Rural Youth and Circulating Labour in South India: The Tortuous Paths Towards Respect for Madigas

This paper explores how young male Dalit labourers negotiate the changes and continuities of labour relations in the construction industry, and power relations in rural Telangana in southern India. It looks at the fluidity between three segments of the classes of labour, namely debt‐bonded, unskilled/self‐employed and educated labourers. It examines how Dalit youths' experiences and representations of labour circulation and political clientelism shape and are shaped by the articulation between the construction industry and rural leaders, and by class, family, caste and generational relations in the village. Two points are made. First, circulation at the bottom of the labour hierarchy prevents labourers (even educated ones) to accumulate capital and participate in collective action: rather, the total lack of protection at work has brought about renewed and graded forms of dependence and political clientelism. Second, circulation serves as a locus that fosters and segments young male Dalit labourers' quests for respect, but hinders them from getting involved in political competition against rural leaders.     

Between construction yard and village: Changing relations of caste and hierarchy among Madhya Pradesh's labouring classes

In Madhya Pradesh, India, rural migrant workers hired in flyover's construction yards experiment a space of work where the social practices relating to caste separation and hierarchy are temporally softened. This paper shows that these processes of conviviality, through mixing between castes and trans-communitarian work identities based on the hierarchies of labour, are taking part in the lower classes' long quest for less oppressive labour relations. Starting from the construction yard, and then going to the village, this paper shows that the labour relations involved in the circulation of rural migrants to the flyover construction yards are contributing to shaping their complex and flexible social consciousness in a context of slow reconfiguration of oppressive rural labour relations.     

Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in India

This paper seeks to reconstruct David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) through an ethnography of a Special Economic Zone in Rajasthan, India. While Harvey sees ABD as an economic process of over‐accumulated capital finding new outlets, I argue that it is an extra‐economic process of coercive expropriation typically exercised by states to help capitalist overcome barriers to accumulation – in this case, the absence of fully capitalist rural land markets. In India's privately developed SEZs, the accumulation generated by this dispossession – which represents the disaccumulation of the peasantry – occurs through capitalist rentiers who develop rural land for mainly IT companies and luxury real estate, and profit from the appreciation of artificially cheap land acquired by the state. While such development has only minimally and precariously absorbed the labour of dispossessed farmers, it has generated a peculiar agrarian transformation through land speculation that has enlisted fractions of the rural elite into a chain of rentiership, drastically amplified existing class and caste inequalities, undermined food security and, surprisingly, fuelled non‐productive economic activity and pre‐capitalist forms of exploitation.     

The complexity of exchange: Wheat markets,petty‐commodity producers and the emergence of commercial capital in colonial Punjab

This paper questions the orthodox Marxist view of merchant capital as “unproductive,” by highlighting the importance of traders in subsuming the countryside to the logic of capital. However, it also argues that in order to properly understand the role played by traders in agrarian change, critical Marxist scholarship on merchant capital needs to recognize the complex marketing systems in which traders and farmers operate. These markets have their own internal relations, organizational and institutional logic which in turn is tied to the specificity of the commodity. Using wheat markets in colonial Punjab as a case study, it then utilizes the framework of complex marketing systems to highlight the range of firms and farms that operated in these markets; the importance of personal relations and informal institutions of family, caste, and religion for establishing trust; and the class stratified nature of market participants. It was from within these informally organized markets that commercial capital first emerged in colonial Punjab. By creatively combining the concept of commercial capital with markets as complex systems, it hopes to provide a richer framework for the study of agrarian change in diverse contexts.     

Beyond the Pampas: Global capital and uneven development in Argentine soybean expansion

The article analyses the social processes introduced by globalization into agrarian production systems. In particular, it explores how capital installs a new agriculture that generates an urban fringe in rural localities. We claim that the expansion of agricultural frontiers is also associated with the rise of new actors, residential changes and transformations in labour markets. The objective is to study the transformation that takes place in the agrarian social structure of a marginal agricultural area. It shows how this transformation leads to new residential behaviour that redefines the local relational system and to a transition from a “peasant” way of life to an urban‐type through the logic of the expulsion of the peasant population and the logic of agribusiness.     

Does human capital raise farm or nonfarm earning more? New insight from a rural Pakistan household panel

This study explores how human capital affects farm household earnings using two tools to refine measurement of human capital effects. First, it employs a two‐sector model to allow the allocation of family labor between farm and nonfarm activities. Second, it accounts for village fixed effects to evaluate whether results from panel data differ meaningfully from a cross‐sectional data analysis with local binary variables. The results show that education has a negligible effect on farm earnings; instead, experience appears to be the principal channel by which human capital affects agricultural performance in a traditional rural setting. Our results also suggest that prior models that fail to separate nonfarm activities spuriously exaggerated the effect of education to the farm sector. In addition, typical cross‐sectional analyses that ignore fixed effects may cause the effects of education on rural household earnings to be significantly overstated. The fact that panel data regressions accounting for village‐level fixed effects found only one instance of education raising earnings—the effect of literacy on nonfarm income—suggests that considerable heterogeneity may have been ignored in cross‐sectional data analyses, especially ones that omitted village‐level effects.     

Land Reform: Taking a Long(er) View

The paper proposes a broad argument that the end of state–led development from the 1970s coincided with (i) the final wave of major redistributive land reform, and its place within transitions to capitalism, that lasted from about 1910 to the 1970s, and (ii) the beginnings of contemporary 'globalization'. Self–styled 'new wave' agrarian reform in the age of neo–liberalism, centred on property rights, is unlikely to deliver much on its claims to both stimulate agricultural productivity and reduce rural poverty. The reasons are grounded in the basic relations and dynamics of capitalism, and how these are intensified and reshaped by and through globalization. Understanding these processes, with all their inevitable unevenness, requires (i) recognizing that the historical conditions of the 'classic' agrarian question no longer apply, and (ii) developing the means to investigate and understand better the changing realities facing different agrarian classes within a general tendency to the concentration of capital and fragmentation of labour, including how the latter may generate new agrarian questions of labour.     

The Return of the State: Neocollectivism,Agrarian Politics and Images of Technological Progress in the MAS Era in Bolivia

The Movement towards Socialism (MAS) party promised to break with neoliberal politics when it rose to power in Bolivia in 2006. Using the concept of neocollectivism to characterize MAS agrarian politics, this paper examines one of its key instruments for achieving rural development: the state enterprise EMAPA. This state company, which supports small producers, envisions a new agrarian structure of production and commercialization, one that will break the power of the Santa Cruz–based agro‐industrial elite. Drawing on a discussion of the mechanisms of governance employed by this state entity, we argue that new complexities in state–civil society relations and a low state capacity have constrained its ability to shift power relationships between the state and the agro‐industrial elites. Instead of reducing the dependency of small producers on agro‐industrial capital, the Bolivian state has increased it, thereby undermining its goal of redistribution. The paper also analyses different moments of politicization and depoliticization in the intervention process arising from the demand for political change, as well as for technically efficient and profitable agricultural production.     

Three populisms and two dead ends: Variants of agrarian populism in Thailand

This article discusses three forms of agrarian populism in Thailand: the “grassroots populism” of the Assembly of the Poor, the “reactionary populism” of the yellow shirts, and the “capitalist populism” of the red shirts. We examine how these three strands of populism are embedded within dynamics of agrarian change in Thailand and how the intellectual and activist orientation towards agrarian populism led to the neglect of labour, particularly agricultural migrant workers. We show how key ideological underpinnings of the Assembly's grassroots populism (Brass's “agrarian myth”) could be appropriated for the agrarian component of both reactionary and capitalist populism. Rather than a new populism, we argue that a broad and popular challenge to right-wing authoritarianism should develop inclusive class politics that embrace the rural–urban linkages that already define the social fabric of the new, rural, and agrarian precarious working class.     

MGNREGA in Tamil Nadu: A Story of Success and Transformation?

Social protection has emerged as a key driver of development policy at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. It is widely considered a ‘good thing’ that has the potential not only to alleviate poverty and vulnerability, but also to generate more transformative outcomes in terms of empowerment and social justice. Based on an ethnographic study of the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), India's flagship social protection policy, this paper takes a critical look at what this policy's ‘success’ consists of. The study was carried out in Tamil Nadu, a state widely presented as a ‘success’ in terms of MGNREGA's implementation, and describes who participates in the scheme and how success is understood and expressed at different social and bureaucratic levels. In terms of MGNREGA's outcomes, we conclude that the scheme is benefitting the poorest households – and Dalits and women in particular – especially in terms of providing a safety net and as a tool for poverty alleviation. But the scheme does more than that. It has also produced significant transformative outcomes for rural labourers, such as pushing up rural wage levels, enhancing low‐caste workers' bargaining power in the labour market and reducing their dependency on high‐caste employers. These benefits are not only substantial but also transformative in that they affect rural relations of production and contribute to the empowerment of the rural labouring poor. However, in terms of creating durable assets and promoting grassroots democracy, the scheme's outcomes are much less encouraging.     

Experiencing primitive accumulation as alienation: Mangrove forest privatization,enclosures and the everyday adaptation of bodies to capital in rural Senegal

This paper examines primitive accumulation by studying changes in fishermen and mollusc collectors' labour before and after the privatization of 1,800 hectares of mangrove forest in rural Senegal through the creation of a tourism‐oriented protected area. Locating this privatization within a broader context of capital's enclosures, the paper shows a process of depeasantization, labour intensification (via the multiplication of petty commodity production activities and proletarianization) and changing socioecological relations. This is a process where enclosures continuously alienate workers by separating them not necessarily from the land, but, more generally, from the conditions of their labour even when these are already commodified. As workers cope with alienation, they encounter it anew, contributing to capital's survival through their search for money and other commodities (i.e., means of production and subsistence). Workers' everyday adaptations to capital, and hence alienation, need to become central in future research on primitive accumulation and agrarian change.     

'Changing Before Our Very Eyes': Agrarian Questions and the Politics of Land in Capitalism Today

This paper endorses the criticisms of neo-classical populism and its advocacy of redistributive land reform provided by other contributions to this special issue of the Journal, to which it adds several further points. If GKI propose a version of an agrarian question of 'small' or 'family' farming, and its resolution through a familiar (Chayanovian) path of development, much of the critique rests, in one way or another, on the 'classic' agrarian question in capitalist transition, in effect the agrarian question of capital in which the agrarian question of labour was once subsumed. Here the question is posed whether, in the conditions of contemporary 'globalization' and its tendency to the 'fragmentation' of labour, there might be a new agrarian question of labour, now detached from that of capital, and which generates a new politics of struggles over land (and its distribution). Even to conceive of this question is beyond the analytical and political field of vision of neo-classical populism. Some of the dimensions of an 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.     

A methodology for class analysis: Agricultural investments and agrarian change in South Africa

This paper presents a class-analytic approach, which combines a “labour exploitation criterion” with class typologies developed for the South African context and the author's additions. The labour exploitation criterion distinguishes between rural classes based on the degree to which one employs others, works for others, or works for oneself. I combine the principal indicator of “labour exploitation” with the income contributions of social grants, ownership of farming assets and livestock, and the contribution of agricultural production to simple or expanded reproduction. Debates around class formation are explored in the context of a comparative analysis of two joint venture (JV) dairy farms, located in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, which involve residents as both landowners and workers. A class-analytic approach illuminates the emerging agrarian class structure that a JV-type intervention both reflects and in turn conditions, in dialectical fashion, with important implications for debates around agrarian change in South Africa.     

Adivasi migrant labour and agrarian capitalism in southern India

This paper looks at a case of rural-to-rural movement of agrarian capital in southern India and the ways in which capital–labour relations are reworked to maintain oppressive forms of exploitation. Faced with an agrarian crisis, capitalist farmers from affluent communities of Wayanad, Kerala, take large tracts of land for lease in the neighbouring state of Karnataka and grow ginger based on price speculation. Landless Adivasis from Wayanad have served as labourers on these ginger farmlands for the past three decades. Recently, farmers have shifted to employing labourers from a Scheduled Caste (SC) from Karnataka. The change happened not just because of the lower wages the SC labourers were willing to work for but also because of the farmers' inclination to move away from Adivasis who have been resisting the poor working conditions on the farm. The story resonates with the broader dynamics of agrarian–labour relations amidst capitalist expansion and highlights the centrality of socio-political factors at play.     

Disparate but not antagonistic: Classes of labour in cotton production in Burkina Faso

This paper examines the variety of agrarian classes of labour and the challenges they face in organizing and pursuing their interests. By taking the cotton sector in Burkina Faso as a case study, it analyses how various ‘classes of labour’ organize and mobilize for collective action to raise their claims: poor cotton farmers and workers in the cotton factories. Poor and middle farmers recently came to the fore when they boycotted cotton production in large numbers. The study focusses on the boycott campaign, and more broadly on class struggle and collective action by farmers and workers, on interclass alliances, and on capital's attempts to play the classes of labour against one another. The boycott campaign provides an outstanding case to analyse the interests of the various classes of labour and of opportunities for rural–urban mobilization and alliances across classes of labour. I argue that poor farmers and factory workers along the chain of cotton production can be considered as various classes of labour that are not necessarily antagonistic to one another but, first and foremost, to capital. In order to achieve radical transformation in the agrarian context, what is needed are networks and organizations to establish interclass solidarity and alliances.     

Accumulation by Dispossession and Socio‐Environmental Conflicts Caused by the Expansion of Agribusiness in Argentina

Drawing upon the concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, this paper analyses the expansion of agrarian capital in Argentina. A case study illustrates the social and environmental impacts of the expansion of agribusiness in central Argentina and the social struggle – both rural and urban – that has arisen to resist this process. Although government policies after the 2001 crisis differ in many ways from those of the 1990s, current agrarian policies are not significantly distinct from those followed during the pre‐crisis neoliberal period. Rather than ‘post‐neoliberal’, the new model could thus be better described as ‘neo‐extractivist’. With the connivance of the state, agribusiness is producing the largest‐ever transformation of natural capital into economic capital in the history of the region. Moreover, the latest policy developments suggest that Argentina is on the threshold of a new and deeper stage of agrarian capital expansion and wealth concentration, this time operating at a much larger scale.     

Stories of Rural Accumulation in Africa: Trajectories and Transitions among Rural Capitalists in Senegal

This paper analyzes primary qualitative evidence from life histories of rural capitalists in contemporary Senegal. Various common themes in the declining literature on rural capitalism in Africa are discussed with reference to the specific individual trajectories of rural farm capitalists in Senegal. The themes include the emergence of rural capitalism in the context of protracted, uneven and gradual rural social differentiation and the various processes that have accompanied it; the condition of 'entrepreneurship' in such changing historical contexts; the symbiotic relationship between different spaces (loci) of accumulation, especially trade, transport and farming and the historical context in which they take place; the crucial but sometimes contradictory role of the state in spurring or constraining rural capitalist accumulation; and the variety of 'idioms of accumulation', which reflect transitions and synthesis between non-capitalist and capitalist forms of labour surplus appropriation at the level of individual capitalists, despite some uniformity in the general logic of capital and the spread of capitalist relations of production and exchange. The paper also discusses the methodological power and limitations of oral narratives as a method to gather evidence on long-term processes of agrarian change and accumulation in rural Africa. Finally, the life histories shed some light on the origins of rural capitalists and show that there is a combination of instances of 'capitalism from above' and 'from below' but that no dominant pattern can be clearly discerned at least in the space of one or two generations.     

The winding paths of peripheral proletarianization: Local labour,world hegemonies,and crisis in rural Colombia

This paper analyses the spatial and temporal patterning of Colombia's rural coffee, banana, and coca‐producing labour regimes. The violent labour repression and endemic crises of labour control characterizing these regimes challenge the market despotism paradigm that predominates in scholarly analysis of 21st century labour and agrarian struggles. Instead, I draw from early and later writings of Giovanni Arrighi and his collaborators to develop a new labour regime framework that is sensitive to the experiences of capitalist development in “hostile environments” (i.e., peripheral market conditions) and “hostile times” (periods of world hegemonic decline). In doing so, I highlight the deep social contradictions—crises, violence, and labour militancy—that result from processes of peripheral proletarianization and the ways that these contradictions were mitigated and/or exacerbated by the rise of U.S. global hegemony, Colombian developmental policy, and local agrarian struggle.     

Evo Morales and the MST in Bolivia: Continuities and Discontinuities in Agrarian Reform

There is a widespread understanding in critical scholarly literature that the government of Evo Morales is fundamentally challenging the neoliberal order in Bolivia. The empirical record of Morales' first five years in office, however, illustrates significant neoliberal continuities in the country's political economy. At the same time, the most important social movements that resisted neoliberalism prior to Morales' election have been considerably demobilized in its wake. This gives rise to the critique that the Morales government has merely implemented a more politically stable version of the model of accumulation it inherited. This paper draws on recent field research in Bolivia to make a contribution to this broader research agenda on reconstituted neoliberalism. Our focus is twofold. On the one hand, the paper examines the continuities of agrarian class relations from the INRA law at the height of neoliberalism in 1996 to the various agrarian reform initiatives introduced since Morales assumed office in 2006. On the other hand, the paper traces the mobilization of the Bolivian Landless Peasants' Movement (MST) in response to the failure of the 1996 neoliberal agrarian reform, followed by the movement's demobilization after Morales' 2006 agrarian reform initiative. The paper explores this demobilization in the context of agrarian relations that have remained largely unchanged in the same period. Finally, the paper draws on recent reflections by MST members who, to varying degrees, seem to be growing critical of Morales' failure to fundamentally alter rural class relations, and the difficulties of remobilizing their movement at the present time.     

Gatekeeping as Accumulation and Domination: Decentralization and Class Relations in Rural South India

Gatekeeping is taken here to mean the act of channelling formal and informal resources between the state and society for private economic and political gain. Based upon fieldwork in Karnataka, India, this paper argues that whilst traditional forms of control over the labouring class have been eroded, gatekeeping increasingly allows the dominant class to exert a more subtle form of political control, which in turn facilitates processes of accumulation. Rather than equalizing political power and control over public resources, heightened levels of fiscal decentralization to village councils (gram panchayats) have increased levels of gatekeeping, which both provides a significant share of the politically active dominant class's income and forges new patterns of labouring class dependence upon the dominant class. This heightens socio‐economic differentiation and reproduces the latter's political dominance despite the loosening of labour‐related ties. In addition, it is argued that although a minority of gatekeepers are from the labouring class, their inclusion facilitates dominant class accumulation rather than their own upward mobility. The paper stratifies gatekeeping in order to locate it amongst the totality of social relations between and within classes, which collectively produce processes of accumulation, differentiation and domination within society. The paper concludes that although the forms taken by extra‐economic aspects of capital's control over rural labour have been altered during the erosion of traditional forms of dominance, they remain highly significant and are increasingly so in the fieldwork area in a context of decentralized governance.