AGRARIAN CHANGE AND THE DISAPPEARING PEASANTRY


The  classical Marxist notion of rural change devices from the view that when capitalism is on  the ascendancy, it sweeps aside all previous modes of production and transforms them  into the new mode. In  agriculture, this change may take the form of  two complementary stages” 
1.             The separation (forcible or otherwise ) of the  smallholding peasant from the means  of Production (land)  and their  transformation  into  either a rural or urban wage earning   class (proletariat ) and / or  along with 
2.            1.  the  concentration of land in the hands of large capitalist farms utilizing wage labour  and advanced machinery where production is purely for profit, thus replacing the small household
   run farms
         Lenin  (1956:68)  basically echoed Marx analysis but discussed the process sin a backward and largely  underdeveloped Russian agrarian society in the last decade   of   the  19th  century “ peasant differentiation” had   taken place as the social division  of  labour  in agriculture became more pronounced and the peasantry and been divided into here types: the rich well-to-do peasants the middle peasants, and the poor peasants(pp.71-192).
           The top and bottom of these types are the ones most tied in with commodity production, the rich peasants becoming the rural capitalist class or “masters” of the cotemporary countryside” while the poor peasants are transformed into the rural proletariat – “the class of allotment-holding wage workers” who now sell their labour power to the former. Only the middle peasantry cling to an independent existence with the ties to the commodity economy although they are in “an extremely precarious position .” sooner or later, a great majority of them will end up among the ranks of he rural proletariat and only a few will become part of the rural bourgeoisie. This whole process Lenin calls “depeasantisation” which results in ‘the dissolution of the patriarchal peasantry.”
               For kautsky agrarian change takes place with the  development of large capitalist farms and their subsequent domination over the small peasant farms. In his  die agrargrage (the agrarian  question ) , Kaussky  argues that rather than causing  the rapid dissolution of the latter,   a relationship arises whereby  the existence of family farms fulfills a necessary function for the large farms, that of providing   an adequate  supply of cheap labour (Alavi  1987:192) . Profits are maximized as   the capitalist farms are freed of responsibility for reproducing the needed   labour power as this is borne  entirely l  by the peasant household
The  finite  natural of land prevents expansion in areas   occupied by capitalist agriculture, only an increase in its activities (hussain and Tribe  1981:107  0.   Furthermore, the  “ proletarianized “ peasantry recruited as wage workers by the large farms are not disposed  of the means of production. Peasant households simply do not possess enough land to sustain themselves and thus are forced to sell their labour . for Kautsky, the sub assumption of small farms under the large farms signifies the full blown development of capitalist agriculture. A peasant  household selling labour power to the capitalist farms becomes a “ proletarianised household’  and a component  of the capitalist mode of production in agriculture. The continued cultivation of land is reduced to ‘a household activity”
            Kautshkys  analysis departs  if significantly  from classical Marxist notions of  agrarians change . The proletariainsation of  the  peasantry is not necessarily accompanied by the disappearance of the family farm which contuse to be organized along non  capitalist lines .  Furthermore, the relations between capitalist  and peasant farms is not so much one of competition as of complementarily”  Hussian  and Tribe  1981)  as rig (2000:17) )  puts it, it is precisely “ the  involvement of  farm families in  non farm industrial activities that permits small scale family farms to persist
            In the Philippines,  many of the wage earning proletariat retain access to land through family ties or through sharecropping and tenant farming  (Banzon –Bautista  1984:174) . This is   true even of the labour sector that is considered the most proletarianized I the country – the migrant sugar  workers of Negros province who, between their seasonal work in sugar haciendas or a slump   in  sugar production, cultivate subsistence plots in marginal lands  around the plantation or are subsidized  by their farming families back home. Larkin (2001:175-176)  describes an entire   peasant   household  in  the  1920s  ‘conscripted’  to provide labour for a Philippine sugar plantation who have at their disposal ‘a  bit of land’ and  sometimes farm animals and  where division of labour   is according to age and gender
Kautsky  (and Lenin as well), separates “ the  process of   proletariansiation  ffrom  the process of destruction of pre capitalist organization and their replacement by capitalist organizations of production” and  this also constitutes ‘an important departure from the Marxist   view “that  the two processes are tethered” (Hussain and  Tribe  1981:110-111)  Kautsky further differs  from  Marx in two other instances 
1.       The  use of the peasant household rather than the individual as  the unit of analysis
2.      The  analysis that changes in agriculture  (particularly in the small peasant farms ) will be generated not  from within  but   from without , I.e   from industry and urban areas. Internal changes within  agriculture itself will ‘concern only what farms of
3.      In  the phikippines, capitalist farmers are not emerging from the ranks of the peasantry “despite the devleoment of   a local  agricultural labour market in the rice sector and of the capitalist farmers   in some areas “  (Banzon  Bautista  1984 :178)  many  straddle the line between the  self  -sufficient stallholder and the rural proletariat; a  situation that partly reflects “ the  resistance of peasants to capitalist penetration”
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