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”