Land Access and Tenure Status
As the access to land depends on tenure status, the ‘reforms’ related to this are the subject for discussion here.
The language used in this area is often imprecise due to the lack of sufficient conceptualisation.
In French the terms ‘reformes foncieres’ (land reforms), ‘reformes agraires’ (agrarian reforms) and sometimes ‘lois concernant le domaine national’ (state land laws), ‘transformations des modes d’exploitation’ (transformation of farming methods) and in English the terms ‘land tenure’, ‘land system’ are often used interchangeably.First of all, two types of ‘tenure status’ (or systems of land tenure) must be defined: those based on the private ownership of farm land and those that are not.
10.2.1 Land Tenure Based on the Private Ownership of the Land
In this case, the owner has, to use the terms of Roman law, usus (the right to use an asset), fructus (the right to appropriate the returns from the asset) and abusus (the right to transfer). This right is ‘absolute’ in the sense that the owner can farm his land himself, rent it out or even abstain from farming. The property may be given away or sold and it forms part of assets that can be inherited.
Certainly, this right is often less absolute than it appears. In all cases use is subject to public order laws (such as those prohibiting its unlawful use for the cultivation of stupefacients) and increasingly to environmental regulations. In some countries where an agrarian reform has been carried through, a limit has been established for the maximum surface area an individual or family can own (see below). The rights of tenant farmers (duration and guarantee of the lease, amount of land rent) limit those of the owners in varying degrees to the extent of affording the tenant farmer the major benefit of the protection of the state and its agricultural policies (this is the case in France).
Freedom to choose his crops is not always the rule. In Egypt, from most remote time, the state agricultural services establish the proportion of land allotted to different crops depending on their irrigation requirements.This system of land ownership is modern, inasmuch as it is the product of the constitution of (‘really existing’) historic capitalism which originated in western Europe (England) in the first place) and among the Europeans who colonised America. It was established through the destruction of the ‘customary’ systems for regulating access to land, even in Europe. The statutes of feudal Europe were based on the superposition of rights to the same land: those of the peasant concerned and other members of a village community (serfs or freemen), those of the feudal lord and those of the king. The assault on these rights took the form of ‘enclosures’ in England, imitated in different ways in all European countries during the course of the 19th century. Very early on, Marx denounced this radical transformation which excluded the majority of peasants from access to use of the land, turning them into proletariat emigrants to the towns (forced by circumstance) or, in the case of those who stayed into farm labourers or tenant farmers, which he regarded as numbering among the type of measures of primitive accumulation that dispossessed the producers of property or the use of the means of production.
The use of the terms of Roman law (usus and abusus) to describe the status of modern bourgeois ownership perhaps indicates that the latter had distant ‘roots’. In this case, those of land ownership in the Roman Empire and more precisely those of pro-slavery latifundist ownership. The fact remains that as these particular forms of ownership have disappeared in feudal Europe, we cannot talk of the ‘continuity’ of a ‘western’ concept of ownership (itself associated with ‘individualism’ and of the values it represents) which has, in fact, never existed.
The rhetoric of capitalist discourse about itself-‘liberal’ ideology—has not only produced this myth of ‘western continuity’.
It has, above all, produced another even more dangerous myth, namely that of the ‘absolute and superior rationale’ of economic management based on the private and exclusive ownership of the means of production which it considers farmland to be. In fact, according to conventional economics, the ‘market’, that is to say the transferability of ownership of capital and land, determines the optimal (most efficient) use of these ‘factors of production’. So, according to this principle, land becomes ‘merchandise like any other’, transferable at the ‘market’ price, in order to guarantee that the best use is made of it both for the owner concerned and society as a whole. This is nothing but mere tautology yet it is the one upon which all (‘vulgar’ which is to say acritical to use Marx’s terms) bourgeois economic discourse is based. This same rhetoric is used to legitimise the principle of land ownership by dint of the fact that it alone can guarantee that the farmer who invests to improve his yield per hectare and the productivity of his work (and that of any employees) will not suddenly be dispossessed of the fruit of his labour and savings. This is not the case and other forms of regulating the right to use the land can produce similar results. In sum, this dominant discourse uses the conclusions that it sees fit to draw from the construction of western modernity in order to propose them as the only necessary ‘rules’ for the advancement of all other peoples. To make the land everywhere private property in the current sense of the term, as practiced in capitalist centres, is to spread the policy of ‘enclosures’ the world over, in other words, to hasten the dispossession of the peasants. This course of action is not new, it began and continued during earlier centuries of the global expansion of capitalism in the context of colonial systems in particular. Today the World Trade Organisation (WTO) intends only to accelerate the process even though the destruction that would result from this capitalist approach is increasingly foreseeable and predictable. Resistance to this option by the peasants and peoples affected would make it possible to build a real and genuinely human alternative.10.2.2 Land Tenure Systems not Based on the Private Ownership of the Land
As we can see, this definition is negative—not based on private property—and therefore cannot designate a homogeneous group since access to land is regulated in all human societies, however, it is regulated either by ‘customary authorities’, ‘modern authorities’, the state or more specifically, and more often, by a group of institutions and practices involving individuals, communities and the state.
‘Customary’ administration (expressed in terms of customary law or known as such) has always (or almost always) ruled out private property (in the modern sense) and always guaranteed access to land for all of the families (rather than the individuals) concerned. In other words, those that are part of a ‘village community’ which is distinct and can be identified as such. Yet it has (almost) always never guaranteed ‘equal’ right to land. In the first place, it most often excluded “foreigners” (usually the vestiges of conquered peoples), ‘slaves’ (of differing status) and shared land unequally depending on clan membership, lineage, caste or status (‘chiefs’, ‘free men’, etc.). So there is no reason to heap excessive praise upon these traditional rights as a number of anti-imperialist national ideologues unfortunately do. Progress will certainly require them to be challenged.
Customary administration has almost never been the system used in ‘independent villages’. These have always been part of stable or changing, sound or precarious state groupings depending on circumstances but very rarely have they been absent. So the rights of use of the communities and families that made them up have always been limited by those of the state which levied taxes (which is why I described the vast family of pre-modern production methods as ‘tributory’).
These complex forms of ‘customary’administration, which differ from one time and place to another, only persist, in the best of cases, in extremely deteriorated forms and have been under attack by the dominant rationale of world capitalism for at least two centuries (in Asia and in Africa), sometimes five (in Latin America).
In this respect, India is probably one of the clearest examples.
Before British colonisation, access to land was managed by ‘village communities’, or more precisely by their upper ruling castes-classes, however, excluding lower castes, the Dalits, who were treated as a kind of collective slave class similar to the Hilotes of Sparta. These communities were, in turn, controlled and exploited by the imperial Mughal state and its vassals (Rajahs’ and other ruler’s states) which levied tribute. The British raised the status of the zamindars, formerly land revenue collectors, to that of ‘owners’ who thus became large allied landowners in spite of tradition although they upheld ‘tradition’ when it suited them to do so, for example, by ‘respecting’ the exclusion of Dalits from access to land! Independent India has not challenged this serious colonial inheritance which is the cause of the incredible poverty of the majority of its peasantry and then after of its urban proletariat (cf S. Amin: Linde, une grande puissance? [India, A Great Power?] October 2004). The solution to these problems and the building of a viable economy for the peasant majority is therefore through an agrarian reform in the strictest sense of the term (see below the meaning of this proposal). The European colonisations of Southeast Asia and that of the United States in the Philippines resulted in similar developments. The ‘enlightened despotic’ regimes of the east (the Ottoman Empire, the Egypt of Mohamed Ali, the Shahs of Iran) also by and large established private ownership in the modern sense of the term to the benefit of a new class wrongly described as ‘feudal’ (by most historical Marxist thinking) recruited from among the senior ranks of their power system.As a result of this, private ownership of the land has since then affected the majority of farm land, especially the best of it, throughout Asia outside China, Vietnam and the former Soviet republics of central Asia and there are only remnants of deteriorated para-customary systems in the poorest regions that are of the least value to the dominant capitalist farming in particular.
This structure differs widely juxtaposing large landowners (country capitalists to use the terminology I proposed), rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants and the landless. There is no peasant ‘organisation’ or ‘movement’ that transcends these acute class conflicts.In Arab Africa, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya, the colonisers (with the exception of Egypt) granted their colonists (or the Boers in South Africa) ‘modern’ private properties of a generally latifundist type. This legacy has certainly been brought to an end in Algeria but here the peasantry had almost disappeared, pro- letarised (and reduced to vagrancy) by the extension of colonial lands, whereas in Morocco and Tunisia the local bourgeoisie took them over (which was also the case to some extent in Kenya). In Zimbabwe, the revolution has challenged the legacy of colonialisation to the benefit, in part, of new middle owners of urban rather than rural origin and, in part, of ‘poor peasants communities’. South Africa still remains outside this movement. The remnants of deteriorated para-customary systems that survive in the ‘poor’ regions of Morocco or Berber Algeria and the former Bantustans of South Africa are threatened with private appropriation from inside and outside the societies concerned. In all these situations, scrutiny of the peasant struggles (and possibly those of the organisations that support them) is required: are we talking about ‘rich peasant’ movements and demands in conflict with some orientation of state policy (and the influences of the dominant world system on them), or of poor and landless peasants? Can they form an ‘alliance’ against the dominant (so-called ‘neo-liberal’) system? Under what conditions? To what extent? Can the demands—expressed or otherwise—of poor and landless peasants be ‘forgotten’?
In intertropical Africa, the apparent survival of ‘customary’ systems is certainly more visible because here the model of colonisation took a different and unique direction, known in French (the term has no translation in English) as ‘economie de traite’. The administration of access to land was left to the so-called ‘customary’ authorities, however, controlled by the colonial state (through traditional clan leaders, legitimate or otherwise, created by the administration). The purpose of this control was to force peasants to produce a quota of specific products for export (peanuts, cotton, coffee, cocoa) over and above what they required for their own subsistence. Maintaining a system of land tenure that did not rely on private property suited colonisation since no land rent entered into composition of the prices of the designated products. This resulted in land being wasted, destroyed by the expansion of crops, sometimes permanently (as illustrated by the desertification of peanut producing areas of Senegal). Yet again capitalism showed that its ‘short term rationale’, an integral part of its dominant rationale, was in fact the cause of an ecological disaster. The combination of subsistence farming and the production of products for export also meant that the peasants were paid almost nothing for their work. To talk in these circumstances of a ‘customary land tenure system’ is going far too far. It is a new regime that preserves only the appearance of ‘traditions’ and often the least valuable of these.
China and Vietnam provide a unique example of a an access to land administration system that is based neither on private ownership or on ‘customs’ but on a new revolutionary right unknown elsewhere. It is the right of all peasants (defined as inhabitants of a village) to equal access to land and I stress the use of equal. This right is the finest accomplishment of the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions.
In China, and even more so in Vietnam which was more extensively colonised, ‘former’ land tenure systems (those that I have described as ‘tributory’) were already quite eroded by dominant capitalism. The former ruling classes of the imperial power system had turned most of the agricultural land into private or quasi-private property whereas the development of capitalism encouraged the formation of new rich peasant classes. Mao Zedong is the first and without doubt the only one, followed by the Chinese and Vietnamese communists, to have defined a revolutionary agrarian strategy based on the mobilisation of the majority of poor, landless and middle peasants. From the outset, the triumph of this revolution made it possible to abolish the private ownership of land, which was replaced by that of the state, and organise new forms of equal access to land for all peasants. This organisation has certainly passed through several successive phases including that inspired by the Soviet model based on production cooperatives. The limited achievements made by the latter have led both countries to return to peasant family farming. Is this model viable? Can it lead to a sustained improvement in production without bringing about an excess of rural manpower? Under what conditions? What supporting policies does it require of the state? What types of political management can meet the challenge?
Ideally, the model involves the dual affirmation of the rights of the state (sole owner) and of the usufructuary (the peasant family). It guarantees equal distribution of the village land among all of the families. It prohibits any use of it, such as renting, other than for family farming. It guarantees that the proceeds of investments made by the usufructuary return to him in the short term through his right of ownership of all farm produce (which is freely marketed, although the state guarantees a minimum price), and in the long term by inheritance of usufruct to the exclusive benefit of children remaining on the farm (any person who emigrates from the village loses his right of access to the land which is then redistributed). As this involves rich land but also small (even tiny) farms, the system is only viable as long as the vertical investment (the green revolution with no large scale industrialisation) is equally efficient to allow the increase of production per rural worker as is horizontal investment (the expansion of farming supported by increased industrialisation).
Has this ‘ideal’ model ever been implemented? Certainly close to it (for example during the time of Deng Xiaoping in China). However, the fact remains that although this model ensures a high degree of equality within the village, it has never been able to overcome the inequalities between one community and another that are a function of the quality of the land, the density of the population and the proximity of urban markets. Furthermore, no redistribution system has not been up to the challenge (even through the structures of cooperatives and state trade monopolies of the ‘Soviet’ phase).
Certainly more serious is the fact that the system is itself subject to internal and external pressures which undermine its direction and social scale. Access to credit, satisfactory subsidisation are subject to bargaining and interventions of all kinds, legitimate or otherwise. ‘Equal’ access to land is not synonymous with ‘equal’ access to the best production conditions. The popularisation of ‘market’ ideology contributes to this destabilization. The system tolerates (and has even relegitimised) farm tenancy and the employment of waged employees. Right wing discourse—encouraged from abroad—stresses the need to give the peasants in question ‘ownership’ of the land and to open up the ‘farmland market’. It is quite clear that rich peasants (and even agribusiness) seeking to increase their property are behind this discourse.
This system of peasant access to land has been administered thus far by the state and the party which are one. Clearly, one might have thought that it could have been administered by genuine elected village councils. This is certainly necessary as there is hardly any other means of winning the support of the majority and reducing the intrigues of the minority would-be beneficiaries of a more markedly capitalist approach. The ‘party dictatorship’ has shown itself to be largely inclined to careerism, opportunism and even corruption. Social struggles are currently far from non-existent in rural China and Vietnam. They are no less strongly expressed than elsewhere in the world but they are by and large “defensive” and concerned with defending the legacy of the revolution—equal right to land for all. This legacy must be defended, especially as it is under greater threat than it may appear despite repeated affirmations from both governments that the ‘state ownership of the land will never be abolished in favour of private property’! Yet today this defence demands recognition of the right to do so through the organisation of those who are affected, that is to say, the peasants.
10.3