Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

This contribution aims to explore the potentials and pitfalls for the emergence of a popular agrarian movement capable of offering a progressive alternative to the far-right. Taking the case of Colombia's national agrarian strike, the paper argues that food sovereignty can offer a mobilizing framework for a multiclass, antineoliberal agrarian coalition. However, the possibilities for building a counter-hegemonic movement should be taken with more caution. An examination of the class differentiation between and within campesino movements reveals how the interests of certain groups may be prioritized over others. While agrarian populism may offer an important political strategy for building coalitions and framing demands, a closer class analysis points to limits to its transformative potential.

Whether producer cooperatives could serve as a stepping stone leading to socialism is a much debated issue in Marxian scholarship. It has now been recognized that producer cooperatives might possess paradoxical potentials of promoting egalitarian economy and democratic management whilst at the same time constructing class hierarchies. So far, agrarian scholars have already identified how pre-existing social differentiation facilitated privileged members to exploit the marginal non-members. However, they have not explored how members exercise their agency in challenging the class division. In summer 2013, at the height of China's cooperatization movement, I embarked on a project of “engaged anthropology” to mobilize shrimp farmers in South China to establish a cooperative so as to challenge agribusinesses that squeeze farmers' returns, but members ended up hiring outside labour. However, members tried hard to bridge the hierarchy between investors and workers as well as between managers and labourers in order to expand its membership and build the village's reputation. This paper traces how cooperative members deal with the dilemmas between profit maximization and egalitarian distribution, highlighting the importance of class analysis for a pro-poor cooperative movement.

In the course of my academic research labour bondage after the abolition of slavery has been a recurrent theme in my writings on the colonial past and the postcolonial present. In the context of the globalizing economy, the role of capitalism as a dominant mode of production has been of pivotal importance in the perpetuation of confined labour relations. This argument does not concur with the conventional wisdom that the transition to capitalism was the start of an emancipatory trend for labour. Expressed in the liberation from extra-economic coercion, the trope of a double freedom contends that the working poor although dispossessed from means of production were at least free now to sell their labour power. The gradual reversal taking place is addressed in what became known as the social question, which led to an improvement in the terms of employment and social security. This article is concerned with aspects of sourcing coolies wide and far and confined labour relations in Asia from colonialism until today. It traces the radically different trajectories of labour and welfare in the Global North and South and argues that cooliehood is directly linked to capitalism and its globalization.

The paper is concerned with the contemporary relevance of caste to agrarian capitalism and the relations of dependency and allegiance it fosters in a village of Andhra Pradesh. It deploys the method of village study to examine the two-way interaction between agrarian class and caste relations and the emerging rural-based informal nonfarm economy. It elaborates the continuation of relations of debt, dependency, and political allegiance fostered by landlordism despite significant diversification to nonfarm by landlords and labour and identifies the crucial role of land inequality and the working of ritual hierarchy in locking Dalit caste in land-based relations of dependency. The paper highlights the importance of expanding the definition of landlordism as the use of social power for accumulation by embedding it in the motives and values generated by the Hindu social order. While the new wave of literature focuses attention on global capital and commodity chains to understand differentiation of rural population and ruralities, the paper emphasizes the persistent significance of landholding provincial capital in shaping class/caste relations and rural politics and argues for a course correction in thinking about the processes of globalization and new forms of labour control and stresses the continuing significance of the agrarian question.