance of the achievement of universalcitizenship should not be underestimated, the limits to national democratic revo-lution were registered in continuities of historic relations of property, productionand economic power. Fourth, this continuity was especially marked in the inher-ited distribution of land and its associated control of agricultural production whichwas, moreover, concentrated in large-scale capitalist farming, albeit juxtaposedwith spatially and socially more extensive peasant farming in Zimbabwe than inSouth Africa. And, of course, both countries, and especially South Africa, weresubstantially more industrialized than other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.Finally, land questions – deeply rooted in processes of encompassing, violent andracialized dispossession intrinsic to the formation of minority regimes in theregion – were more central to the course of liberation struggle in Rhodesia (andits guerilla campaigns in the countryside), and continued to be of greater politicalweight in Zimbabwe than in South Africa at any time since the early 1960s.

In effect, both countries combine and concentrate features of different (world)historical processes and moments in potentially explosive ways. They are amongthe last instances of national liberation from minority regimes of colonial origin,with exceptionally unequal and racialized distributions of land and the mostextensive (and ‘advanced’) sectors of capitalist farming in sub-Saharan Africa,and they exemplify the effects of what I have termed the fragmentation of

38 This section partly draws on, and also substantially elaborates and updates, Bernstein (2003).


labour intensified (if not initiated) by ‘globalization’, manifested with particularacuteness in conditions of extreme social inequality.

Class Structure and the Case for Land Reform: ‘Worker-Peasants’ and Farm Workers

Central to the history of capitalism in sub-Saharan Africa are combinations of‘hoe and wage’ (Cordell et al. 1996) – or wage and hoe, as some might prefer inthe context of the massive regional migratory labour regimes that suppliedthe mining complexes of Southern Africa, and of South Africa above all.Combinations of hoe and wage/wage and hoe, of farming and (migrant)wage employment, have their own distinctive historical lineages in much ofsub-Saharan Africa, and especially Southern Africa, flagged by ideas, and debatesabout ‘worker-peasants’. This is a vast area of issues with its own complexitiesand contentions represented in a rich empirical and analytical literature which,inter alia, prefigures the more general thesis of the ‘fragmentation’ of labour incontemporary ‘globalization’, stated so baldly above.

Such conventional and pervasive distinctions/separations as ‘urban’ and ‘rural’,‘worker’ and ‘farmer’, are blurred by the social logic of migratory labour systems.39

Ray Bush and Lionel Cliffe (1984), among others, have illustrated well the pur-chase of such conceptual categories/distinctions, that provide the conventions ofdiscourses of ‘modernization’, on official thinking about development in Rhodesiain the 1950s and 1960s and continuing in Zimbabwe after liberation. Their essayof 20 years ago, written during the first round of (limited) land ‘reform’/resettle-ment in Zimbabwe, was noteworthy for its focus on ‘agrarian reform in labour migrantsocieties’, that is, in social formations where agrarian capital dominates landownership and agricultural production and accumulation while combinations of‘hoe and wage’ (or wage and hoe) are key to the reproduction of labour. Theirconclusion was that land redistribution should be concentrated first and foremoston ‘the overwhelming majority of rural dwellers . . . the dependents of migrants,the worker-peasant or semi-proletarian class’, rather than rich peasants (as in colonial‘progressive farmer’ policies) and ‘the near landless and jobless poor peasants, akind of “sub-proletariat” ’ (Bush and Cliffe 1984, 87, emphasis added).

By the early 1990s, Ben Cousins et al. (1992) suggested that the numbersof ‘worker-peasants’ in Zimbabwe were declining, while those of agriculturalpetty commodity producers, of a ‘lumpen semi-peasantry’, and of a rural pettybourgeoisie were increasing.40 Of course, achieving any statistical precision for

39 And which also contest the assumption of ‘purely’ agrarian classes of capital and labour.40 The view of a growing rural petty bourgeoisie was influenced by the spurt of commodity produc-tion of maize during the 1980s by better-off black farmers in resettlement areas and in those ‘commu-nal areas’ in more fertile parts of the country (principally in the three Mashonaland provinces), asthey gained access to credit, input and marketing services previously restricted to white farmers(Amin 1992); there was also considerable growth of cotton production by the black ‘peasantry’.These trends may have influenced (or reinforced) views of the merits of ‘peasant’ (‘small’, ‘house-hold’ etc.) farming in Zimbabwe (e.g. Moyo 2000, 8, who appeals to the literature on the inverserelationship), with the usual disregard of processes of differentiation underlying successful pettycommodity (‘middle peasant’) production (note 4 above).

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the numbers of people distributed between these, or other, social classificationsapplied to various strata of the peasantry and of ‘worker-peasants’, is well-nighimpossible: because of the porous social boundaries of adjacent categories aswell as complex processes of differentiation and in recent years the effects ofZimbabwe’s accelerating and encompassing economic misery, both of whichI touch on below. The political conclusions of Cousins et al. were to argue forpolitical and economic democratization, in which the ‘crucial link may be thefirst part of that hybrid category, “worker-peasant” ’ through struggles in theurban workplace. Democratization should include land redistribution as partof ‘real agrarian reform’, requiring an alliance of ‘worker-peasants’ with ‘thegrowing numbers of lumpen semi-peasants’ (1992, 21–2).

In the very different conjuncture of Zimbabwe since February 2000, ParisYeros (as cited above) also connects redistributive land reform with ‘semi-proletarianization’. Moreover, he does so in terms that revive some of the centralmotifs of the ‘classic’ agrarian question: ‘Zimbabwe’s mass land occupation move-ment, even if state-patronized and streamlined, remains an historic opportunityto break the inherited structure of the home market’. Redistributive land reform isnecessary but not sufficient for the ‘widening of the home market’ which also needsstate support to build ‘the requisite infrastructure . . . (for) dynamic accumulation. . . in the smallholder sector’ and ‘to co-ordinate inter-sectoral linkages’ to transcend‘disarticulated accumulation’ (Yeros 2002b, 12–13, emphases added; see also Moyo2003).

In a way, this seems to propose a peasant (or ‘American’, in Lenin’s designa-tion) path of development, with the novel feature, of course, that the conditionsof this path in Zimbabwe are established by the division of capitalist, rather thanpre-capitalist, landed property (and production). As always, it is difficult toimagine how ‘dynamic accumulation’ can occur without rural labour markets,which means differentiation, and ‘worker-peasants’ or ‘semi-proletarians’ are nomore homogenous or immune to differentiation than ‘peasants’/petty commod-ity producers. Sophisticated understandings of the historical trajectories of‘worker-peasants’ in Southern Africa (inter alios First 1983; Bush and Cliffe 1984;Levin and Neocosomos 1989; Cousins et al. 1992; O’Laughlin 1998) recognizethese tendencies to class differentiation and their implications. It is not only that(typically female) rural ‘subsistence’ production ‘subsidizes’ the wages paid to(typically male) labour migrants, but that remittances and savings from wageemployment contribute to the monetary costs of reproducing farming (see note20 above), including through hiring labour, and hence can contribute to accumu-lation (expanded reproduction) by some agricultural petty commodity enter-prises. In effect, this discloses a further and distinctive source of fragmentation oflabour among ‘worker-peasants’. In the absence of adequate public provision ofthe means of farming beyond access to land (as advocated by Yeros), only richerpeasant or ‘worker-peasant’ households can command the resources (capital) toestablish production on new and/or additional and/or better land acquired throughredistribution. Even without marked inequalities of initial conditions, the nor-mal tendency to differentiation may generate increasing inequalities between those


who benefit from land redistribution, and – ironically – may do so even more inconjunction with structural and idiosyncratic or fortuitous factors that shape the(differential) fortunes in labour markets of those who combine hoe and wage.

If semi-proletarianization or ‘worker-peasant’ issues are central to seriousattempts to characterize the class structure of the countryside in Zimbabwe, so asto elucidate issues of land reform, then another key element of that class struc-ture – and arguably the most clearly proletarian – is conspicuous by its absenceso far, namely workers on large-scale capitalist farms. At the end of the 1990s,there were an estimated 320,000–350,000 farm workers in Zimbabwe. Togetherwith 1.8–2 million other family members, they accounted for about 20 per centof the country’s total population (a far greater proportion than in South Africa).41

Many of them are descendants of farm workers recruited from neighbouringcolonial territories – Nyasaland (now Malawi), Northern Rhodesia (now Zam-bia) and Mozambique – up to the 1960s. While the current generation was mostlyborn in Zimbabwe,42 they are often stigmatized as ‘foreigners’, especially as thediscourses of the ruling party ZANU(PF) increasingly, and opportunistically,turned towards what has been termed ‘authoritarian nationalism’ and depictedfarm workers as both passive dependents of white farmers and potentially activeallies of their employers in resistance to land redistribution (Rutherford 2001b).And, it has to be said, in many analyses of Zimbabwe’s agrarian questions froma progressive position – like those briefly surveyed above and preoccupied withsemi-proletarianization on the one hand, the prospects of a ‘peasant’ path on theother – the position and interests of farm workers typically have been marginalized,if acknowledged at all.43

Land Redistribution: An Outline

By contrast with insignificant land ‘reform’ in South Africa after apartheid,Zimbabwe since February 2000 presents a unique case of sweeping, regime-sanctioned, confiscatory land redistribution in the world today and one that getsthe attention of the international media, at least periodically: the most newswor-thy ‘rogue state’ in the realm of property rights?44 The markers of its trajectory

41 These and other figures on farm workers are from Sachinkonye’s valuable report (2003); see alsoRutherford (2001a).42 About 70 per cent, according to a source cited by Sender and Johnston (p. 154, note 15).43 An exception, if more prescriptive than analytically useful, is Moyo et al. (2000). Tandon (2001)addresses much more directly this manifest failure of political vision and analysis concerning farmworkers, by far the largest single component of the working class in Zimbabwe – a failure compara-ble in its seriousness to that in South Africa in the 1980s concerning migrant workers (especially fromthe then KwaZulu) whose hostels became bases for systematic violence against adjacent townshipsorganized by the ANC and UDF (United Democratic Front); see Mamdani (1996, chapter 7), alsoMorris and Hindson (1992).44 And thus a ready source of rhetoric for use elsewhere, for example, Scotland (‘with the highestconcentration of private land ownership in the world’) whose Parliament passed a land reform bill inJanuary 2003. ‘Some landowners have threatened legal action, saying the bill, which gives croftingcommunities the right to buy their land even if the landlord does not want to sell, is akin to PresidentMugabe’s land grab in Zimbabwe’. A Conservative Party Member of the Scottish Parliament

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of land politics and policies since liberation are well known: the state-managedredistribution/resettlement of the early 1980s, constrained in its extent by,inter alia, the Lancaster House Agreement and its ‘willing buyer–willing seller’provision (to prevent confiscation); following the end of the Lancaster Houseprovisions in 1990 (and with the course of political events in Zimbabwe) themuch more radical redistribution promised by the Land Act of 1992 and by thegazetting of 1471 large landed properties for compulsory acquisition in late 1997,both of which, however, delivered relatively little; and the comprehensive landoccupations/confiscations – ‘fast track resettlement’ – from late February or March2000, sanctioned by a regime increasingly mired in deep political troublesubstantially of its own making.

Some brief explanation of Table 1 is needed for familiar reasons: the landcategories are official designations and the figures for 1980 and 1997 are fromgovernment sources which can conceal as much as they reveal45 (figures for 2002are compiled by Sachnikonye). The three principal categories of farm landin 1980 were taken over from the white minority regime replaced by Mugabe’sfirst government. The LSCF category, then consisting exclusively of landedproperty of (white) settler origin, was occupied by some 6000 large farms.The SSCFA area was occupied by some 8500 (black) ‘yeoman’ or ‘progressive’farmers, a characteristic category promoted by British colonialism in Africa,especially in its late ‘developmental’ phase. ‘Communal areas’, a fundamental

similarly spoke of ‘this Mugabe-style land grab’ which ‘has nothing to do with land reform andeverything to do with other parties being obsessed by replaying the class war of 200 years ago’ –presumably the Highland clearances of which Marx wrote (1976, 891–5); all quotes from The Guard-ian (London), 24 January 2003.45 In fact, the source of these figures is a paper by Dr T. Takavarasha, then Permanent Secretary ofthe Ministry of Lands and Agriculture, Government of Zimbabwe, presented to a conference atSOAS in March 1998, and reported in Stoneman (2000). Most of the figures in what follows aretaken from Sachikonye (2003), unless otherwise indicated.

Table 1. Land distribution in Zimbabwe 1980–2002

Land category 1980 ha (m) 1997 ha (m) 2002 ha (m)

LSCF 15.5 12.1 1.0a

LSCF (A2 model) 2.0CA 16.4 16.4 16.4SSCFA 1.4 1.4 1.4Resettlement 3.6 11.0State farms 0.3 0.8 0.6National parks 6.0 6.0 6.0

Source: Sachikonye (2003, 22).

Key: a approximation; LSCF: Large-scale commercial farm (white-owned, but seebelow); LSCF (A2) model: Large-scale commercial farm (black-owned); CA:Communal areas; SSCFA: Small-scale commercial farming area.


category of both colonial land tenure and the structuring of colonial state rule,46

contained some 700,000 (black) households, with 75 per cent of ‘communalareas’ located in the country’s drier and less fertile agro-ecological zones.

Under the post-independence resettlement programme, about 48,000 house-holds from the ‘communal areas’ were resettled by 1989, most of them by 1984on land acquired between 1980 and 1982 and that was ‘available’ as it had beenabandoned by its owners in areas of guerilla attacks in the 1970s (Cliffe 2000).The pace of official resettlement slowed considerably after the mid-1980s, withless than 20,000 households receiving land between 1990 and 1997. The muchmore extensive redistribution promised by the Land Act of 199247 and by thegazetting of 1471 large landed properties for compulsory acquisition in late 1997(above) did not happen (Moyo 2000), principally for political reasons includingthe government’s desire to avoid offending aid donors in the 1990s when Zimba-bwe’s adoption of a structural adjustment programme coincided with seriouseconomic downturn and a rapidly growing, and increasingly effective, politicalopposition of which the ZCTU (Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions) was acentral component. What is missing in, or obscured by, Table 1 – as well as byaccounts that focus on lost opportunities for greater redistribution to ‘communalarea’ farmers from the mid-1980s to the end of the 1990s – is the emergence andgrowth of large-scale black landed property. A commonly cited figure (e.g. byMoyo 2003) is that on the eve of ‘fast track’ resettlement, there were some 4500large landed properties/farms (down by a quarter since 1980) of which 800 or sowere owned by black Zimbabweans drawn, presumably, from the ranks of thepolitical elite, the most successful black capitalist farmers, and black investorsfrom outside the agricultural sector.48

The political conjuncture of 1997 to February 2000 (when the governmentwas defeated in a referendum on constitutional change) is key to what happenedsubsequently. In addition to continuing, and mounting, economic deteriorationand political opposition, consolidated with the formation of the Movement forDemocratic Change (MDC) as a political party late in 1999, there were two keyevents. One was an extensive wave of spontaneous local invasions and occupa-tions of large landed properties (mostly, but not exclusively, white farms) in1997–8, some of which were followed by eviction and repression by state forces

46 The basis of its ‘decentralized despotism’, as analysed by Mamdani (1996); see also note 12above.47 Nick Amin observed of the 1992 Land Act at the time that ‘Land redistribution on the scaleplanned is . . . not likely to be a financially viable option. Against this, of course, is the view that theruling party sees swift action to redistribute white-owned land to blacks as the only way to win backdwindling support’ (1992, 150), a view it finally acted on in 2000.48 Whereas black landed property only makes its appearance in Table 1 after ‘fast track’ resettlementin the category ‘LSCF (A2 model)’. However, Sachinkonye notes that about 500 ‘fully-fledged(black) commercial farmers’ (2003, 22) were acknowledged officially by the mid-1990s, of whom‘about 80 per cent had bought farms with their own resources while the remainder rented govern-ment leasehold farms’ according to government figures – but hardly the full story, it is safe toassume.

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(Moyo 2001; Marongwe forthcoming);49 the other was the increasing pressureon the government by the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’Association (ZNWLVA):

. . . when sustained lobbying of government by ZNWLVA for greaterfinancial compensation, political recognition, and progress on land redistri-bution reached a dramatic crescendo in late 1997, President Mugabe gave into their demands. Aware of the veterans’ political capital . . . and reluctantto lose their support or the prospect of an even more violent challengefrom them as threatened, he yielded to their demands. He awarded all warveterans a one-off cash payment and an ongoing monthly pension, as wellas a significant percentage of all newly acquired land for resettlement.(Hammar and Raftopoulos forthcoming)

It seems that the invasions and occupations of large landed properties that movedwith ferocious speed from March 2002 were mostly initiated by the ZNWLVA,then rapidly accepted and proclaimed by the Mugabe regime (euphemistically) as‘fast track resettlement’. The results are dramatic as the final column of Table 1indicates, above all in the cells for LSCF (white-owned and A2 model) andresettlement. By the end of 2002, there were estimated to be 600–800 whitefarmers remaining on their properties of approximately 1 million hectares intotal,50 while some 30,000 black commercial farmers (60 per cent of the targetfigure) had acquired 2 million hectares under the rubric of the ‘A2 model’. Inthe ‘A1 model’ of resettlement from ‘communal areas’, some 300,000 ruralhouseholds are estimated to have moved on to about 7.4 million hectares (theresettlement figure for 2002 less that for 1997 in Table 1).51

‘Fast Track Resettlement’: Some Immediate Effects

Land ‘acquisition’, especially in the mostly chaotic fashion in which it occurredin Zimbabwe in the space of two years, is not the same as the immediate(re)settlement of farmers nor (re)settlement with the immediate commencement

49 There was also ‘an unprecedented level of strikes on commercial farms across the country inOctober 1997 and, to a lesser extent, in July 1998’ (Tandon 2001, 216). The regimes’s fearof workers’ organization and politics was thus compounded by a new level of militancy of farmworkers usually stigmatized as ‘passive’. Sachikonye (2003, 7) reports that a new state-sponsoredZimbabwe Federation of Trade Unions (ZFTU), established to counter the ZCTU, has been tryingto recruit farm workers in Masvingo and elsewhere.50 Even within this comprehensive ‘acquisition’ (in the official jargon) of white farms there wasconsiderable (and erratic) local variation, as in all aspects of the process in the countryside from early2000 (see further below). For example, ‘larger estates and plantations, those specialising in sugar, teaand timber production in particular, were spared from acquisition’ in Midlands province, as weresome tea estates in Manicaland, sugar plantations in Masvingo, and citrus estates in MashonalandCentral (Sachikonye 2003, 43).51 Again these rough figures do not identify the land grabbing by members of the political elite thatundoubtedly took place. Against the commonly cited figure of some 11 million hectares of whitefarm land redistributed by the end of 2002 (e.g. by Moyo 2003; Sachinkonye 2003), there are some1.6 million hectares ‘missing’ in the last column of Table 1.


of farming, let alone at a level that replaces production on land seized, asavailable data readily confirm. First, substantial annual reductions in outputfor the three years from 2000 to 2002, and anticipated for 2003, are reportedfor tobacco, wheat, maize, soya and livestock (Sachikonye 2003, 6–7, 41), ofwhich the decline in tobacco is especially significant for foreign exchangeearnings. Sachikonye’s survey supports a general picture of substantial declinesin production on ‘acquired’ farms, albeit with marked variations between differentareas.

Second, the disruptions of production coincided with a severe drought, andboth compounded problems of food production and domestic food supply thatwere already evident before ‘fast track resettlement’ (Hammar and Raftopoulos,forthcoming).

Third, it is estimated that ‘By the beginning of 2003, only about 100,000farm workers, a third of the original workforce, were still employed on thefarms and plantations’ (Sachikonye 2003, 5). Sachikonye summarizes thussome of the findings of his (unique) survey in October–November 2002,covering nearly 1000 farm workers on 125 commercial farms in all eight ruralprovinces:

. . . up to 50 per cent of farm workers stayed on even if they no longer heldjobs. In general, female workers suffered greater loss of employment . . .more than 50 per cent of permanent female workers and nearly 60 per centof seasonal female workers lost their jobs. This compares with 30 per centand 33 per cent respectively for permanent and seasonal male workers. Thedata also indicate a decline in permanent and seasonal female workers (by63 per cent and 42 per cent respectively) living on farms. That substantialproportion of female and male workers no longer living on farms must beexperiencing considerable hardship, wherever they are now.

In the survey sample, only about a quarter of the farm workers who lostjobs had received severance packages by the end of 2002 . . .

(While) the new farmers, both small and large (have been) . . . benefici-aries of land reform, (farm workers) have not, despite appeals for landthrough their union, the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers’Union (GAPWUZ). A somewhat uneasy relationship exists between thebeneficiaries and the farm workers. There have been conflicts over contin-ued access to farm housing for farm workers, and over resources suchas land, water and food. However, there are also instances of peacefulco-existence on some farms . . . Not surprisingly, (those interviewed) . . .identified the more immediate needs of farm workers as food and land . . .Other priority needs were income generating projects (requested in particularby women respondents), crop inputs, social infrastructure and services.(Sachikonye 2003, 7–9)

In sum, the immediate effects of land redistribution in Zimbabwe in the past fewyears support Sender and Johnston’s conclusions, above all concerning farmworkers (and especially female farm workers) – and with a force that the South

218 Henry Bernstein

African experience does not. Moreover, as should be obvious, the politicalcircumstances and processes of ‘fast track resettlement’ in Zimbabwe wereentirely different to the minimal implementation in South Africa of WorldBank-style ‘new wave’, market-led ‘land reform’.

Politics of Land Redistribution in Zimbabwe

The conjuncture of ‘fast track resettlement’, as noted above, was one of intenseeconomic crisis in Zimbabwe as well as of a fragile and volatile political situa-tion. Some 300,000 jobs (of 1,300,000) in formal employment were lost in the1990s (Hammar and Raftopoulos, forthcoming), and a crisis of daily reproduc-tion was experienced by large sections of the (urban) middle class and pettybourgeoisie (as in many other parts of Africa in the era of structural adjustmentand ‘globalization’) as well as by workers, ‘semi-proletarians’, poor farmers andthe rural landless. Moreover, the majority of the urban population, across theclass structure, retain strong rural links (and interests) of various kinds.52

There was also an intense democratic struggle against the depredations, flagrantcorruption and repression of the ZANU(PF) regime of Mugabe that put it underincreasing pressure. That pressure was symbolized by the moment of its defeatin the referendum on constitutional reform in February 2002, widely regarded asthe immediate trigger of the launch of ‘fast track resettlement’.

‘Fast track resettlement’, of course, occurred in a context of both longstandingand more recent complexities and contradictions of land questions in Zimbabwethat include, if not exhaustively: struggles over land within areas of ‘peasant’farming and especially perhaps on their frontiers; the dynamics and effects ofpatterns of substantial rural–rural migration since independence – discoursesof ‘squatting’ and associated practices of eviction are not confined to the spaces oflarge commercial landed property (Nyambara 2001); the extent to which, andways in which, the gathering crisis of the reproduction of labour during the1990s added instances of urban–rural migration in a quest for land to the tensionsnoted; the effects of shifts in land use, and claims on land, generated by new,and highly profitable, branches of export production and by the stratagems ofeco-tourism capital and its practices of displacement and eviction (Hughes 2001);and how all these processes impact on, and are shaped by, class and genderdifferentiation in the countryside (Cousins et al. 1992).

The translation of such ‘social facts’ into ‘political facts’ (to adopt the formu-lation of Mamdani 1996, 219) includes how the kinds of processes sketched aremediated through the often fragile political alliances and erratic practices oflocal accumulators and the similarly erratic, and contested, interventions of thelocal state, in which ‘native’/‘stranger’ distinctions, ‘squatting’ and eviction alsofeature (Hammar 2001); the continuous if ‘low profile’ local land disputes and

52 A sociological reality that goes beyond the rural–urban linkages of solely cyclical labour migrationfrom a rural residential base, emphasized in much of the ‘semi-proletarianization’ literature (as above).


occupations from the moment of independence, moving to ‘high profile/highintensity’ local land occupations in 1997–8 (Moyo 2000, 2001), noted above; themultiple ambiguities of ideological representations of farm workers, and theirpolitical sources and effects (Rutherford 2001b), also noted; the insertion of thewar veterans, as a nationally organized political force, in this intensification ofland politics in the late 1990s and their role in the moment of February 2000(Moyo 2001); the reasons why, and means by which, Mugabe’s politically em-battled regime (finally) declared its support for, and sought political benefit from,sweeping land redistribution, after twenty years of vacillation and inconsistency.

In reviewing the various instances, locations, timings and agents of land occu-pation during the upsurge of 2000, Moyo (2001) acknowledges its ‘numerouslocalized and contradictory waves’; the great range of actors involved, with afocus on the actual or aspiring ‘leadership’ of party politicians, state officials, warveterans and chiefs, acting in concert with or independently of national directivesfrom ZNLWA and ZANU(PF); and the heterogeneous social mix of participants,from rural ‘communities’ to some members of the urban middle class – and, oneshould add, the unemployed youth mobilized by ZANU(PF) that a number ofobservers noted.53

Key questions for the future, of course, are who got what land, what are theydoing with it, and what will they do with it?54 For reasons that have beenindicated, almost all classes in the context of Zimbabwe’s manifold crisis havesome or other interest in getting rights to land that was being so massively (andchaotically) redistributed, except for (white) landed property/agrarian capital.Whether farm workers (and which farm workers) wanted land in addition to theirjobs is not known. Certainly, it seems that farm workers have mostly, if notentirely, lost out on reallocated land, as did others who are members or sup-porters of the opposition MDC, or were accused of being so (Marongweforthcoming).55 Otherwise, one would expect that those rural (and urban) socialgroups that lack political power and/or connections (for example, through localand wider relations of patronage) no doubt got very little, if any, of the land‘acquired’ (seized) and redistributed, including presumably the great majority ofthe rural poor and especially poor women, as Sender and Johnston emphasize(and see note 56 below).

My concern here is to suggest the historical significance of Zimbabwe’s uniqueredistributive land reform, and to illustrate its amalgam of contradictorysocial forces and meanings, rather than to evaluate it as a ‘development’ policy

53 Rural as well as urban youth, and especially those drawn from the ranks of the rural‘sub-proletariat’ or ‘lumpen semi-peasantry’ (Bush and Cliffe 1984, and Cousins et al. 1992, as citedearlier)? See also Marongwe (forthcoming) and Sachikonye (2003) for instances of the immense localvariation in farm occupations and their politics.54 Questions that Sam Moyo, among others, is currently trying to answer (Moyo 2003, and personalcommunication).55 Another ugly aspect, among many, of the Mugabe regime’s vicious attempts to crush the MDC,is the refusal to provide government and party [ZANU(PF)] managed emergency food relief toareas, groups and individuals associated with the MDC.

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‘intervention’,56 which it was not pace the regime’s presentation of it in this wayand the attempts of others (like Moyo and Yeros) to assess its potential for adifferent (superior) path of agrarian development. This requires grappling withthe multiple, and fluid, complexities and contradictions of the conjuncture inZimbabwe at the end of the 1990s, of which only some elements were brieflysketched above. Any ‘concrete analysis of a concrete situation’ is going to involvealertness to ‘multiple determinations’ (in Marx’s term) and, in my view, needs toshed any expectations of class (or any other) ‘purism’ (Bernstein 2000, 40–2), orevaluation of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ on the criteria of some rationalist plan of ‘policy’(i.e. objective, means, outcome) removed from the real worlds of politics.

The land question in Zimbabwe is entangled with struggle for democracy in anumber of senses: the struggle against landed property and agrarian capital ofcolonial/settler provenance, the reproduction of which registers the limitsof national democratic revolution;57 the struggles of fragmented (and divided)labour for means of livelihood and reproduction (the agrarian question of labourproposed above); and the specific (and variant) sources, trajectories and fortunesof political opposition to the Mugabe regime.58 On all these connected terrains,the agrarian question of labour is only one of a number of class (and other social)forces in a volatile, complex and contradictory dynamic in Zimbabwe, with theadditional irony of the part (belatedly) played in comprehensive land redistribu-tion by a regime antagonistic to the concerns and interests of labour. The mostsignificant cost of the processes described was the failure of political vision andcommitment to find means of negotiating and combining the interests of the key‘fragments’ of labour – not least ‘worker-peasants’ and farm workers – in the faceof ‘the many ways that power fragment(s) the circumstances and experiences ofthe oppressed’ (Mamdani 1996, 272).

CONCLUSION

The paper began by registering its agreement with other contributions to thisspecial issue that advance potent criticisms of neo-populism, specifically in theGKI version, as theoretical model, empirical account of agrarian structure, and –not least – ‘development ideology’ as Byres (p. 19) aptly reminds us, and which

56 Which Sender and Johnston tend to do? Their point that land reforms in practice, depending –I would add – on the balance of political forces and its trajectories, do not help the rural poor (orpoorest) is undoubtedly often valid (and the same criticism of Latin American land reforms made byGKI). This applies especially to existing structures and processes of patriarchy (in its various forms),the struggles they generate, and their effects for the benefits (if any) that women farmers, ruralworkers and ‘worker-peasants’ get from redistributive land reforms; see Jacobs (1997), Deere andLeón (2001) and Razavi (2003) among a large literature on this.57 And however perverse, as well as opportunistic, the appropriation of that struggle in the‘anti-imperialist’ discourse of the Mugabe regime, itself a typical example of what happens in the realworlds of politics.58 Ben Cousins (forthcoming) provides a wide-ranging and more systematic discussion of land andagrarian questions in relation to issues of democracy and democratization in the Southern Africanregion.


I suggested proposes a solution to the agrarian question of small or ‘family’farmers. In opposition to that ideology is the ‘classic’ agrarian question of thetransition to capitalism, that is, the agrarian question of (industrial) capital, whichalso historically subsumed the agrarian question of labour. I advanced some(highly schematic) theses concerning the ‘world historical’ of capitalism to sug-gest that there is no longer an agrarian question of capital on a world scale, as aneffect of changes within capitalism characterized as ‘globalization’. The tendencyof ‘globalization’ to fragment labour in the sense indicated led to the questionwhether there might be a (new) agrarian question of labour now detached fromthat of capital, rooted in crises of employment, and manifested in struggles over,and for, land to secure some part of its reproduction needs. The purpose is toprovoke ways of recognizing, and investigating, ‘what is changing before ourvery eyes’ in this period of a ‘globalizing’ capitalism, to enlarge the agenda of thecontemporary concerns of agrarian political economy.

A stance taken here, for better or worse, is that struggles over land today thatmight correspond to, or incorporate, a (new) agrarian question of labour demanda kind of respect in their interrogation and analysis that is not required in disposingof the claims of ‘development ideology’ (and ideologues) – even when represen-tations by those waging such struggles may draw on discursive elements sharedwith ‘development ideology’.59 This is not to write a blank cheque for each andevery instance claiming the credentials of a land struggle ‘from below’ nor, asnoted above, to accept that land struggle is the definitive political practice of thesemi-proletarian condition throughout the ‘South’ or the cutting edge of worldrevolution. Rather it is to suggest that issues of redistributive land reform incapitalism today should not be surrendered to the concerns (or fantasies) of neo-classical populism nor otherwise assigned to the dustbin of history marked ‘anach-ronistic’, ‘reactionary’, ‘utopian’ (or all three), a view I sought to illustrate by thesketch of land redistribution in Zimbabwe with all its manifold contradictions.

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Amin, N., 1992. ‘State and Peasantry in Zimbabwe since Independence’. European Journalof Development Research, 4 (1): 112–62.

Arrighi, G. and J.W. Moore, 2001. ‘Capitalist Development in World HistoricalPerspective’. In Phases of Capitalist Development. Booms, Crises and Globalizations, edsR. Albritton, M. Itoh, R. Westra and A. Zuege, 56–75. London: Palgrave.

59 Which, as we know only too well, is entirely promiscuous in its varieties of ideological dress aswell as fairly constant in its core message: just trying to do its best for those who need its help most.Perhaps one of the effects of neo-liberal hegemony today is to increase ‘the scale of ideological cross-dressing’ as Nixon (1994, 152) memorably put it in the context of South Africa’s political transition,when the forces that had flourished under apartheid were busy reinventing themselves to claim theirplace in the new ‘rainbow nation’ in ways that ‘defied belief ’ (as Nixon said) – and not least (white)agrarian capital and its institutions (Bernstein 1996b, 1998). On the other hand, in some cases theadoption of certain discursive elements in popular struggles – as on the part of established ruling classinterests – may manifest a quite definite and conscious political tactic rather than indicating a funda-mental ideological delusion.

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Bernstein, H., 2000. ‘ “The Peasantry” in Global Capitalism: Who, Where and Why?’.In The Socialist Register 2001, eds L. Panitch and C. Leys, 25–51. London: MerlinPress.

Bernstein, H., 2002. ‘Land Reform: Taking a Long(er) View’. Journal of Agrarian Change,2 (4): 433–63.

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