The Domination of Agriculture by the Capitalist Mode of Production
The third development phase of capitalism saw the actual beginning of the subordination of agriculture to capital. Furthermore, this subordination occurred throughout the world since this third phase coincided with that of imperialism, i.e., with the establishment of the world system in its present form.
The main consequence of the subordination of agriculture was the abolition of ground rent.
England provides the first historical example of this liquidation which occurred even prior to the beginning of the third phase in question. We know that English capital abolished ground rent simply by liquidating agriculture in England: this was the reason for the repeal of the Corn Laws and for the recourse to American wheat which did not have to bear the cost of ground rent. This operation put an end to the class alliance between the industrial bourgeoisie and the big capitalist landowners which had shaped the essential aspects of economic and political life in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the case of England, large estate ownership was linked with industrial capital. This largely made up for the former’s loss of its economic importance, as did the maintenance of the political and social privileges of that class, represented by the House of Lords.In continental Europe, the subordination of agriculture to capital did not occur in the same way. The new industrial bourgeoisie, weaker and sometimes threatened by the rising working class—early in France and much later in Germany— was compelled to form more permanent class alliances with the peasantry who benefited from the bourgeois revolution in France; with the middle strata of the former artisan and trading groups of the mercantilist period in southern Germany and Italy; with the big capitalist landlords in eastern Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, and in southern Italy and Spain.
The process of subordination of agriculture there is thus of recent origin, very often occurring after the Second World War. The distortion of relative prices at the expense of agriculture which accompanied the intensified industrialization of agriculture is a typical example of the way in which peasant landownership, while maintained in theory, was rendered ineffective since it no longer produced rent and reduced the peasant’s earnings to that of his labor power.Conventional economic analysis does not understand this mechanism. It attributes this modification of price structure either to the structure of demand (the low elasticity of demand for food products) or to the market structure (opposing the low and dispersed agricultural supply to the concentrated demand of wholesale and food industry oligopolies). These observations are not wrong but they remain superficial and at the level of observed phenomena.
The first condition of this subordination of agriculture is the intervention of dominant capital in the actual process of production in agriculture. This is not the capital deployed in agriculture in the form of equipment utilized in agricultural production. It belongs to those food industries and trading concerns linked with the agricultural producers. Through the standardization of products, the expansion of industrial food processing, and the concentration of networks for collection and marketing, the agricultural producer’s production plan is subjected to control by this capital. He is no longer really a free commercial producer producing, in the first place, what he likes and in his own way and later selling a part of it. He is reduced to the status of a proletarian working at home. This interference in the production process clearly indicates that capital is not the sum total of all individual capital. It is more than that; it is global prior to being fragmented. Again, we could never understand the meaning of capitalism if we confined ourselves to a survey of capitalist farms examined separately.
The path of concentrating landed property and directly proletarianizing the peasantry is not the principal one followed by capitalism in developing its relations with agriculture but rather is the exception, more costly since it maintains—and often reinforces—the drain which rent represents. This path becomes the principal one only when a particular class alliance demands it. Capital prefers subordinating the peasantry according to the pattern described by Chayanov, for capital then obtains not only a better overall rate of profit but also better political control over society. Remaining, in name only, the owners of their means of production, the peasants build an ideological picture of themselves which separates them from the proletariat. They believe that their interests diverge from those of the proletariat, and on the face of it they are right since higher prices for their products improve their situation at the expense of the working-class consumers. A contradiction thus develops among the people, of which capital takes advantage.The second condition underlying the subordination of agriculture is of a political nature. Capital can only give up its class alliance with the landed aristocracy if it can replace it either by a social-democratic integration of the working class or by other class alliances. The first case no doubt applied to northern Europe and the United States. The path for this development was smoothed by the old social-democratic tradition of England (sustained by the immense and longstanding! size of its colonial empire), that of Scandinavia (encouraged by the limited extent of feudalism in that part of Europe, particularly in Sweden), and that of Germany (encouraged by the destruction of communism by Nazism and the force with which Nazism was rejected in the form communism took in East Germany). In North America, the integration of the working class took place even before that class had defined itself politically and ideologically. This did not occur in southern Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Greece) where the working class has never really had a share in political power, since this was threatened capital—as shown by the repeated short-lived experiments of popular front movements.
Thus the development of capitalism occurred under authoritarian right-wing regimes (from the Second Empire to the rule of de Gaulle, Franco, Italian facism, etc.) which relied on the peasants, the petty traders, the notables and big landlords, the urban speculators, etc., depending on the case. During the last period of rapid development in this region of Europe (1948-1967), the illusion was fostered that capital could free itself from these alliances by replacing them with alliances with the upper crusts of the new ‘proletariat’ made up of cadres and technicians, through a policy of deliberately accentuating the inequality in income distribution. May 1968 in France, like the creeping ‘May’ movement in Italy, demonstrated the ideological failure of this attempt, the narrow base of the social-democratic working class, and forced capital to seek other alliances with parasitic sectors of the new ‘‘petty capitalism’’ of the tertiary sector, the urban speculator group, and so on.But the subordination of agriculture is now increasingly taking place on a world scale. It is only in the last few years that the integration into the world capitalist system of countries which have become underdeveloped has begun to be the subject of a scientific, coherent, and systematic analysis. The outlines of the theory of the center and the periphery in the world system have now been developed. Starting with a systematic criticism of the conventional approach to ‘underdevelopment’ (one of the fields in which social science studies have most clearly failed) and with a critique of the linear vision of development characteristic of the mechanistic philosophy underlying the dominant economistic ideology, this theory has now formulated in positive terms the nature and mechanisms of world accumulation and unequal development. The criticism of Rostow and of ‘dualism,’ the debates on dependence, extraversion, and unequal exchange, and those relating to the periodization of the development of capitalism as a world system, are the steps in this formulation.[20]
Possibly because of its recent origin, this formulation, in spite of its wealth of ideas, does not come readily enough to mind when one is dealing with particular aspects of underdevelopment.
One decisive result emerges from the theory of the world system: precisely that the unity of the system (not to be confused with homogeneity) is predominant, i.e., ultimately determines the nature of the components of that system. In other words, we would be making a fundamental mistake if each time we studied a particular phenomenon of the Third World, we looked for its ‘cause’ in the Third World itself instead of placing it within the dialectic of the world system. For example, there is the debate relating to ‘marginality’ which opposes the views of those who regard it as a phenomenon peculiar to the periphery and those who consider it as the effect, within the periphery, of the law of accumulation. There is also the debate on the relations between the state and social classes, opposing the views of those who define these relations in their immediate local context and those who place them in a world context. There is the critique of the theory of spatial planning and regional development, inappropriately transferred from the center to the periphery. These are all good examples of such blunders. The analysis of the relations between capitalist development and agriculture in the periphery may suffer the same fate.Since capitalism at the periphery is the result of external aggression, and not of internal evolution, the first phase referred to above does not occur in it. We know that in the underdeveloped countries, there is no agricultural revolution prior to industrial revolution, as in Europe; on the contrary, the order is reversed: what we call the ‘‘green revolution’’ is a contemporary phenomenon. Daniel Thorner rightly notes that there was a nucleus of rich peasants in India as early as the nineteenth century but that the kulak class has become significant in Indian society only in the last ten years. Broadly speaking, the agrariaa re forms which gave rise to this type of rural capitalism became widespread only after the Second World War.
Capitalism was first introduced into the periphery through comprador trade in the hands of foreigners (the colonial companies and the Asian minorities in Tropical Africa) or of nationals (in Latin America, the East, and Asia).
Later this occurred through the export of capital in mining and plantation agriculture owned either by settlers (French Maghreb, Kenya, Rhodesia, and South Africa) or by foreign companies established under colonial or semicolonial concessions (United Fruit in Central America, Unilever in the Belgian Congo, Firestone in Liberia, various types of European tea and rubber plantations in Ceylon, Indonesia, Indochina). In Latin America, the indigenous agriculture generally turned into a capitalist latifundia agriculture for export (such as coffee plantations in Brazil, sugar plantations in Cuba, cattle ranches in Argentina). The phenomenon rarely occurred in the East and in Asia, and the agricultural products marketed, either through export or on the domestic market, derived generally from sectors still governed by production relations of a precapitalist type. Egypt, where the dominant form of latifundium was capitalist, is an exception. In sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural production for the market was practically unaffected by this type of direct agrarian capitalism.Later, in the recent past, capitalism flourished anew on the wave of the industrialization linked with import substitution. Consequently, the demand for food products rose. But more often agriculture, hampered by precapitalist production relations, has been unable to meet this demand. Hence the paradox that the Third World, with the bulk of its population engaged in agriculture, becomes an importer of food products supplied by the center.
At this stage, not yet really superseded in the Third World and still less in sub-Saharan Africa, the capitalist mode of production is established in other sectors than agriculture and dominates the entire society. In this setting, the main functions of the subordinate, so-called traditional rural society are the following: (1) to supply cheap labor to the mining industry and to the plantations; (2) to supply food cheaply, thus enabling the value of labor power to be reduced in the directly controlled capitalist sectors; (3) to enhance the real value of luxury consumption of the privileged groups (comprador and bureaucratic bouijgeoisie), particularly through the supply of cheap services (domestic, etc.).
These objectives are met through a series of economic and political measures applied according to circumstances. Very often, they are achieved through a class alliance between dominant foreign capital and the ruling classes of the precapitalist society. At this point, we must mention the entrenched position of the big landowners, common in Latin America, in the Arab Middle East, and in Asia. This leads to a worsening of the precapitalist forms of exploitation, particularly ground rent, which on the one hand provides a market for new capital (a market for luxury consumption) and on the other, pauperizes the peasants and drives from the land a proportion of them who then supply the required cheap labor. These methods must be studied in conjunction with unequal development—particularly in its regional effects—and the set of phenomena termed ‘marginalization.’
The variety of economic and political measures employed in sub-Saharan Africa must be examined in relation to the structures of dependency they developed. We can distinguish between three types of policies for the transition to underdevelopment, which correspond roughly to three regions of the continent south of the Sahara[21]: (1) the colonial trading system of West Africa; (2) the system of concession-owning companies of the Congo basin; (3) the system of reserves in eastern and southern Africa. In that context, I have elsewhere analyzed
the phenomena of unequal regional development (the genesis of countries and regions termed ‘‘least developed”)[22] and those of migration in West Africa[23] which arise from it and express the domination of capitalism over rural societies. These societies, while retaining their precapitalist appearance, are no longer really such, having been greatly distorted and transformed.
In the next stage, the pressures of urban capitalism led to great changes in the rural world. In Latin America, in the Arab countries of the Middle East, and in Asia, the era of agrarian reform began. More or less radical, these changes became generalized after the Second World War, with independence in India, with the wave of petty-bourgeois nationalism in the Arab world in the fifties, with the populist movement and especially that of desar-rollismo in Latin America, also in the fifties. These reforms, in bringing to an end the former class alliances between foreign capital and the big landowners, replaced them with the new triple alliance between foreign capital, the local urban bourgeoisie (private and/or state), and the kulaks. They formed the social basis of the green revolution which followed.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the pattern of evolution in agriculture is different: there is no social disruption similar to that caused by agrarian reform elsewhere, but only an extension and a more intensive application of the colonial trading system. The reason for this peculiarity lies in the nature of the class alliances under colonialism in Africa and the patterns of their neocolonial renewal. The colonial administration must not be seen simply as an apparatus for the political domination of conquered regions. It fulfilled crucial economic roles, leading P.-P. Rey to speak of a ‘‘colonial mode of production.”[24] European imperialism certainly met with a variety of societies ranging from the type which had almost no class structure to advanced tributary societies (termed feudal). But it was always confronted with comparatively weak societies in terms of human population and the degree of their state organization. This was largely due to the debility which sub-Saharan Africa suffered as a result of the slave trade, including ethnic fragmentation, breakup of large states, and reduction of the population. Under these circumstances, the colonial power could assume direct control of the social life of the peoples conquered, giving less importance to its alliance with the ruling classes of these societies than it did in the colonial Asian or Arab world or in independent Latin America and Asia. Not that such alliances did not exist in sub-Saharan Africa: during the first period, i.e., during the conquest and occupation which followed, they played an important part in the strategies used to establish foreign domination. But they lost importance as the occupation became secure, and were subordinated to direct administrative rule.
The colonial administration thus fulfilled the economic and social functions instead of the local propeltied classes. Through administrative measures, it channeled the population into small reservations, as was the case in Kenya and southern Africa. Elsewhere, it took over from the concession-owning companies which were real private administrations. Through the imposition of money taxes, it also introduced forced labor and compulsory crops, and the establishment of the economic dc traitc. When it developed class alliances with the local ruling classes, these alliances served to reinforce its direct intervention.
These direct economic functions of the colonial administration in turn molded the nature of the economic dc traitc, a concept which is oversimplified and badly understood even when it is recognized. Anglo-Saxon economic terminology does not even have such an expression, using the meaningless translation, ‘‘trade economy.” In the French-speaking world, the expression as it was introduced after the war by Marxist geographers, in particular Jean Dresch, lost its true meaning as it became more widely used. It was reduced to description of an economy characterized by peasant producers’ specialization in export crops (peanuts, cotton, coffee, cocoa), exchanged against mass consumption manufactured goods (textiles, hardware), with colonial trading firms controlling trade in both directions. This description is correct but insufficient. To stop here I would imply that the extension of the economic dc traitc is achieved through the ‘normal’ economic laws of comparative advantage and that the persistent poverty of the producers is attributable to the obvious monopoly of the colonial firms in question.
But theproductcur de traite, the producer under that system, is not a petty- commodity producer, in spite of appearances. The administration and capital intervene in the productive process and actually control it. There is a host of administrative measures employed to force the peasant to produce what is wanted and in the manner desired: from pure and simple compulsion to the slightly more subtle approach of taxation in money form. Meanwhile, the authorities are only prepared to buy one particular product from him. There is also the form of compulsion arising from promotion or modernization of the ‘‘rural training’’ services (agricultural extension accompanied by the almost forced purchase of equipment—ploughs, seeders, hoeing equipment, insecticides, fertilizers), ‘‘provident societies,’’ and ‘cooperatives.’ The constant interference of the administration in the productive process ensures and supplements that of capital: both the visible part of that capital—colonial trade, minor agents, transport—and the invisible part, the capital of the processing industries located in Europe or on the coast of Africa. Again, capital is social prior to being fragmented.
Thus dominated, the producteur de traite is stripped of the real control of his means of production. In theory, he remains the traditional owner of the land, and the owner—in the bourgeois, individual sense—of the equipment. However, he is not in control of his production nor can he decide what to produce on the basis of comparative prices. He is therefore not really a commodity producer. His remuneration does not include either compensation for his ownership of the land, i.e., ground rent, or a return on his capital; he is reduced, owing to the domination of capital, to the value of his labor power or frequently to even less. Productivity gains induced by the vaunted improvement brought about by agricultural extension services are immediately taken back through price deterioration. The consequences of this situation are known: the wastage of land through mining exploitation, the peasants’ resistance to proposed ‘modernization,’ and so on. A peasant reduced to this status is a semiproletarian: a proletarian, because he is subjected to capital exploitation which extracts surplus value from him; a semiproletarian, because he retains the appearance of a free commodity producer. Objectively proletarianized, the peasant remains a small producer in terms of his class consciousness.
Independence has brought no change whatsoever to this system. The new African government fulfills the same functions as the former foreign administration. Hence we have the importance attached to education, its forms, the recourse to the foreign language and, arising from these, the characteristic alienations that occur in the course of the reproduction of this class. This class, like the administration it replaces, is not only a bureaucracy, it also intervenes in the process of production by the peasants.
This type of capital domination over agriculture is not particularly advanced, although it is highly profitable: in spite of the low levels of productivity it gives rise to, the remuneration of labor is so low that prices remain competitive. This explains the lateness of the green revolution in Tropical Africa. This profitability is obtained at the cost of soil exhaustion, deforestation, desert encroachment, and lateralization eventually revealed by drought. It is also obtained at the cost of a remuneration to labor below the value of labor power, which can be wasted, as seen in the exceptional level of mortality, malnutrition, and famine resulting from the fall in food production or rural depopulation.
Broadly speaking, there are two categories of economies de traite: the plantation economies and the other ‘poorer’ types. When the plantation zones are pinpointed on the map, obvious correlations appear between the expansion of these plantations and several other factors, among them: (1) a certain hierarchic division in precapitalist society, which permitted a favorable local class alliance ready to accept this strategic objective; (2) an average population density of thirty inhabitants per square kilometer; (3) the possibility of bringing in migrants foreign to the ethnic group of the plantation zone to initiate the process of proletarianization. We also distinguish between two supcategories of plantation economies in relation to these factors: kulak capitalist plantations, as in Ghana and the Ivory Coast; and the family microplantations, as in the Cameroon. As for the second category of economies de traite, i.e., the ‘poor’ savanna type, it also takes different forms. In predominantly Muslim areas, it frequently takes the form of religious brotherhoods and sultanates (Mouride in Senegal, Ashiqqa and Khatmia in the Sudan, and the emirates in Nigeria), and presupposes a class alliance with the leaders of the religious brotherhoods. Another form, common in the regions where such an alliance is not possible, is characterized by the presence of so-called intervention companies.
Has the economie de traite entered a period of grave crisis which heralds its decadence and imminent collapse?[25] By what type of economy could it be replaced? Peasant cash-crop agriculture in the dry zones of the Sahel and the African savanna regions has been competitive only because the peasants have received extremely low rewards for their labor. Following the general law of unequal international specialization and of the consequent unequal exchange, the gap between the earnings of African peasants producing peanuts and that of capitalist soybean producers (these being mutually substitutable oil-yielding crops) was even greater than the gap between their productivities. A pauper economy of this type was only possible through a gradual exhaustion of the soil by mining without any concern to restore its productive capacity. It was also accompanied by an overexploitation of the peasantry which was reduced to a level of subsistence verging on starvation. The continually worsening conditions of the economie de traite were bound to lead to its eventual disappearance. The poor rainfall cycle of the last few years has suddenly revealed the destructive nature of this system.
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As to replacing this primitive form of colonial exploitation with a new agrarian economy, it would seem that irrigated farming will become more intensive and more modernized. This ‘improvement’ of farming will certainly cause landownership to become a more important element of social differentiation than has been the case until now in extensive dry farming. This intensification is the precondition for bringing to tropical Africa the green revolution which, as we know, has accelerated class differentiation. Similarly in stockfarming, the trend is likely to be a gradual changeover from seminomad extensive herding to raising animals on ranches. An anonymous article in the English journal The Economist,[26] cynically informs us that the African Sahel is eminently suited to the production of meat for the developed world and that this vocation implies the disappearance of the seminomad herders who make up the present population. The new ranches which are increasing in number throughout the world under the impact of agribusinesses and foreign ‘aid’ and which have priority in the use of water resources, in fact only require a very small amount of labor. When deprived of water, these superfluous herdsmen will disappear. Thus African agriculture and stockfarming, boosted by the green revolution, will contribute to feeding the Europeans while the local populations will be asked to emigrate or ‘disappear’.
In its various forms, capital’s domination over African agriculture is already a characteristic feature of rural life throughout the African continent.
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