Akram-Lodhi & Kay - 2010 - Surveying The Agrarian Question - Part 1

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Surveying the agrarian question (part

1): unearthing foundations, exploring
diversity
A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi & Cristóbal Kay
Available online: 22 Jan 2010
To cite this article: A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi & Cristóbal Kay (2010): Surveying the agrarian question
(part 1): unearthing foundations, exploring diversity, Journal of Peasant Studies, 37:1, 177-202
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The Journal of Peasant Studies
Vol. 37, No. 1, January 2010, 177–202
Surveying the agrarian question (part 1): unearthing foundations,

exploring diversity
A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristóbal Kay
This two-part article surveys the origin, development, and current meaning of the
‘agrarian question’. Part one of the survey explores the history of the agrarian
question, elaborating its origin in the work of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin,
and its development in the work of Preobrazhensky, Dobb, Brenner, and others.
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 10:51 03 January 2012
Part two of the survey identifies seven current variants of the agrarian question
and critically interrogates these variants in order to understand whether, and if so,
how, the location of small-scale petty commodity food and farm production
within contemporary capitalism has been reconfigured during the era of
neoliberal globalisation. Together, the two parts of the survey argue that the
agrarian question continues to offer a rigorously flexible framework by which to
undertake a historically-informed and country-specific analysis of the material
conditions governing rural production, reproduction, and the process of agrarian
accumulation or its lack thereof, a process that can now be located within the law
of value and market imperatives that operate on a world scale.
Keywords: agrarian question; agrarian change; rural development; rural
transformation; peasant studies; globalisation
Peasants, capitalism and globalisation

Fifteen years ago Eric Hobsbawm (1994, 289) wrote that ‘the most dramatic and far-
reaching social change of the second half of this (last) century, and the one which
cuts us off for ever from the world of the past, is the death of the peasantry’. While
Hobsbawm was referring to the size of the global peasantry relative to global
population, the underlying reason for this empirical fact is more fundamental: since
the late 1970s capitalism underwent sea changes with critical implications for the
global peasantry. In the past peasants were subordinated to a variety of state forms,
economic systems, and labour regimes. By the time Hobsbawm was writing the
state forms, economic systems and labour regimes that subordinated peasants had
become incorporated into global circuits of production, trade, and finance as
historically unprecedented processes of concentration and centralisation of capital
Preliminary versions of this article were presented to the XVth World Economic History
Congress, Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands, August 2009 and the International
Conference on the Global Food Crisis, Universidad Autonóma de Zacatecas, Zacatecas,
Mexico, August 2009. Our thanks to Eric Vanhaute, Cormac Ó Gráda, Henry Veltmeyer, and
Jun Borras. We also acknowledge the contribution made by two anonymous reviewers, who
must be commended for the diligence with which they worked: they have significantly
improved the article.
ISSN 0306-6150 print/ISSN 1743-9361 online

Ó 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/03066150903498838
http://www.informaworld.com
178 A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristóbal Kay
on a world-scale took place. These phenomena have become generally known as

‘globalisation’.1
In agriculture capital has reorganised the social and technical arrangements
governing farming on a world-scale. Under the aegis of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, almost three decades of structural adjustment in
developing capitalist countries as well as the collapse of the central planned
economies led to the dismantling of a panoply of trade, investment and financial
restrictions. This allowed global agro-food transnational capital, working in close
collaboration with states rendered compliant by the rules of the World Trade
Organization and its predecessor, to intensify the integration of developing capitalist
countries into the ‘temperate grain-livestock complex’ (Weis 2007) established at the
beginning of the twentieth century. But this corporate food regime (McMichael
2009) has been constructed on a dramatic social and distributional contradiction:
world supplies of agricultural commodities are more than sufficient to meet global
food demand, but the numbers of those living in varying degrees of calorie and
protein insecurity and chronic hunger in the world’s towns and countryside is, at
more than one billion, historically unprecedented. The establishment of the
dominance of capital over world agriculture has thus produced a systemic global
agrarian crisis, in which underconsumption collides with overconsumption and in
which overproduction calibrates with underproduction. So, in a world of the ‘stuffed
and starved’ (Patel 2007) three-quarters of the world’s poorest people live in the
countryside and face a systemic livelihoods crisis (International Fund for
Agricultural Development 2001, Food and Agriculture Organization 2008, Interna-
tional Food Policy Research Institute 2007, Weis 2007). The global food crisis that
erupted in 2008 has only starkly revealed an underlying reality that was already there
(Bello 2009, Thurow and Kilman 2009, Johnston 2010).
The dynamics of globalisation and the intensifying systemic crisis in the
countryside means that our depiction of the world’s peasants cannot remain rooted
in the approaches developed over the past five decades. The peasantry has been
understood in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most classic analysis of the
characteristics of the peasantry is that of Wolf (1966), but the two editions of
Peasants and Peasant Societies (1971, 1988), edited by Shanin, offered a number of
ways of conceptualising peasants, and Ellis (1993) offered a clear exposition of the
economic characteristics of the peasantry. From these and others, ‘peasant studies’
has explored the life and times of female and male agricultural workers whose
livelihoods are primarily but not exclusively based on having access to land that is
either owned or rented, who have diminutive amounts of basic tools and equipment,
and who use mostly their own labour and the labour of other family members to
work that land. So, allocating small stocks of both capital and labour contemporary
peasants are ‘petty commodity producers’, operating as both petty capitalists of little
consequence and as workers with little power over the terms and conditions of their
employment (Bernstein 1991, Gibbon and Neocosmos 1985). Trying to do both,
within an often contradictory set of social and economic conditions, brought with it
a set of challenges; while most survived, and many resiliently and indeed defiantly
held onto their agrarian culture within myriad different agricultural histories, they
did not prosper.
1
Critical overviews of globalisation are provided by Hirst and Thompson (1996), Weiss (1997),
and Chernomas and Sepehri (2005).
The Journal of Peasant Studies 179
Globally, this picture has become somewhat much fuzzier, particularly because
systemic crisis in the countryside means that for many an exclusive emphasis on
farming is not an adequate survival strategy because it does not produce a
rudimentarily secure livelihood or even sufficient household food supplies (Bernstein
2009, World Bank 2007). It is now more common for rural livelihoods to be
constructed from a plethora of fragmentary and insecure sources: petty commodity
production in farming, to be sure; but also the sale of temporary and casualised
waged labour, both on and off-farm; as well as petty commodity handicraft
manufacture, petty merchant trading, the provision of petty services, and a reliance
on remittances arising from migration (Kay 2008a). The relationship of peasants to
product and labour markets has also changed: while markets continue to be
structured by the operation of personalised sets of social relations, and are thus
bearers of power and privilege, their importance to petty commodity producer
survival strategies has increased immensely. With rural livelihoods in the twenty-first
century being constructed on such a vulnerable terrain, could it be, as Henry

Bernstein says, that ‘much is obscured by characterizing social formations in the
South today as peasant societies, or contemporary classes of petty-commodity
producing small farmers as peasants’ (Bernstein 2009, 249). Does it make sense to
speak of peasants, or have they, in the early years of this century, become a
‘historical anachronism, unable to survive the dynamics of the capitalist develop-
ment of agriculture’ (Veltmeyer 2006, 445) on a world-scale?
These suggestions make it clear that there are a range of alternative viewpoints
about the place and relevance of petty commodity producing peasants in capitalist
development in the early twenty-first century. In this light, this two-part article will
survey the trajectory of the historical materialist analytical framework as it has been
used, over time, to grasp the place of farming and agriculture in emergent and
mature capitalist societies, an analytical framework that was first identified more
than 100 years ago and which is known, in the political economy literature, as the
‘agrarian question’. The best previous survey of the agrarian question is now more
than a decade and a half old, and predates discussions of globalisation (Bernstein
1994). This survey is therefore undertaken in order to ask whether, and if so, how,
the location of small-scale petty commodity production within contemporary
capitalism has been reconfigured; whether we have seen, in Hobsbawm’s words, ‘the
death of the peasantry’?2 So, although framed as a survey, the article offers an
analysis of the place of small-scale petty commodity producing peasant farming and
rural labour in contemporary developing capitalist countries under the sway of
globalising capital and the ongoing expansion of capitalism in agriculture. In so
doing, the article develops ideas in Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2009).
More than a century ago Karl Kautsky succinctly defined the agrarian question
as being ‘whether, and how, capital is seizing hold of agriculture, revolutionising it,
making old forms of production and property untenable and creating the necessity
for new ones’ (Kautsky 1988, 12, orig. 1899). Just over a decade ago Terence J. Byres
(1996, 26) elaborated Kautsky’s definition by identifying the agrarian question as
‘the continued existence in the countryside, in a substantive sense, of obstacles to an
unleashing of accumulation in both the countryside itself and more generally – in
2
Hobsbawm’s (1994, 289) obituary has been challenged by Otero (1999), Bryceson et al.
(2000), Bernstein (2000), Watts (2002), Johnson (2004), McMichael (2006a, 2006b), and Kay
(2008b).
particular, the accumulation associated with capitalist industrialization’. Clearly, as

an analytical framework concerned with capitalist transformation and capital
accumulation in farming and agriculture the agrarian question must be located
within the specifics of the world-historical context within which it is asked, whether
that be the period of imperialism or the period of globalisation. These contexts are
predicated on a specific configuration of the development of the forces and
relations of production on a global scale, and these configurations have
implications for the prospects of capitalist transformation and capital accumula-
tion within the rural economy and beyond. Indeed, this is the heart of
Hobsbawm’s assertion: if the tendency is for capital and capital accumulation to
be increasingly internationalised, does small-scale petty commodity producing
peasant farming continue to have a possible role in the emergence of capital within
agriculture and the prospects for capitalist accumulation within states, or is it, in
the current international economic conjuncture, marginal to capital and capitalism
in an era of globalisation?
This survey argues that agriculture continues to be relevant for capital and
capitalism in an era of neoliberal globalisation. It argues that small-scale petty
commodity producing peasant farming still has a role in the emergence of capital in
the agriculture of some social formations, and argues that agriculture still has an
impact on the prospects for capitalist accumulation within states and globally. But
the article also argues that this is not the fate of many small-scale petty commodity
producing peasant farmers who, other than partially supporting the reserve army of
labour and in so doing mitigating a degree of its social explosiveness, have been
rendered redundant to the needs of capital, and are increasingly dumped into rural
and urban slums. Having said that, though, how these former peasants resist the
logic and imperatives of their marginalisation is of central importance in
understanding the prospects for capitalist accumulation and anti-systemic move-
ments on a world-scale. In these ways, then, the concerns of the agrarian question, a
problematic that offers a remarkably flexible, subtle, and nuanced analysis of the
modes and mechanisms of agrarian change, has returned with a vengeance as
capitalism enters a new phase in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis.
The treatment that is offered in this survey is conceptual and analytical. Space
prevents the detailed presentation of the ample theoretical and empirical evidence
that can be used to substantiate the arguments put forth. But theoretically we draw
heavily upon the arguments presented in Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2009), while
country-based empirical evidence that supports our positions can be found in our
earlier work (Akram-Lodhi et al. 2008) and in Borras et al. (2008), Rosset et al.
(2006), Moyo and Yeros (2005), de Janvry et al. (2001), Bryceson et al. (2000), as
well as some of the background papers for World Bank (2007), amongst others.
The origin of the agrarian question: Marx and rural change

Political economy has been concerned with the place of agriculture since the time of
the Physiocrats (Hunt 1979); Quesnay in particular presented a treatment of the role
of agriculture in structural transformation. But a specifically agrarian political
economy originated with Marx’s analysis of the genesis of capitalism, and the
processes by which its core characteristics came to be established: being a system that
is on the one hand exploitative and inhumane in its construction of the differential
material interests of capital and labour; while being at the same time a system that is,
because of its capacity to develop the material forces of production, a necessary

precondition of a more economically prosperous and socially humane society.
As is well known, for Marx the possibility of transcending capitalism lay in the
hands of the class that it created: only the proletariat, a class free from the ownership
of the means of production and free to sell its labour-power, was capable of
eradicating class society and ending exploitation. This then was the starting point for
Marx’s analysis of the agrarian question: if small-scale peasant producers combined
elements of being petty capitalists and labour, how could the complete development
of the capitalist mode of production, and the concomitant creation of a working
class, take place? Marx’s answer was to carefully consider the relationship between
small-scale pre-capitalist peasant farming, petty commodity production, and the
emergence of agrarian capital. This was evident as early as the Grundrisse (Marx
1973, orig. 1939–1941), which elaborates a variety of ways in which transitions from
pre-capitalism to capitalism occur.
In the Grundrisse small-scale pre-capitalist peasant farming often appears in the

guise sketched out in many of Marx’s writings over a 30-year period, including his
famous journalism on India (Marx 1977, orig. 1852 and 1853), in which the peasantry
is essentially seen as being, for lack of a better phrase, a pre-capitalist remnant that
will be dragged into modernity by the capitalist mode of production. He could be
brutal in his judgment of this kind of peasant society, but this was, in part, because of
its implications for the establishment of capitalism, a historically progressive force:
‘agricultural smallholding, by its very nature, rules out the development of the
productive powers of social labour’ (Marx 1981, 943, orig. 1894) and thereby impedes
the development of capitalism.3 This perspective – that Marx viewed the small-scale
pre-capitalist peasantry as an impediment to the full fruition of the capitalist mode of
production – is very widely held. It is also, in our view, not wholly accurate.
Marx’s most fully developed analysis of the development of capitalism in
agriculture is that which he worked out later in his life and which was published in
the first volume of Capital (Marx 1976, orig. 1867). Bernstein (2006, 449) reminds us
that here the class basis of the emergence of capitalist farming within England was
explored, through the use of the concept of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, which
is used to explain how capital initially comes into existence. There, Marx wrote that
all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in course of
formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are
suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-
market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the
agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process. The
history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs
through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical
epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic
form. (Marx 1976, 876)
In Marx’s ‘classic’ example, which came, in many ways, to be seen as a sui

generis, serfdom in England had all but disappeared by the end of the fourteenth
3
Furthermore, as Marx (1971, orig. 1852, 230) characterised the French peasantry at the time:
‘Their field of production, the small-holding, admits of no division of labour in its cultivation,
no application of science and, therefore, no diversity of development, no variety of talent, no
wealth of social relationships.’
century. Feudal lords remained, but their ‘might . . . depended . . . on the number of
peasant proprietors’ (Marx 1976, 878). These were the free, and comparatively
prosperous, pre-capitalist yeoman peasant farmers that owned their land and
cultivated it with their own labour, but whose social and material reproduction relied
heavily upon access to common lands. At the start of the sixteenth century feudal
landlords began ‘forcibly driving the peasantry from the land’ as well as the coercive
‘usurpation of common lands’ (1976, 878). ‘So-called primitive accumulation . . . is
nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of
production’ creating a class of workers that are free (or ‘released’) from the means of
production and free (and compelled) to sell their labour-power (1976, 874).
Primitive accumulation in England used dispossessory enclosures by predatory
feudal landlords, later supported by the state, to reconfigure the relations of
production in order to physically expel a prosperous yeomanry from the land and
create a propertyless class of rural waged labour that faced a class of capitalist
tenant-farmers, beneath the dominant landlord class (Tribe 1981, Byres 2009).
Primitive accumulation is in this sense not accumulation at all, but rather the
conversion of the pre-capitalist means of production into capital and the consequent
establishment of the capital-labour relation.
For many readers of Marx it appears that the outcome of the introduction of
capitalist relations of production into agriculture must inevitably be the emergence
of agrarian capital and agrarian wage labour. But note the critical provisions that
Marx has made in the above quote: ‘the history of this expropriation assumes
different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in
different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs’ (Marx 1976, 876).
Here and elsewhere Marx argued that there could be multiple and differential ways
by which a set of capitalist social relations of production could be established or
consolidated in agriculture.
This is to be expected because the establishment or consolidation of capitalist
relations of production in agriculture was not an event but a complex and
contradictory tendential process. As he noted, ‘the entry of capital into agriculture as
an independent and leading power does not take place everywhere all at once, but
rather gradually and in particular branches of production’ (Marx 1981, 937). While
‘supremacy and subordination in the process of production supplant an earlier state
of independence’ (Marx 1976, 1028–9, emphasis in original), ‘capital subsumes the
labour process as it finds it’ (Marx 1976, 1021). So the modes and mechanisms by
which capital subsumes labour in the establishment of the capitalist mode of
production can produce ‘certain hybrid forms, in which although surplus labour is
not extorted by direct compulsion from the producer, the producer has not yet
become formally subordinate to capital’ (Marx 1976, 645). Thus while peasants may
be dispossessed as capitalism develops, capital can also subsume peasant labour
through hybrid forms that consolidate the peasantry. The peasantry would
outwardly appear unchanged even as capital produced a fundamental transforma-
tion in its social characteristics: there would be an ephemeral yet substantive
separation of means of production and labour within the peasant farm. Indeed, this
is what establishes small-scale pre-capitalist peasant farms as small-scale petty
commodity producers under capitalism (Gibbon and Neocosmos 1985, Bernstein
1991).
The transformation of the social characteristics of the peasantry belies their
apparent resilience in the face of capitalism. Peasants survive; but their poverty is
created because of coping mechanisms that are employed by petty commodity

producers under capitalism:
the smallholding peasant’s exploitation is not limited by the average profit on capital, in
as much as he is a small capitalist; nor by the need for rent, in as much as he is a
landowner. The only absolute barrier he faces as a petty capitalist is the wage that he
pays himself, after deducting his actual expenses . . . and he often does so down to a
physical minimum. (Marx 1981, 941–2)
So ‘smallholding and petty landownership . . . production . . . proceeds without

being governed by the general rate of profit’ (Marx 1981, 946), which can foster
tendencies toward peasant class differentiation as
the custom necessarily develops, among the better-off rent paying peasants, of exploiting
agricultural wage-labourers on their own account . . . In this way it gradually becomes
possible for them to build up a certain degree of wealth and transform themselves into
future capitalists. Among the old possessors of the land, working for themselves, there
arises a seed-bed for the nurturing of capitalist farmers, whose development is
conditioned by the development of capitalist production. (Marx 1981, 935)
So Marx recognised that processes of capitalist development in agriculture can create

both ‘peasant dispossession by displacement’, or enclosure, and ‘peasant disposses-
sion by differentiation’ (Araghi 2009, 118, Akram-Lodhi 2007), which is driven by
the market imperatives of capitalism to exploit labour, improve productivity, and cut
the costs of production (Wood 2009).
In this light a letter Marx composed in 1881 appears somewhat less remarkable
than that which is sometimes claimed (Shanin 1983). Rather, the four drafts and final
text of the letter to Vera Zasulich resemble The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte (Marx 1967, orig. 1852), demonstrating how Marx applied his materialist
political economy to the analysis of the messy and complex set of social and
economic conditions governing the possible fate of the Russian peasantry (Marx
1983, orig. 1925). The context is clear: a formally independent but internationally
weak state, with a dominant small-scale peasant population, which was nonetheless
rapidly industrialising under the auspices of an interventionist state, and with
industry under the control of the state or non-Russians. It is, in many ways, a
remarkably contemporary setting,4 made all the more so because Marx situates the
fate of the Russian peasantry within the context of global economic processes: the
Russian commune was ‘linked to a world market in which capitalist production is
predominant’ (Marx 1983, 102). He stresses the specificity of the economic structure:
a ‘type of capitalism fostered by the state at the peasant’s expense’ (Marx 1983, 104).
In so doing, Marx argues that in this setting the Russian commune was not
threatened by the irresistible economic logic of the capital-labour relation per se but
was rather threatened by oppression by the state and by ‘capitalist intruders whom
the state has made powerful at the peasant’s expense’ (Marx 1983, 105).
So Marx identifies a set of ‘powerful interests’ seeking to subordinate the rural
commune and the peasantry: ‘overburdened by state exactions, fraudulently
exploited by intruding capitalists, merchants, etc., and the landed ‘‘proprietors’’, it
is also being undermined by village usurers’ (Marx 1983, 114). In this muddled
setting, two different resolutions of the agrarian question were identified by Marx as
4
Southeast Asia, and particularly Thailand and Vietnam, spring to mind.
being possible. The first would see the dominant class coalition – the ‘new pillars of
society’ – largely eliminate the peasantry, converting them ‘into wage-labourers’ or,
for a small number, into ‘a rural middle class’ (Marx 1983, 116), thus completing the
transition to a fully capitalist mode of production.
The second resolution of the agrarian question in the letter to Zasulich would see
the agricultural commune gradually transforming itself into ‘an element of collective
production on a national scale’ (Marx 1983, 106). This could occur, according to
Marx, because of the corporate specificities of the commune. These specificities
included the fact that membership of the commune was not based on kinship, that all
members of the commune received a private house and garden, and that the arable
land itself had never been private property but was allocated and reallocated to
individuals that were allowed to individually appropriate the product of the land for
their own subsistence (Marx 1983, 108). This ‘dualism’ (Marx 1983, 104), according
to Marx, gave the commune a set of social relations that articulated the positive and
progressive features of capitalism with a set of features derived from an archaic but
historically adaptable structure. It was clearly an example of a ‘hybrid form’:
subordinate to an emerging capitalist mode of production that was not yet supreme
(Marx 1976, 1027), yet with social relations that opened up the possibility that the
commune could ‘reap the fruits with which capitalist production has enriched
humanity without passing through the capitalist regime’ (Marx 1983, 112).
But in order for the second path of transition to take place, the collective
tendencies within the commune would have to gain a dominant logic over private
interests, and this required, in turn, a working class revolution that succeeded in
creating a countervailing social force to the anti-commune compulsions fostered by
emergent capital. Moreover, Marx hypothesised that following such a revolution new
technologies could also be introduced to sustain the position of small-scale peasant
farming. Finally, the deepening of democratic processes arising out of the revolution
would be essential to the survival of the commune. Thus, Marx argues in the letter, ‘to
save the Russian commune there must be a Russian revolution’ (Marx 1983, 116).
This letter is more than a historical footnote. It shows that multiple resolutions of
the agrarian question facing small-scale petty commodity producing peasants
located and operating within a dominant world capitalist economy were both
possible and consistent with Marx’s underlying logic. Indeed, Marx writes repeatedly
in the drafts of the letter that the analysis of Capital is ‘expressly restricted to the
countries of Western Europe’ (Marx 1983, 117) and that it is wrong to place all
agrarian transformations ‘on the same plane’ (Marx 1983, 107, fn. c). This
intellectual flexibility within a rigorously demanding theoretical framework, this
willingness to confront diverse material circumstances and existing social relations;
these are possibly the most important analytical legacies that should be borne in
mind when contemplating the contemporary salience of the agrarian question. For,
as Marx writes in the letter, the agrarian commune’s ‘innate dualism admits of an
alternative: either its property element will gain the upper hand over its collective
element; or else the reverse will take place. Everything depends upon the historical
context in which it is located’ (Marx 1983, 120–1).
Engels and the politics of the agrarian question

Marx’s letter to Zasulich voiced a strong sense that collective political agency could
transcend the structural processes underpinning the agrarian question. A decade and
a half later Friedrich Engels turned his attention to this. In The Peasant Question in
France and Germany, Engels (1950, 381, orig. 1894) argued that ‘from Ireland to
Sicily, from Andalusia to Russia, and Bulgaria, the peasant is a very essential factor
of population, production and political power’. However, ‘the development of the
capitalist form of production has cut the life-strings of small production in
agriculture; small production is irretrievably going to rack and ruin’ (Engels 1950,
382). The reason was that European farm production in general, whether produced
by big landowners or small peasants, was unable to compete with cheap grain
produced outside Europe as a consequence of the opening of vast new agricultural
frontiers in the Americas, Australia, and Southern Africa. This was leading to the
slow dissolution of the peasantry; unable to compete, they were becoming
dispossessed from the land. Only in England and in Prussia east of the Elbe was
this not taking place, because these places witnessed ‘big, landed estates and large-
scale agriculture’ (Engels 1950, 381) – capitalism in agriculture was already well
established.
It was therefore necessary, according to Engels, that the European peasantry
adopt a political response to this emergent agrarian crisis. However, ‘the doomed
peasant (was) in the hands of his false protectors’ – big landowners that ‘assume the
role of champions of the interests of the small peasants’ (Engels 1950, 382). The
political party of the urban working class, which had a ‘clear insight into the
interconnections between economic causes and political effects’, therefore had to
become a ‘power in the countryside’ (1950, 382) by adopting a programme that
reflected the political needs of the peasantry and, in so doing, forming an alliance
with the peasantry. That was the road, argued Engels, to political power, in both the
town and the country.
Engels’ emphasis was thus clearly on the political implications of the agrarian
question – that, in a sense, the emerging internationalisation of the food system as a
result of imperialism5 was undermining peasant livelihoods in Europe, and that the
agrarian question was thus an agrarian question for and about labour and the
expression of its agency. His concern was not with the issue of the emergence of
agrarian capital, rural capital accumulation, or capital more generally, as had been
Marx’s central concern. These broader, more structural, concerns were raised,
though, later in the same decade by Karl Kautsky and Vladimir Lenin.
Kautsky and Lenin: the ‘classic’ agrarian question

In the late 1890s Karl Kautsky was the most famous Marxist in the world; Vladimir
Lenin would only later don this mantle. Both men, viewing capitalism as being a
simultaneously progressive and dispossessive system, paid close political and
intellectual attention to the relationship between peasant life and the transforma-
tions wrought by the consolidation of capitalist relations of production in the
societies in which they lived, including the consolidation of capitalist relations of
production in agriculture, using careful empirical analysis to understand tendencies
and processes of agrarian change.
5
For materialist analyses of the emergence of the global food system, see Friedmann (1993),
Bonnano et al. (1994), McMichael (1994), Goodman and Watts (1997), Davis (2001), Weis
(2007), and Watts (2009).
Capitalist industrialisation and agriculture

For both Kautsky and Lenin the force behind the rural transformation described by
Engels, including its political implications, was, as in Marx, the processes facilitating
the generalised emergence of capital, and hence the capital-labour relation necessary
for the production of surplus value. For example, Lenin (1964, orig. 1899) took it as
a given that from the 1880s Russia had been undergoing a tendential process of
capitalist industrialisation, which had eroded the basis of the peasant economy,
albeit incompletely and unevenly, and had revolutionised property relations,
spurring the predominance of private property. The rise of capitalist industrialisa-
tion in Russia was breaking the interrelationship of rural agriculture and rural petty
manufacturing and was increasingly commodifying agricultural production. It had
broken down pre-capitalist labour regimes in town and country as the need for a
waged labour force had emerged. Finally, capitalist industrialisation was introducing
new, productivity-enhancing techniques and technologies into agriculture and the

rural economy. Together, incipient capitalist industrialisation propelled, as a
necessary if not sufficient condition, the corresponding establishment of agrarian
capital. So, for Lenin, as well as for Kautsky, it was the process by which agrarian
capital was established which lay at the heart of their classically-construed agrarian
question.
Developing some of the insights of Marx, the establishment of agrarian capital
began, according to Kautsky and Lenin, with the expanding and deepening use of
manufactures in rural society. Rural areas had always produced a range of their own
simple manufactures, to meet the needs of the peasantry, as well as importing small
measures of urban manufactures. What changed with the establishment of capitalist
relations of production in industrial manufacturing was that capitalist manufactures
became cheaper than manufactures produced under pre-capitalist conditions,
because capitalist manufactures were subject to market imperatives that necessitated
productivity improvements and cost reductions (Akram-Lodhi forthcoming). Then,
as Kautsky understood, as the expanded insinuation of capitalist commodity
manufactures into the rural economy proceeded, a need for money would be
created. As a consequence, the commoditisation of agricultural production, often
initially a staple food for the urban population and the manufacturing producers,
would occur.
Specialisation and social differentiation

As commodity production for agricultural markets expanded the disciplines of
capitalist competition were introduced into rural society. In particular, as more was
produced to be sold, the need to sell to survive deepened. The compulsion to sell
resulted in increasing specialisation in agricultural commodity production as a
means of controlling costs, which further heightened dependence upon the market
even as those producers that sought to sustain their market competitiveness found
that markets could provide the basis of agrarian accumulation if the principles of
capitalism were followed: expansion, innovation, and a lowering of unit costs
through scale economies.
Those peasants unable or unwilling to successfully compete in markets found
that attempts to use markets to sustain or increase consumption while not being
able to be competitive in product markets generated cash deficits which were only
reinforced by the distress sales of output and the accrual of debt. In order to meet
the costs of increasing market dependence deficit households would therefore
increasingly engage in waged labour, which was performed both for the more
dynamic agrarian producers and for industrial capital. So, as agricultural
commodity production expanded, peasants became subordinated to product and
labour markets even as some producers, capable of sustaining agrarian accumula-
tion, produced for the purpose of accumulation. The result: as Marx had indicated,
the slow emergence of qualitatively distinct types of rural holdings which differed
in their purpose of production. One group produced for markets and for accumu-
lation, while the other strove to maintain subsistence in increasingly difficult
circumstances.
Accumulating peasant households sought to increase their control over
productive assets in order to give a further impetus to accumulation. Deficit peasant
households were forced to liquidate their assets by selling them to more dynamic
producers, in order to be able to cope. So a change in the distribution of productive

assets – both means of production and labour-power – took place. Petty commodity
production was torn asunder, with peasants being socially and materially
transformed into part of the labour force and providing the home market needed
by the accumulating peasants. In turn, accumulating peasants had relatively higher
incomes which, by contributing to the creation of a home market, spurred capital
formation and accumulation as a whole. Moreover, as peasant accumulation
proceeded the social and material conditions of petty commodity production were
transformed as they slowly became proto-capitalist and fully capitalist employers of
not only themselves and their households but, crucially, waged labour.
Thus, in the genesis of agrarian capitalism changes in social relations emerging
out of a dynamic reconfiguration of access to and control over productive assets gave
rise to changes in the structure of economic processes and rural transformation.
Eventually, pre-capitalist property relations and labour processes were subordinated
and integrated into capitalism (Brenner 1977).
The process of rural transformation

Both Kautsky and Lenin did not propose that rural transformation was subject to
the inevitability of what today would be called ‘path-dependence’; that is to say, self-
reinforcing processes. Lenin and Kautsky wrote at a time of intensifying capitalist
change and increasing imperial and international trade, of which they were aware,
and which was not confined to industrial capitalism but which extended into
agriculture. Indeed, as Michael Watts (2002) has cogently reminded us, Kautsky was
explicitly aware that at the end of the nineteenth century intense international
competition in an increasingly integrated world market in farm products had been
facilitated not only by the expansion of the global agricultural frontier but also by
improvements in long distance shipping, by changing tastes arising from an ongoing
gastronomic transition, and by supply-constrained national grain production being
unable to match increases in national demand. Thus, Lenin and Kautsky wrote
during the heyday of what has been termed by Harriet Friedmann and Philip
McMichael (1989) the ‘first world food regime’, and the recognition of the impact of
these processes on petty commodity producing peasants and incipient agrarian
capitalists by Kautsky in particular, and Lenin, to a lesser extent, informed their
thinking.
As a consequence, Kautsky in particular, but also Lenin, argued that the

resolution of the agrarian question could take multiple and diverse forms, rooted in
the specific circumstances of particular farming practices, agricultural processes, and
the conditions by which surplus labour was extracted from the direct producer. Like
Marx, Lenin wrote that ‘a theoretical economic analysis can, in general, only deal
with tendencies’ and as such cannot uncover ‘a law for all individual cases’ (Lenin
1964, 111, 117). What Watts (1998, 450) memorably terms ‘recombinant’ agrarian
capital might, in particular circumstances, prefer to sustain a hybrid non-capitalist
rural economy subsumed to capital because of the unique characteristics of
agricultural production – its seasonal and biological aspects and associated risks, as
well as the capacity of family-based petty commodity farm production to, as Marx
had noted, depress real wages by working longer and harder, and in so doing sustain
an ability to compete with agrarian capital that was driven by the market imperative.
In such circumstances, according to Kautsky (1988), agroindustrial capital would
restrict itself to food processing, farm inputs, and rural financial systems, using
science, technology, and money to subsume petty commodity production to the
demands of agroindustrial capital. We suggest that this is a vividly contemporary
picture of some aspects of global rural change.
The variant tendencies of recombinant agrarian capital meant that, for Kautsky,
there were no inevitable ‘laws’ of agrarian development: capitalism does not impose
path-dependence on agriculture. Thus, there was no tendency for the size
distribution of farms to change over time, as might be inferred if capitalist
agriculture overwhelmed petty commodity producing peasant farming. Farms did
not have to be technically efficient in a capitalist sense in order to survive, but petty
commodity producing peasants had to be prepared to work more intensely,
depressing the real return to their family’s labour, in order to sustain competitiveness
with agrarian capital. As a consequence, farms responded to the increased
coerciveness of market relations in the late nineteenth century by altering their
product mix, by incurring debt, and by out-migrating. So the agrarian crisis of the
late nineteenth century that was described by Engels and Kautsky, driven as it was
by a massive increase in the global supply of grain from the new temperate
breadbaskets, and which, as a consequence, witnessed falling grain prices, falling
land rents, and falling profits, was solved by the intensification of rural production
amongst petty commodity producers and by agroindustrial capital taking over some
of the functions previously done within the petty commodity farm sector, in effect
capitalising a range of rural manufacturing processes.
Developing the ideas of Engels, Kautsky also identified a contradiction at the
heart of the first world food regime: that as rural economic activity in general, and
agriculture in particular, assumed a lesser role in the economy over time, the political
importance of rural producers became more important. This was driven by both the
slow extension of the democratic franchise, which gave the still populous rural
economy political importance, and by the integration of an increasingly competitive
global food market. It was the political importance of rural interests that led states to
first develop a structure of import protection for national agricultures capable of
sustaining petty commodity production if peasants, when pitted against capitalist
competition, were prepared to depress their own real earnings in order to survive.
For Kautsky (1988, Ch. 5–8), this did not have to be a transitional phase – this
hybrid form could be sustained over time. So Kautsky was able to link the character
of the agrarian question to the character of the imperialist world market.
Rural class formation

Lenin too did not isolate the processes at work in the countryside from the world
market. Like Kautsky he saw what was happening in rural Russia as being highly
uneven and contingent, processes that had to be explored in all their complexity if
the development of agrarian capital was to be understood. This is perhaps most
clearly demonstrated in Lenin’s (1966) Preliminary Draft Theses on the Agrarian
Question, written in 1920, which suggested that as agrarian capital developed in
Europe rural classes could be identified as emerging from within a petty commodity
producing peasantry undergoing tendential processes of fragmentation and change.
At the apex of the rural class structure were
the big landowners, who, in capitalist countries – directly or through their tenant
farmers – systematically exploit wage-labour and the neighbouring small (and, not
infrequently, part of the middle) peasantry, do not themselves engage in manual labour,
and are in the main descended from feudal lords . . . or are rich financial magnates, or
else a mixture of both. (Lenin 1966, 159)
Below the big landowners came a second stratum of exploiters:

The big peasants (Grossbauern) are capitalist entrepreneurs in agriculture, who as a rule
employ several hired labourers and are connected with the ‘peasantry’ only in their low
cultural level, habits of life, and the manual labour they themselves perform on their
farms. (Lenin 1966, 157, emphasis in original)
Lenin next introduced a strata locked between the clear exploiters and the clearly
exploited when he wrote that
in an economic sense, one should understand by ‘middle peasants’ those farmers who, 1)
either as owners or tenants hold plots of land that are also small but, under capitalism,
are sufficient not only to provide, as a general rule, a meagre subsistence for the family
and the bare minimum needed to maintain the farm, but also produce a certain surplus
which may, in good years at least, be converted into capital; 2) quite frequently . . .
resort to the employment of hired labour. (Lenin 1966, 156)
Amongst the clearly exploited, Lenin defined three strata. First, there were ‘the small
peasantry, i.e. the small-scale tillers who, either as owners or as tenants, hold small
plots of land which enable them to satisfy the needs of their families and their farms,
and do not hire outside labour’ (Lenin 1966, 154). Second, there were
the semi-proletarians or peasants who till tiny plots of land, i.e. those who obtain their
livelihood partly as wage-labourers . . . and partly by working their own or rented plots
of land, which provide their families only with part of their means of subsistence. (Lenin
1966, 153)
Finally, there was ‘the agricultural proletariat, wage-labourers (by the year, season
or day), who obtain their livelihood by working for hire at capitalist agricultural
enterprises’ (Lenin 1966, 153).
Analytically, then, Lenin’s understanding of the processes of change embedded
within the agrarian question critically hinged on the emergence of capitalist
exploitation, defined in its strict historical materialist sense as the appropriation by
capital of the surplus value produced by classes of waged labour. So the
commodification of labour was, in these processes, the pivotal event, even if it was
contingent, because under capitalist relations of production it was waged labour that
produced the surplus value that could serve as the basis of rural capital
accumulation. Of course, in order for surplus value to be appropriated from labour
it had to be free in Marx’s ‘dual sense’ noted earlier: free to sell labour-power, and
free from the means of production. Thus, the emergence of agrarian capital and its
corollary, agrarian labour, required a set of interlocking processes by which landed
estates were transformed, at least to some degree, into capitalist farms and petty
commodity producing peasants were also transformed, at least to some degree, into
waged labour.
Lenin identified several mechanisms which might serve to facilitate the emergence
of agrarian capital by enhancing either the relative or the absolute amount of surplus
labour that was being extracted from the direct producer by the dominant class, and
in turn promote accumulation. Three of these mechanisms can be mentioned,
because of their continuing contemporary relevance: scale economies, changes in
tenancy relations, and debt.
Scale versus size

With regard to the first, scale economies in agriculture are seen when there are
reductions in the average cost of farm products as production per farmer expands
over time because of the adoption of technical changes such as mechanisation.
Kautsky and Lenin argued that scale economies in agriculture enhanced relative
surplus labour extraction, and thus were a necessary part of the capitalisation of
farming.6 But Kautsky also crucially distinguished between a concentration in the
scale of production permitted by an increase in the ownership of the total means of
production and increases in the size of the physical units of production in order to
capture the differences in farm asset ownership, cropping patterns, technology,
production, sales, debt, and migration, differences that would be witnessed in the
development of agrarian capital. As Lenin wrote in this regard,
if the land is not being improved, acreage gives no idea at all of the scale of agricultural
operations; it gives no correct idea at all if besides this there are so many substantial
differences between farms in the method of cultivation, the intensity of agriculture, the
method of field cropping, quantities of fertilizers, the use of machinery, the character of
livestock farming, etc. (Lenin 1964, 68, emphasis in original)
A similar understanding of the dynamics of agrarian change allowed Kautsky to

state that ‘a small holding cultivated on an intensive basis can constitute a larger
enterprise than a bigger farm that is exploited extensively’ (Banaji 1980, 75).
These differences in petty commodity producing farms emerged as a result of the
extent to which markets governed peasant behaviour. The compulsions of market
6
The comparative merits of small- versus large-scale agricultural production or peasant versus
capitalist agriculture were intensely debated by Kautsky and other members of the German
Social Democratic party at the turn of the nineteenth century, and are discussed in Hussain
and Tribe (1984). This remains an ongoing debate of great importance; recent contributions
include Griffin et al. (2002, 2004), Byres (2004a, 2004b), and others. The World Bank (2007)
has re-entered this debate, arguing about the advantages of large-scale farming in an era of
neoliberal globalisation (Akram-Lodhi 2008, Oya 2009). Our own position is that the technical
conditions governing farm production can only be understood when set within the social
relations of production.
dependence propelled both investment and the establishment of a more effective,

more capitalist, division of labour if petty commodity producing peasant farms
sought to survive. This in turn permitted the reaping of scale economies at the level
of the production process, the household, and the farm, and engendered the
emergence of dynamic and efficient units capable of accumulation. These differences
could not be captured by examining the size of the unit of production because this
neglected the increased use of technology per unit of land and thus the technical
coefficients of production.
For Kautsky and Lenin peasant farms used different technical coefficients of
production when they differed in the purpose of production. Yet even uncovering the
technical coefficients of production could be difficult, as ‘in agriculture, because
relationships are so much more complicated and intertwined, it is harder to determine
the scale of operations, the value of the product and the extent to which hired labour
is employed’ (Lenin 1964, 65–6). It was apparent to both Lenin and Kautsky that the
larger the size of farm, the more that had to be produced in order to cover costs and
obtain a given level of income. This did not mean, however, that smaller-sized peasant
farms were necessarily more profitable. As Marx had suggested, peasants on small-
sized farms which were also small in scale would be pushed by subsistence to work
harder in order to survive while remaining mired in poverty. As Kautsky memorably
wrote, for small-scale small-size peasant farmers ‘the profit did not mean his barns
were full; it meant their stomachs were empty’ (Banaji 1980, 70).
While the utilisation of scale economies in agriculture required stricter conditions
than in industry, Kautsky and Lenin argued that diminishing returns to non-fixed
farm inputs such as labour-power, fertilizer and pesticides, and tools and equipment,
would in practice not apply because technological change and the extension of
techniques meant that the productivity of both investment and of land would not
decline. This was so not only for large-sized large-scale holdings, where the potential
for technical change was great; Lenin also argued that the productivity gains typical
of a mature capitalist agriculture might lead to an absolute decrease in the size of the
capitalist farms, as output growth could permit the leasing out of unneeded low
productivity land. The argument that large-scale holdings did not necessarily require
large amounts of land led both Kautsky and Lenin to suggest that the emergence of
agrarian capital did not have to solely rely on out and out dispossession of petty
commodity producing peasants. Small and semi-proletarian peasants could margin-
ally survive alongside and subsumed to agrarian capital.
Tenancy and debt

Another mechanism of rural transformation could be changes in the forms of
holding land. Lenin argued that agrarian peasant class differentiation might take the
form of a decline in mortgage and a rise in tenancy. As Lenin wrote, ‘the class
interests of the landowners compel them to strive to allot land to the workers’ (Lenin
1964, 137). This might be done by large-scale enterprises leasing out unneeded land
in order to obviate labour shortages during peak periods: a hybrid form indeed. In
addition, as differentiation led to concentration in the ownership and control of the
means of production small plots might fetch high prices and high rents for the
landowners; but ‘the higher price of small plots of land is not due to the superiority
of small-scale farming, but to the particularly oppressed condition of the peasant’
(Lenin 1964, 138).
Kautsky and Lenin also argued that another mechanism of rural transformation
and the emergence of agrarian capital was debt. Lenin wrote that the types of debt
incurred by the poorer and by the richer petty commodity producing peasants was
different. Small and semi-proletarian peasants became dependent upon the market
over time to maintain subsistence. Although they consumed relatively less than big
peasants, poorer peasants spent relatively more on basic wage goods, and debt
typically ensued if they lacked cash to meet these needs. Given the tenuous economic
position of small and semi-proletarian peasants it was not surprising that Lenin
argued that a larger proportion of small-scale farmers were indebted. Big peasants,
on the other hand, were both less dependent on the market for basic wage goods and
more dependent on the market to supply production-oriented goods. The bulk of
their cash expenditure went on the latter. From their more secure financial position
big peasants were more easily able to secure credit for large investments. As a result,
while a lower proportion of large-scale farmers were indebted, those farms held a
much larger mass of total debt. The emergence of agrarian capital thus gave rise to
different types of debt; one was a sign of precariousness, the other increasing
consolidation and capitalisation.
As this discussion makes clear, both Kautsky and Lenin had a thorough, subtle,
and nuanced understanding of the agrarian question and the modes and mechanisms
of its possible resolution. Both offered an analysis capable of uncovering significant
differences in processes of change in particular contexts, and thus substantive
diversity amongst individual cases, rooted in historically-embedded routes of social
and economic transformation. As we have tried to stress, this is a consistent strand
of agrarian political economy from the time of Marx, who ‘returned repeatedly to
the recombinant ways in which agrarian capitalisms developed (within the ‘‘swamp’’
of pre-capitalist labour relations)’ (Watts 2002, 32).
Primitive socialist accumulation

Kautsky and Lenin’s analysis of the agrarian question was hugely influential in the
politics and practice of revolutionary political parties in Europe prior to World War I.
But during the first quarter of the twentieth century the conceptual underpinnings of
the agrarian question evolved within historical materialism primarily as a
consequence of the creation of the Soviet Union, a largely rural and agrarian
country in which the victorious revolutionary party sought to use the state to
transform the entire social and economic order in a direction that was far removed
from the capitalist development that was taking place (Nove 1982). As a result, the
principal concerns of the agrarian question extended beyond the specific issue of the
emergence of agrarian capital and agrarian waged labour and towards more general
issues of the relationship of agriculture to capital accumulation and of the role of the
peasantry in the process of capital accumulation in a society undergoing social
transformation. In broadening the concerns of the agrarian question, new dimensions
of the issues emerged and a wider, more thorough reading of the agrarian question
was established (Hussain and Tribe 1981).
The Soviet Union was seeking to undertake a form of what McMichael (2004)
calls the ‘development project’: the transformation of the structure of societies,
starting with the economy. Economic structural transformation is seen in: changes in
the pattern of employment, with shifts out of agriculture and into manufacturing and
services; changes in agriculture, with shifts away from labour-intensive technical
coefficients of production towards capital-intensive technical coefficients of produc-

tion; changes in industry, with shifts away from light manufacturing towards heavy
and knowledge-intensive manufacturing; and demand, with increasing shares of
production being destined to meet domestic consumption and investment require-
ments.
This kind of structural transformation needs resources: physical, financial, and
human resources, and in the early stages of economic development these can rarely
be met solely from outside a country, as aid or as foreign direct investment, or from
the small capitalist industrial sector that may or may not be present. The need for
resources to facilitate structural transformation was a key constraint for the newly-
established Soviet Union in the 1920s, recovering from the effects of World War I
and a civil conflict.
Agriculture has the capacity to generate resources for structural transformation
because it can produce physical and financial resources beyond its own requirements.
Peasant petty commodity producers have the capacity to produce food and non-food
output and generate financial resources surplus to the immediate consumption and
investment needs of the farm economy. This ‘agricultural surplus’ can provide the
physical, financial, and wage goods needed to undertake the development project.
Moreover, the agricultural surplus can grow as new agricultural techniques and
technologies are introduced into the countryside. By facilitating a process of
accumulation of physical, financial, and wage goods the agricultural surplus can
become the basis of the emergence of capital, both in agriculture and in industry. It
also allows the ‘release’ of labour from agriculture for use in industry as the
capitalisation of agriculture takes place.
That the agricultural surplus has a role in sustaining capital accumulation has
been understood in political economy since before Adam Smith (Dobb 1963), and
this provenance led to it being inserted into the extensive debate that took place in
the Soviet Union between 1924 and 1928 concerning the policies which would
facilitate an economic transition to a socialist mode of production: a structural
transformation of a non-capitalist type. Reassessing his position in light of the
adoption of the market-oriented New Economic Policy in 1921 in the Soviet Union,
Nicolai Bukharin argued that a socialist transformation could only be achieved by
strengthening the political alliance of the peasantry and the working class because of
the agrarian character of the country (Cohen 1974, Nove 1982). Generating the
active consent of the peasantry for the project of socialist development in turn
required improving the livelihoods of the peasantry by creating the commercial
circumstances in which middle and big peasants could and would produce the
agricultural food and non-food surpluses needed for the cities and for industry.
But, as Bukharin was well aware, historical materialist agrarian political
economy demonstrated that this position was one that would encourage the
development of agrarian capital: the sustained production of the agricultural surplus
required a rural transformation of petty commodity producing peasants and the
facilitation of a dynamic, surplus-generating class of proto-capitalist peasant
producers within the countryside. There would be strong tendencies towards the
establishment of relations of exploitation: the extraction of surpluses from the direct
producers through waged labour. Moreover, prior to the establishment of
exploitation agrarian transformation would be constrained by the petty commodity
producing peasantry’s unwillingness to supply surpluses, in favour of increasing their
own consumption. So the attempt to initiate a socialist development project was ripe
with contradictions in the Soviet countryside, and Bukharin believed it would have
to proceed gradually, by increasing balanced trade between agriculture and industry,
in order to deal with those contradictions.
Evgeny Preobrazhensky (1965, orig. 1926) challenged Bukharin theoretically,
using Marx’s understanding of primitive accumulation under capitalism as a way of
developing policies that were, in his view, more appropriate to the socialist
development project (Kay 2009, 107–9). Preobrazhensky developed the concept of
primitive socialist accumulation, which he defined as ‘accumulation in the hands of
the state of material resources mainly or partly from sources lying outside the
complex of state economy’ during the period of structural transformation
(Preobrazhensky 1972, 132). Primitive socialist accumulation required ‘the alienation
in favour of socialism of part of the surplus product of all the pre-socialist economic
forms’ (Preobrazhensky 1972, 133). In the Soviet Union in the 1920s the bulk of the
surplus produced under ‘pre-socialist economic forms’ was produced by the petty
commodity producing peasantry. So Preobrazhensky’s primitive socialist accumula-

tion required the appropriation of the agricultural surplus of the peasantry, which
could be used to finance investment in the expanding socialist industrial sector that
could underpin post-capitalist structural transformation.
According to Preobrazhensky the agricultural surplus could be appropriated to
fund socialist capital accumulation in two main ways: through taxation; and more
importantly, through the manipulation of the intersectoral terms of trade between
agriculture and industry (Dobb 1966). Both were forms of forced savings which, when
combined with any voluntary savings, could be used to fund socialist investment.
Preobrazhensky also argued that industrialisation through primitive socialist
accumulation would have to be rapid. This was because the rampant inflation and the
macroeconomic imbalances plaguing the Soviet Union were, according to Preo-
brazhensky, the result of both a lack of sufficient industrial capacity and changes in
agriculture as a result of the revolution (Mohun 1991). The agrarian revolution in the
Soviet Union had resulted in the increased consumption of agricultural products in
the countryside itself along with a massive increase in the countryside’s demand for
the products of industry, which could not be met by existing industrial capacity, and
which thus fuelled an upward inflationary spiral. So, structural transformation
required rapid industrialisation, which in turn needed investment which could be
obtained by diverting the excess demand of the agricultural sector into industrial
investment through forced savings, which would quell inflationary pressures. The
principal mechanism by which the intersectoral terms of trade could be manipulated
to pull this off was to be state trading monopolies that would buy farm products at
below-market prices and sell industrial products at above-market prices; unequal
exchange would capture the agricultural surplus of the Soviet peasantry for the
socialist development project (Gregory and Stuart 1986), while the ‘law’ of primitive
socialist accumulation in the socialist economic sector served as a bulwark against the
continuing hold of the law of value in the capitalist economic sector during the period
of the transition to socialism (Mohun 1991).
Primitive socialist accumulation was used to justify the collectivisation of Soviet
agriculture that began in 1928, and has become associated with the death of millions
of peasants. But what was done in the name of primitive socialist accumulation by
Stalin in order to consolidate his personal political power cannot be attributed to
Preobrazhenky, who was a forceful advocate of democracy and whose writing on
primitive socialist accumulation did not in any way suggest the extreme degree of
coercion that was used against the Soviet peasantry to introduce collectivisation
(Haupt and Marie 1974).7
Preobrazhensky’s concept of primitive socialist accumulation has had a lasting
impact on the agrarian question. The classic rendering of the agrarian question in the
1890s examined tendencies in farming that facilitated the emergence of agrarian
capital and agrarian waged labour, as well as the political implications of these
changes. Byres (1991) was the first to note that the debates in the Soviet Union over
the role of peasant petty commodity production in facilitating or hindering capital
accumulation during the process of structural transformation added a ‘new layer of
meaning’ (Byres 1991, 10) to the agrarian question, a meaning that had direct
implications for the political economy of the development project, and one which is
now intricately bound up in discussions of the agrarian question. Araghi (2009, 118),
for example, suggests that the agrarian question
was in its origins a socialist problematic rooted in a political concern about how to
conduct socialist revolutions when a substantial majority of the population consisted of
peasants. However, the postwar peasant question . . . became a developmentalist
problematic rooted in a theoretical concern about how to understand the lack of
development – or the persistence of ‘backwardness’ – in third world countrysides . . . the
lessons of the original debate (were married) to an altogether different purpose.
For Araghi, then, the current relevance of the agrarian question is open to debate
unless it is situated within a world-historical interpretation that captures ‘the spatial
dimensions of class formation and value relations as a global process’ (Araghi 2009,
118). Araghi’s argument is dealt with in the second part of this survey, but for now it
is sufficient to say that historical materialist analysis of the agrarian question pays
central attention to the issue of the accumulation impulses fostered by agrarian
social relations, in large part because of Evgeny Preobrazhensky.
The debate on the agrarian transition

In the canonical works on the agrarian question the transformation of pre-capitalist
social relations of production into capitalist relations of production sketched out by
Marx in Capital and analysed in precise detail by Lenin in The Development of
Capitalism in Russia are too often assumed to be a linear process, which we have
argued was not the case. However, if this is not the case, it remains to be seen how
the capitalist mode of production emerges. Byres (1991) argued that in order for
agriculture to no longer pose any obstacles to capitalist transformation the agrarian
question must be ‘resolved’ through some form of successful ‘agrarian transition’.
Byres’ definition of an agrarian transition is the occurrence of ‘those changes in the
countryside of a poor country necessary to the overall development of capitalism and
its ultimate dominance in a particular national social formation’ (Byres 1996, 27).
Bernstein (1996/1997, 24–5) has in turn stressed that the implication of the ‘radical
core of Byres reformulation of the agrarian question as ‘‘agrarian transition’’ is the
possibility of what Byres terms ‘‘historical puzzles’’’ (1996, 15): agrarian transitions
which do not necessarily imply the full development of capitalist social relations of
production in agriculture as part of the establishment of the dominance of capitalism
within a particular social formation.
7
Preobrazhensky was himself a victim of Stalin’s purges.
A key issue for the agrarian question then is to understand how one predominant
form of surplus creation and appropriation, which defines a mode of production, is
transformed into another predominant form of surplus creation and appropriation.
In other words, understanding actually-existing agrarian questions requires
uncovering the tendencies and processes by which rural relations of domination
and subordination are being transformed. In this regard, in 1950 an exchange took
place between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy about the transition from feudalism
to capitalism in Europe that generated a lively and ongoing debate and which had
important implications for the understanding of the agrarian question and agrarian
transition.
Economic historians analysing the transition from feudalism to capitalism in
Europe focus on two key questions. First, why did serfdom decline in some regions
and persist in others? Secondly, why did capitalist farmers and rural waged labour
emerge in some regions, landlord-tenant relations emerge in others, and an owner-
occupier petty commodity producing small peasantry in yet others? In a critique of

Dobb, Sweezy had argued that in the case of England feudalism ended because of the
expansion of trade, which greatly increased commodification and so prepared the
ground for the capitalism that later emerged (Dobb 1963, Sweezy 1976). But Sweezy
never offered a convincing explanation of the origin of capitalism, while his emphasis
on the process of exchange rather than the terms and conditions governing
production were deemed by many to be non-materialist. Dobb, on the other hand,
prepared the terrain for such a materialist explanation.
In Studies in the Development of Capitalism Dobb (1963) had argued that
feudalism ended in England because of the conflictual social relations that existed
between lords and peasants: class struggle allowed some peasants to free themselves
from their feudal obligations and to transform themselves into capitalists. Later,
Rodney Hilton substantially elaborated Dobb’s argument, providing the archival
evidence of the character of the transition (Hilton 1990). Hilton’s analysis showed
that the demands of lords for the agricultural surpluses of the peasants led the
peasants to improve their production techniques, which in turn encouraged the
emergence of simple commodity production, which had been hindered by feudalism.
Hilton also documented the character of peasant resistance to the appropriations of
landlords, and its role in bringing about the transition to capitalism (Hilton 1976).
In 1976 the Dobb-Sweezy debate (Sweezy et al. 1976) was reopened by Robert
Brenner, who systematically examined the transition to capitalism in western Europe
and produced the most rounded explanation of it within historical materialism
(Brenner 1986, Aston and Philpin 1985). Although influenced by Dobb and Hilton’s
emphasis on the social relationships between the appropriators and the appro-
priated, and agreeing that the downfall of feudalism had to be found with the social
relations of feudalism itself, Brenner did not like the implicit assumption of Dobb
that within the interstices of feudalism lay the basis of capitalism waiting to be
unleashed. Like Sweezy, Brenner believed that feudalism was a tenacious mode of
production, but Brenner went further than Sweezy, arguing that it was not trade but
rather the property relations of feudalism that resulted in its downfall.
In feudalism surplus extraction was the basis by which the dominant landlord
class reproduced itself. Surplus extractions from the peasantry were carried out
through the mechanism of rent and backed up by force. Production was organised
through the institution of serfdom to fit the needs of surplus extraction. Peasant
ownership was by and large excluded. Property relations thus resulted in lords and
serfs not having to rely on the market; without the discipline of the market
imperative reproductive strategies focused not on accumulation but on consumption
were logical. So for Brenner pre-capitalist feudal relations of production cannot
develop the forces of production because lords ultimately use force to appropriate
the agricultural surplus of the peasantry, not having to rely upon markets and the
competitive imperatives that they generate. Lords can increase their incomes by
making peasants work harder, work longer, or reducing their incomes, but there is
neither incentive nor need to systematically improve the efficiency, labour
productivity and competitiveness that market imperatives demand.
So the material benefits of heavy surplus extraction gave no incentive for the
dominant classes to innovate, while the peasantry lacked both the incentive and the
means to invest. As a result, productivity dropped and an exhaustion of peasant
production emerged. The class structure of feudalism thus precipitated a crisis of
productivity and threatened the basis of subsistence, and indeed survival. This
crisis broke down the inhibiting effect of the lord’s coercive capacity amongst
the peasantry. Conflicts could therefore eventually take the shape of struggles
over the control of surpluses and possession of the means of production. These
struggles occurred from the fourteenth century to, in some parts of Europe, the
eighteenth century (Sweezy et al. 1976, Aston and Philpin 1985, Brenner 1985,
Hilton 1990).
The outcomes of these struggles were regionally specific and based upon the
prevailing balance of class forces. Indeed, it is in understanding the balance of class
forces that the debate continues to resonate: for Brenner, peasant class differentia-
tion under feudalism is ignored, as it is an outcome of agrarian transition. As a
consequence, understanding the balance of class forces refers to antagonisms
between landlords and peasants. Contrarily, Byres (2006, 17; 2009) argues that
peasant class differentiation under feudalism ‘is not an outcome but a determining
variable, a causa causans rather than a causa causata’; hence, the process of peasant
differentiation affects the balance of class forces both between lords and peasants
and within the peasantry itself, and thus shapes the process of agrarian transition.
In some areas, such as France, the direct producers took control of the land.
Freed of the burden of surplus extraction, they could invest to overcome
productivity decline. As output increased and surpluses accrued, the gains to be
had from the pursuit of efficient market-oriented competitive strategies became clear.
Accumulation was thus fostered.
In other areas, such as England, the crisis meant that both landlords and
peasants had to become more competitive in the market and more productive on the
land: in the lord’s case, in order to increase the rents they were paid, and in the
tenant’s case in order to keep and indeed enhance their access to land. Those who
were not competitive were driven off the land, either by coercive and expropriative
enclosure or through the normal workings of market-led appropriation. As serfs
became separated from the land they had to rely upon the market for subsistence.
With a growing demand for subsistence goods and lacking access to secure surpluses,
individual landlords started to move directly into agricultural production. Falling
under the sway of market relations meant having to compete, which entailed both
labour-productivity enhancing specialisation and innovation. Those that were
competitive and more productive increasingly commodified their output, facilitating
the emergence over time of agrarian capitalism in England, with landlords, capitalist
tenants and waged labour. Agrarian production responded and capital accumulation
in agriculture began. Again, agriculture was transformed. In other areas the result
was the emergence of new, commercially-based tenancy arrangements.
The key to the resolution of the agrarian question and the agrarian transition in
Europe was thus an economic crisis in the pre-capitalist mode of production, a crisis
that was embedded within the prevailing property relations of that mode of
production, which created fetters upon accumulation and social transformation. In
this context, Brenner placed at the centre of processes of agrarian change the
conflictual relationships that emerged between lords and peasants trying to best
reproduce themselves within the fettered conditions that they faced. Byres further
developed the argument by following Hilton and identifying the salience of peasant
class differentiation within this context, which shaped the balance of class forces both
between lords and peasants and within the peasantry as the transition from feudalism
to capitalism took place. Notwithstanding some differences, then, for both it was not
markets and trade, which had existed for millennia, which fostered change. Rather, in
the genesis of agrarian capitalism changes in social relations driven by shifts in the
balance of class forces gave rise to changes in the structure of property relations and
the economy. Eventually, non-capitalist property relations and labour-processes were
subordinated and integrated into the capitalist mode of production (Brenner 1986).
The importance of Brenner’s argument for contemporary readings of the
agrarian question and agrarian transition is that Brenner was able to systematically
uncover ‘the mechanisms linking structural features of the mode of production to its
dynamics . . . Development and underdevelopment are the product of class
structures which are themselves the outcome of a historical process’ (Brewer 1990,
231). Brenner rigorously reasserted the centrality of class structure, class relation-
ships, and class struggle as the central dynamic variables in understanding processes
of development and change, including the resolution of the agrarian question
through a capitalist agrarian transition.
Conclusion
By the end of the twentieth century new understandings had been attached onto the
classical account of the agrarian question developed in the nineteenth century. These
interpretations were evaluated by Byres (1991) and were further discussed by
Bernstein (1996/1997). Bernstein argued that the agrarian question could be
analytically deconstructed into three ‘problematics’. The first problematic was that
of the structure and dynamics of the rural production process. Changing tendencies
in the control over productive assets and the transformation of peasant labour into
waged labour-power were key factors in comprehending agrarian change. This was
the terrain of Marx, of Lenin, and of Kautsky. The second problematic was that of
accumulation, and the extent to which agriculture was or was not supplying
surpluses capable of sustaining industrialisation and structural transformation. This
was the terrain of Preobrazhensky. The third problematic was rural politics: the ways
by which changes in the structure of rural production and processes of agrarian
accumulation were or were not producing a political response from the rural
population, for rural politics is squarely about production and accumulation. This
was the terrain of Engels.
For us, the analytical framework that is the agrarian question is an essential yet
highly nuanced approach to understanding rural change, one that captures both the
common processes at work in the countryside of a range of developing capitalist
countries as well as the substantive diversity that can be witnessed within and between
those countries. The agrarian question offers both theoretical and empirical
coherence as well as the analytical tools and analytical sensitivity necessary to
understand ongoing processes of agrarian change in contemporary developing
capitalist countries. Yet despite this practical relevance, in the early years of the
twenty-first century the agrarian question continues to generate significant and
heated debate within agrarian political economy. Why this is so, and how it may be
possible to move beyond current controversies, is taken up in the second part of this
survey.
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A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi teaches agrarian political economy. He is Professor of International

Development Studies at Trent University, Peterborough, Canada and Associated Research
Professor of the Academic Unit in Development Studies of the Universidad Autonóma de
Zacatecas, Zacatecas, Mexico. His most recent book, co-edited with Cristóbal Kay, is entitled
Peasants and globalization: political economy, rural transformation and the agrarian question.
Email: haroonakramlodhi@trentu.ca
Cristóbal Kay is Emeritus Professor in Development Studies and Rural Development at the
International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague, The
Netherlands; Adjunct Professor of International Development Studies at Saint Mary’s
University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; and Professorial Research Associate in the
Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University
of London. He is an editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change. Email: Kay@iss.nl

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Surveying the agrarian question (part 1): unearthing foundations,

Peasants, capitalism and globalisation

ISSN 0306-6150 print/ISSN 1743-9361 online

on a world-scale took place. These phenomena have become generally known as

century being constructed on such a vulnerable terrain, could it be, as Henry

particular, the accumulation associated with capitalist industrialization’. Clearly, as

The origin of the agrarian question: Marx and rural change

because of its capacity to develop the material forces of production, a necessary

In the Grundrisse small-scale pre-capitalist peasant farming often appears in the

In Marx’s ‘classic’ example, which came, in many ways, to be seen as a sui

created because of coping mechanisms that are employed by petty commodity

So ‘smallholding and petty landownership . . . production . . . proceeds without

So Marx recognised that processes of capitalist development in agriculture can create

Engels and the politics of the agrarian question

Kautsky and Lenin: the ‘classic’ agrarian question

Capitalist industrialisation and agriculture

new, productivity-enhancing techniques and technologies into agriculture and the

Specialisation and social diﬀerentiation

producers, in order to be able to cope. So a change in the distribution of productive

The process of rural transformation

As a consequence, Kautsky in particular, but also Lenin, argued that the

Rural class formation

Below the big landowners came a second stratum of exploiters:

tenancy relations, and debt.

Scale versus size

A similar understanding of the dynamics of agrarian change allowed Kautsky to

dependence propelled both investment and the establishment of a more eﬀective,

Tenancy and debt

Primitive socialist accumulation

coeﬃcients of production towards capital-intensive technical coeﬃcients of produc-

commodity producing peasantry. So Preobrazhensky’s primitive socialist accumula-

The debate on the agrarian transition

occupier petty commodity producing small peasantry in yet others? In a critique of

Lodhi, R. Chernomas and A. Sepehri, eds. Globalization, neo-conservative policies and

Oya, C. 2009. Introduction to a symposium on the World Development Report 2008:

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi teaches agrarian political economy. He is Professor of International

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