Class formation and commodity chains in the making of regional monocultures: Agrarian reform from above and below in Mexico's henequen and cotton zones

This paper analyses the rise and fall of two regional monocultures in Mexico: the henequen zone in the southern state of Yucatán and the cotton‐growing area of La Laguna. Both regions experienced a dramatic expansion of commodity production between 1870 and 1910, but their key crops came to be cultivated under different labour regimes: debt peonage in the case of henequen and wage labour in the case of cotton. The process of class formation that unfolded in each region culminated in the 1930s in different kinds of crises. In Yucatán, a political struggle between hacienda owners and the federal government resulted in an agrarian reform “from above.” In La Laguna, class conflict between rural wageworkers and the landed bourgeoisie forced an agrarian reform “from below.” These previously distinct labour regimes converged in subsequent decades, however, as rural producers became de facto wageworkers on state‐organized and state‐administered production units known as collective ejidos. Ultimately, changes in the global markets for cotton and henequen, combined with the inability of the Mexican state to reconcile the political logic of agrarian clientelism with shifting commodity chain dynamics, resulted in the collapse of these regional monocultures in the late 20th century.     

(Landlord) Theory from the South: Empire and estates on a Punjabi Frontier

Theory has occasionally shaped agrarian transformations. Utilitarian theory, for instance, influenced British colonial land revenue policies, while modernization theory spurred, via the Green Revolution, the development of capitalist farming across the global South. Yet scholarship, when it has probed the mediation of theory in agrarian change, has largely centred on the intellectual activities of Western figures. In this paper, I examine an under-appreciated theorizing actor: landlords in the global South. I explore landlords' concept-work in the former “Punjab Frontier,” a region where Baloch chiefs collaborated with the British Raj to acquire localized magisterial powers, a paramilitary apparatus, and immense “landed estates” (jagirs). To overcome various crises, certain chiefs engaged with various imperial concepts—namely, property, race, progress, contract, and freedom—and re-arranged their estates. By showing how these elites creatively embraced these concepts to maintain a colonial-fortified hegemony, I also challenge those who overstate the emancipatory and decolonial possibilities of theory from the South.     

The food regime in late colonial Philippines: Pathways of appropriation and unpaid work

I argue that food regimes need to take into account the production relations of paid and unpaid work. As an angle of vision, I use the historical geography of late colonial Philippines (1901–1941) to show how paid and unpaid work in food production was not discrete and separated processes but rather conjoined moments of capital accumulation. The colonial regime—in this context, American colonial government, U.S. agribusinesses, and Filipino landed elites—utilized state power, customary land relations, and commodity‐specific characteristics to appropriate vast amounts of unpaid work from agrarian classes of Philippine labour and draft animals towards the exploitation of commodified labour power. These processes not only produced considerable quantities of coconut and sugar products that were exported to the American consumer market, sold at cheaper prices, and contributed to the profitability of U.S. agribusiness elites but also allowed the colonial regime to efficiently expand commodity production across the islands. The more the American capitalists and Philippine elites invested in Philippine agriculture, the more they appropriated unpaid work from the agrarian classes of labour.     

Narco‐frontiers: A spatial framework for drug‐fuelled accumulation

Based on historical and ethnographic research conducted in a region of northwest Colombia and drawing on the stories of novelist Gabriel García Márquez, this article develops the analytical concept of “narco‐frontiers” to help disentangle the confusing political economy of agrarian spaces affected by the violence of the drug war. As socially produced spaces, narco‐frontiers emerge through the convergence of four interlocking processes: uneven development, internal colonialism, political violence, and narco‐fuelled dispossession. Although often depicted as “ungovernable” or “stateless” spaces, narco‐frontiers are wracked by extra‐legal regimes of rule in which the state is simply one actor among others. With the drug trade inducing violent agrarian change all over the world—from Colombia to Afghanistan, Burma to Central America—this article offers a spatial‐historical framework for understanding these dramatic transformations.     

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.     

Potatoes,Petty Commodity Producers and Livelihoods: Contract farming and agrarian change in Maharashtra,India

This paper explores the implications of contract farming for patterns of agrarian change in India. The paper draws on a detailed analysis of primary qualitative data from a case study of potato contract farming in the state of Maharashtra. It argues that debates on contract farming are often ideological in nature, leading to overly simplified narratives of “win–win” or “win–lose.” Instead, by combining the strengths of agrarian political economy and rural livelihood analysis, the paper offers a concrete exploration of the intersections between contract farming, livelihoods, and agrarian change. It finds that contract farming activities in the case study villages are focused on a group of petty commodity producers. However, rather than sparking dynamic new processes of accumulation among contract farmers or leading to new forms of exploitation, the paper argues that contract farming is contributing to processes of agrarian change “already under way.” These processes are intimately connected to livelihood diversification and the struggles of new classes of fragmented labour.     

The hidden edifice of (food) sovereignty: Rights,territory, and the struggle for agrarian reform in Venezuela

This article seeks to make a critical contribution to the “sovereignty problem” in food sovereignty (FS) studies. Contemporary scholarship has largely struggled to answer the question of who or what is sovereign within the realm of FS politics—underpinned by the relocalisation of agrarian production, sustainable nature–society relations, and a radical democratisation of food systems. Although the most recent scholarship has made significant progress on this issue, I offer an alternative historical materialist account of sovereignty understood as the combination of rights and territory. From a critical Marxian perspective, I deconstruct the basis of sovereign power as the intersection between social property rights (exploitation) and territorial governance (political technology) congealed within both capital and the state. This approach thus provides some clarity as to the necessary breaks required to establish an FS regime (self‐directed labour and cooperative territorial governance). The framework is then applied to the case of Bolivarian Venezuela. While witnessing some important achievements, Venezuela's FS experiment has encountered a number of contradictions. As this case study shows, peasant struggles aiming to retake control over production and establish cooperative forms of governance must traverse the entire terrain of the state and thus affect a broader socialisation of society's sociopolitical infrastructures.     

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.     

What kind of labour regime is contract farming? Contracting and sharecropping in Java compared

This article compares contract farming with share tenancy, another labour regime in which smallholder farmers are bound by contract to deliver produce to another, usually more powerful party. Based on research in the Javanese village of Kaliloro, we explore contracting and sharecropping as labour regimes, each with their own specific mechanisms of surplus transfer from producers to non-producers. The cases compared are sharecropping of irrigated rice, contract farming of watermelon, and contract farming of poultry. There are important differences in how labour inputs are organized, how decisions are made, how costs are divided between landowner/contractor and farmer, and in the mechanisms of surplus transfer between the contracting parties. Exploring these differences allows us to understand and compare the role of the two labour regimes in the penetration of capital into the rural economy. Neither contract farming nor share tenancy are in themselves “win-win” or “win-lose” relationships, good or bad for small-scale cultivators. The actual balance of burdens and benefits—often contravening the provisions of written contracts or state regulation—is determined by power relations between the contracting parties.     

Social conflict and agrarian change in Uganda's countryside

In this paper, I explore the significance of Giovanni Arrighi's scholarship about the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and transformation in Africa and other “hostile” environments for critical agrarian studies. Specifically, I examine the relevance of his work for the analysis of multiple trajectories of agrarian change and social conflict in Uganda's countryside. By adopting synchronic and diachronic perspectives, the analysis here unveils the geographically uneven nature of transformation in the agrarian social structure in two distinct regions in Uganda: Buganda and Acholi. This complementarity allows us to grasp continuities and discontinuities in the processes of agrarian change and in the social struggles over the production and appropriation of surplus value in the longue durée. I argue that the agrarian social structure and the associated dynamics and forms of social conflict in the two regions massively diverged during the colonial period, while partially converging in the current era of neoliberal restructuring.     

Capitalist development in hostile conjunctures: War,dispossession, and class formation in Turkey

This article analyses how periods of geopolitical conflict and violence have affected the development of capitalism and class formation in Turkey. We argue that all major episodes of conflict, violence and war—from forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of the non‐Muslims in the late 19th and the early 20th century, to Kurdish secessionist warfare in the 1990s and the Syrian Civil War—have become major historical turning points in the development of historical capitalism in Turkey. These “hostile conjunctures” transformed capitalism through their direct and indirect effects on dispossession, class formation, and capital accumulation. Although each of these conflicts produced a violent dispossession process, none of them resembled the rural dispossession process in England. To make sense of Turkey's experience, we turn our attention to what we call the “Castilian/Spanish road,” and what Lenin called the “Junker/Prussian road” and the “farmers/American road.” Our analysis shows that these differential paths of dispossession, class formation, and capital accumulation have produced highly variegated rather than uniform outcomes. We conclude that we are living in a new “hostile conjuncture,” which is pregnant to a major structural crisis and is generating the preconditions of another historical transformation in the way capitalism operates.     

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.     

Temporariness made interminable: Pacific Islander farmworkers in Australia and the enduring crises of global agricultural production

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) workers in south-east Australia, I reflect in this paper on the experience of interminable temporariness and on its implications for the structural conditions underpinning contemporary horticultural labour in Australia. Although in many ways reflective of the specificities of a unique historical moment, the interminable temporariness experienced through the COVID-19 pandemic also speaks to broader, enduring conditions produced within contemporary Australian agriculture. Here, the restructuring of the agri-industry produces for many what Lauren Berlant describes as the “impasse” or “crisis ordinariness” of life under neoliberalism. At the same time, logics of development—including racialized imaginaries and border regimes—articulate with agricultural guest worker schemes in ways that seek to fix whole populations and regions in relations of suspended hope. In this context, I argue, the pandemic exposed and intensified structural vulnerabilities and unequal distributions of risk, which are encoded in the political economy of farm work in Australia, while also cleaving open new, if tentative, possibilities for agency and solidarity.     

Restructuring palm oil value chain governance in Colombia through long-term labour control

In this paper, I argue that the cumulative effects of coercive and indirect labour discipline enable firms to reorganize production. Through a historical analysis of the palm oil industry in northeastern Colombia, I identify changing forms of value chain governance in relation to transformations in labour control regimes. The combined effects of multiple labour control strategies have weakened labour power and workers' overall possibilities to shape value chain governance. In this case, labour coercion directly diminished workers' associational power and enabled labour flexibilization in the industry, limiting workers' structural power. A dialogue between the Global Value Chains framework and Critical Agrarian Studies, with a focus on labour regimes, highlights that labour flexibilization can build on past instances of coercive control to transform the structure of a value chain. This research illustrates that coercion is not necessarily “extra-economic” but is often intrinsic to the organization of the global economy.     

Bovine meat,authoritarian populism,and state contradictions in Modi's India

While authoritarian populism and its relationship to the rural world have gained analytical prominence recently, few have attempted a systematic exploration of how various authoritarian populisms emerge from, and are embedded within, dynamics of capital accumulation, state, and class struggle. Drawing on Poulantzas' approach to “state contradictions,” we focus on the ways by which bovine meat figures in Narendra Modi's authoritarian populist project in contemporary India. On the one hand, violent authoritarianism in the country uses beef eating as a powerful tool for subjugating subaltern groups to Hindutva rule. On the other hand, the country houses a rapidly expanding beef meat agro-industry, accounting for as much as 20% of global exports and based on corporate concentration around dominant class interests. We argue that this points to state contradictions in Modi's India witnessing strained accumulation patterns. These contradictions, we emphasize, have distinct ramifications for India's classes of labour in the countryside, as certain groups experience what we describe as a process of “double victimization.”     

The value components of contract farming in contemporary capitalism

Contract farming (CF) has generally been understood as, essentially, a market institution—by both (approving) “mainstream” and (critical) “radical” perspectives. Analyses of relations of production have, meanwhile, tended towards a problematic “peasantist” frame, where contracts undermine farmer “autonomy” in processes of “flexible” corporate agro‐industrial restructuring. This paper argues that a materialist analysis of CF from within capital–labour relations offers a stronger conceptual foundation for re‐synthesizing questions of market‐power. It first argues that radical notions of “peasant subsumation” conceptually mirror Marx's “formal subsumption of capital” but underplay dynamics of “real subsumption” accompanying capitalism's wider development. Drawing on the “petty commodity production” concept, it then argues that CF's “flexibility” rests in its differential content. CF's fungibility to contradictory movements of “integration” and “dispersion” enables it to emphasize different methods of surplus appropriation under shifting conditions; each corresponding to a different dominant social tendency. On the one hand, conditions of market expansion inspire integration for relative surplus appropriation through raised productivity, and CF tends to act as a “tool of proletarianization” in the wider centralization of capital. On the other, conditions of contraction motivate the dispersal of unvalorized capital, prompting efforts to raise absolute surplus appropriation, and CF tends to act as a “tool of differentiation” to concentrate agricultural capital.     

COVID-19 and the power of indigenous,Mexican-origin farmworker families in the US Pacific Northwest

Over the last several years—in the context of US political upheaval, ongoing crises related to climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and an economic downturn—indigenous, Mexican-origin farmworker families in Washington State have engaged more intensely in class struggle through acts of solidarity and forms of collective action, in part through independent labour unions, worker cooperatives and mutual aid. This article chronicles the labour struggles that led to a notion of class rooted in family units of production and that strengthened transnational solidarity in resistance to racist forms of exploitation in the agricultural sector. Class organization rooted in family and solidarity has allowed indigenous agricultural workers in Washington State to face COVID-19 and incidents driven by climate change, which syndemically compounded existing community health crises, from a place of power. Focusing on the experience of farmworker families in Washington State, I outline agricultural employers' exploitation of workers during this period of increased vulnerability and the strength of farmworkers' resolve to take their health and well-being into their own hands.     

The afterlife of living under contract,an epilogue

This epilogue summarizes key challenges in the critical study of contract farming (CF) that are highlighted in this special issue, and it utilizes our co-edited volume Living under contract as the platform to ask what has been learned and what questions remain nearly three decades after the book's publication. It discusses the political and historical moment of the late 1980s when our CF project was started and the neo-liberal roots of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) were firmly implanted, especially in Africa—the regional focus of our book. We argue that this neoliberal turn continues to shape many topics addressed in this special issue, including the role of the state, labour and land (and ecology) relations, and the vertical integration of CF within global values chains. The epilogue concludes with a plea for more systematic comparisons and “big picture” analyses that highlight how space, local agrarian formations and classes, state powers, and materiality (the commodity itself) shape the character and dynamics of CF schemes.     

In Search of Pathways out of Poverty: Mapping the Role of International Labour Migration,Agriculture and Rural Labour

The issue of rural poverty continues to shape critical academic and policy discourses in the global South. In such discourses, some scholars and policy‐makers highlight non‐agrarian pathways leading to prosperity, while others continue to emphasize the significance of land and farming for poverty reduction. However, such analyses tend not only to obscure strong linkages between agriculture, migration and rural labour, but also stay silent on how rural people interpret changes or continuities in their livelihoods. In this paper, I focus on the case of rural Nepal to unfold how some rural people, but not others, improve their livelihoods through international labour migration, farming and rural labour. This paper reveals that many poor people have experienced improved livelihoods pursuing a diverse portfolio of agricultural and non‐agricultural activities including labour migration. However, the dispossession of poor people from land and their adverse incorporation into the local and international labour markets continue to perpetuate chronic poverty.     

Contemporary agrarian,rural and rural–urban movements and alliances

Henry Bernstein has criticized the research agenda of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), and the publications linked to it, for, among other things, not having specified which classes are supposed to comprise the proposed emancipatory rural politics. The Journal of Agrarian Change organized a special issue (published in January 2023) that takes Bernstein's critique as its point of departure. It emphasized the importance of movements of the working class that straddle the rural–urban corridor. I agree, but this should not be done by de-valuing the agrarian and the rural. The key challenge is in building agrarian, rural and rural–urban anti-capitalist movements and alliances within and between these spheres. This calls for more—not less—attention to agrarian movements seen from the inseparable domains of the agrarian, rural and rural–urban continuum in terms of academic research and political action. A starting point, and implication, of this broader unit of analysis and political intervention is an argument against a ‘too agrarian-centric’, or ‘merely agrarian’, mass movement-building and political mobilization to counter regressive populism and struggle against capitalism.