Minimum elements to analyze agricultural capitalism (a manifesto)

Unfortunately, after reading the last book by Charles Post and Xavier Lafrance on transitions to capitalism in peripheral regions such as Brazil and Turkey, we find that they situate the emergence of capitalism always in the second half of the 20th century. The reasons given in the texts is the predominance of tenancy, or small property, or the absence of "free" peasant wage-labor, etc. But this forgets the texts of Lenin or Marx where all these formations are not only capitalist, but even agricultural industrial capitalism. We think it is necessary to criticize those texts where there’s no in-depth analysis 1) neither of the agrarian issue, 2) nor in the terrain of the peripheral countries; the forgetting of agricultural analysis is reciprocal to the oblivion of how capitalism penetrated the peripheral zones, and vice versa: the absence of analysis of formal and real subsumption of capital in the agricultural area of ​​the peripheral regions, produces the inverse forgetting of the forms in that capitalism exists in agriculture, and that they go beyond the classical primitive accumulation, or beyond the great latifundia with peasant wage workers, etc, all of which are clichés of the most orthodox Marxism. We feel the need to stop the ‘semi-feudalism/capitalism’ model or argument within Marxism, because it reproduces the most backwards positions within Marxism, in relationship to agrarian subjects, and in relationship to the characterization of peripheral “Third World” countries. We, in effect, don’t need to hide our pretension: we want to eliminate once and for all the semi-feudalism characterization within the ranks of Marxism, and move forward.

-           Leasing is a form of capitalist industry, and not of "semi-feudalism" or non-capitalism. It is defined in Marx's theory of rent as well as in Lenin's The development of capitalism in Russia. There’s no reason to think that the high presence of tenancy is a form of non-capitalism. The same can be said of sharecropping within a commercial economy and based on income in money or “wages” (ie: when the surplus is used for marketing, and therefore, the fraction of fixed rent in kind is exchanged for money, and its part of a relationship of agricultural or commercial profit, whether through the landlord or the merchant). This is also mentioned by Lenin himself in his The development of capitalism in Russia as a form of passage from rent in kind (the part of the product that is delivered as fixed rent through sharecropping) to a regime of capitalist industry.

- Subsistence farming doesn’t necessarily or automatically mean ‘feudalism’ or even ‘semi-feudalism’. You can sell excedents while still producing for your own consumption as a peasant. If your plot is not enough even for subsistence, then you turn into a tenant, a sharecropper or any other variant of wage-labour or rent in money (both which are capitalist), like the ones detailed by García Nossa in Latin America, or by african and asian writers in their respective continents. Plus what we have already said about tenancy and sharecropping as a form of capitalist exploitation not only because of the commercialization of excedents for trade, but because of the money relationship (both in the sense of wages or rent in money), they represent forms of penetration of agricultural industrial capitalism.

-           The parcel or small plot model can be industrial agrarian capital, and even more industrial than big latifundia. Reading the texts of Lenin on agrarian analysis sheds light on the poverty of agrarian analysis within current marxism, and specially on the simplified interpretation made by Kautsky. He even finds entire countries, where lands with a bigger amount of salaried labor per acre, are the smaller plots, in even bigger rates than the big latifundia. This turns those plots into large-scale industrial capitalism, even if they're smaller, or even if it's not permanent salaried work and only temporal or seasonal, etc, or property of family units, because all of these plots together operate as investment of big agrarian capital (even if it's just the property of one family unit operating as capitalists). They don't have to be lots of parcels or plots based on the production of one single product either, and they can diversify. The whole of small plots together then produces more value and employs more wage-labor than the whole big latifundia together.

-           The small property of the land or a minor minifundio-latifundia ratio does not mean that there is no capitalism. Small peasant property is a form of real subsumption, insofar as the small farmer modifies the production process directly as his own property, and is a form of formal subsumption to the extent that the commercial or agricultural industrial capital seizes the surplus for marketing through payment in money, etc. This, again, was already elaborated by Chayanov as capitalism, for example. The peasant who changes the productive process of his small plot is producing real subsumption, even though it’s produced by a small proprietor or small peasant and not a big landowner. Machines are not the criteria for the modification of the productive process on industrial and bourgeois lines. The criteria is the extraction of relative surplus value. And since Marx defines the small peasant as a half-proletarian and half-bourgeois formation, then he is actually extracting relative surplus value in his own plot, at the same time producing what it seems to be clear for all is subsistence farming. This is all explained by Chayanov, based on Lenin, we insist.

-           Collective property, both in the mode of possession or usufruct, and property itself, through extended families or family units of production, such as those that predominate in Asia or Africa, are also forms of agricultural capitalism. Both in the case of being subsumed in forms of integration through subcontracting schemes that may or may not involve the public sector, or the private sector, or both, etc; in addition to contract farming; or even: through the exploitation of the family land through a customary or de facto landowner conformed by a traditional village or clan chief, etc. Here the contact with capitalism is not only due to the fact of commercially selling agricultural production, or by selling the agricultural surpluses of collective and family units commercially, but by the fact that the internal productive process is modified (real subsumption), in a mixture with forms of formal subsumption. Both state public subcontracting schemes, such as contract farming with commercial enterprises, as well as the production organized by a customary or traditional landowner of the villas, clans or families, are all producing relative surplus value and not only absolute surplus value, at the moment that there’s a modification of the direct productive process through the granting or mediation of raw materials or means of production for the direct producer, etc.

-           Not only production on large latifundia based on wage labor is capitalist, but also production where there is a great fragmentation of the land, either by small peasant owners (as in most of Latin America), or by small units of extended or customary family based agriculture (as in Asia and Africa) . Or in other words: primitive accumulation is not the only capitalist structure, where land is expropriated from the peasant and peasant labor “liberated” for exchange; even where land and labor are not “liberated”, there can be a penetration of capitalism into agriculture based on the appropriation of commercial capital over the productivity of the whole economy, instead of the development of industry in the classical European sense. Therefore: the existence of small farmers and producers in opposition to the existence of free and salaried labor, does not imply by itself the existence or not of capitalism. It is necessary to study its formal or real subsumption to capital. This is going to affect wage relationships different from the classical peasant proletariat, like seasonal work or out hiring labour into small plots for subsistence agriculture (where, for example, the fact that a peasant owns a small plot and hires labour in order to barely survive, well below the socially necessary working time or below the average rate of profit, will turn this capitalistic relationship into one of a mixture of half-bourgoise half-proletarian, and self-exploiting relationships mixed with the exploitation of others, etc).

- Forms of coercion or even the fact that the small peasant owner is not landless, makes him unfree in the sense of volume I of Capital and in the sense of primitive accumulation. But he still enters in money-wages relationships, rent in money relationships, all which are industrial agrarian capitalism, and fit completely well and exactly with the second non-revolutionary way of transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism detailed in chapter XX of volume III. The biggest obstacle seems to be still primitive accumulation and the historic sketch made by Marx, which in no way should be confused with the logical synchronic sketch. The second non-revolutionary way of transition to capitalism is another form of penetration and transition.

- We adhere to the correction and interpretation made by Ashok Rudra on the mode of production debate in India. We only need to clarify his position on sharecropping, reminding that Lenin includes sharecropping into capitalism depending on the elimination of servitude, and depending on whether is functioning for overconsumption/underproduction as in feudalism or pre-capitalism in general (Mandel). Besides this slight difference, we adhere to all his corrections and his contribution to the debate. Tenancy is not pre-capitalist, wage-labour even is its unfree or even if its still tied to the land, is still a form of an agrarian proletariat, “coercion” by economic means is not the same as coercion in the pre-capitalist sense, and there’s no way (we repeat, there’s no way) to sustain a mixture of semi-feudalism and capitalism as a form of transition for peripheral countries. The decision must be made: sustaining the semi-feudal/capitalist model is exactly the same as Sweezy’s position on the European transition debate with Dobb and others. There’s no way to uphold through Marx the simultaneous co-existence between two modes of production. One needs to study historically which social formation is the dominant one along the others with all their gradations and particularities, and to make a choice according to this domination, in relationship to modes of production. For this is imperative that we go from forms of exploitation, to relations of production and reproduction, just like Banaji already pointed out in that very same debate. That’s why we’re not concerned only with labour processes, or the technical composition of the productive process, but with capital as a relationship. We analyze tenancy and it’s relationship with agricultural or commercial profit making endeavors, being part of capitalist accumulation, etc, not because there’s money present or not exclusively (the whole rent in money or monetization variable); we analyze commercial integration not because of the external relationship of selling for trade, but for the very internal real subsumption of extracting relative surplus value; etc. For example: calling landowners ‘feudal’ because they spend their capitalistic profit in luxury products, is a travesty of economic analysis.

For us, internal variables like the labour process are connected to the world market even at the level of unequal organic compositions and different gradations of productivity of labour in the world market. The reason agriculture didn’t have much investment in the “Third World” during the first half of the XX century and the age of agricultural export-models, is basically because the rate of profit is higher with a smaller organic composition, and it allows for a bigger exploitation rate as well. But basing your production process in productivity of labour or exploitation rates are two different things completely, and the Triad developed and preferred the path of productivity of labour because 1) its reduces necessary labour compared to suplus labour, 2) allows to reduce unitary prices and extract more value (against any neo-classicism, lets just remember it), 3) allows for a simultaneous higher explotation rate thanks to the reduction of necessary labour compared to surplus labour, and 4) allows for increasing aggregate demand and in this sense, better realization of surplus value in the exchange market. All of this characteristics made the production processes of the Triad based on productivity of labour way more superior than the peripheral countries’s production based on exploitation of labour (respectively: the difference between producing through the extraction of relative surplus value versus production based on extracting absolute surplus value). This relationship has inverted itself between the Triad and peripheral countries to some degree (not absolutely!), but agricultural profits start dominating rent (Patnaik) not only because of a qualitative change, which is true, but because of sustaining a higher exploitation rate and a higher profit rate with cheaper and lower organic composition. This relates the production processes of agrarian capitalism in the “Third World” with the competition against the productivity of labour of the Triad. So just like internal variables are not only made of labour processes, but related literally to value and profit flows through different productivity and organic compositions all around the world, the external variables are not only commercial trade (like in world-systems theory), but, once again, the very same co-existence in conflict and competition of unequal productivities and organic compositions. In any case, this is not the place to develop an interpretation of how to analyze the world market. This whole paragraph is just our answer to Jairus Banaji’s plea for a debate based on modes of production and not on forms of exploitation.