Peasant Prospects in the Neoliberal Age

Peasant prospects today are matters of significant contention, not least regarding the question of the recomposition of the peasantry. The question of the peasantry’s future links to another longstanding debate about the trajectory of capitalism. This continues the Marxist/populist debate over peasant prospects anchored in Lenin’s claim that what Russian Narodniks viewed as peasant ‘differentiation’ was indeed peasant ‘disintegration’ in the context of a developing home market for capital. Variants of this debate echo in the extensive literature concerning the persistence of small farmers in the capitalist era. While the latter centres on the reproduction of small farming within the circuits of capitalist agriculture, a broader agrarian question concerns the reproduction of small farming by capitalism globally and across sectors. This broader ‘agrarian question’ focuses attention on the relentless assault on small farming by a new balance of forces, including financial relations incorporating agriculture into global industrial-retailing circuits, intellectual property rights protocols displacing peasant knowledges through seed monopolies, and globally-managed circuits of food displacing small farmers. In reviewing these questions, this essay argues that the current agrarian question and its resolution depend on the peasantry itself, in a politicised movement on a world scale to confront the international power, and socio-ecological impact, of capital. In this respect, the Vı́a Campesina transnational peasant movement favouring ‘food sovereignty’ makes the critical observation that the ‘massive movement of food around the world is forcing the increased movement of people’. The juxtaposition of labour and new circuits of food represents a historic moment in the reproduction of capitalism through the mechanisms of the ‘corporate food regime’. These mechanisms are captured in David Harvey’s concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, which involves the direct expropriation of peasantries through global market forces (destabilising effects of food imports, contract farming relations, and so on), and the more indirect dispossessions through privatising public supports of small-scale agriculture, in turn enabling the consolidation of corporate agriculture. In this respect, the dismantling of farm sectors everywhere not only undermines local stewardship of the land and relegates ‘food security’ to a global market relation, but it also nourishes global capitalism with an endless supply of ‘surplus’ labour that depresses wages worldwide. New Political Economy, Vol. 11, No. 3, September 2006