5. SEGUIMENT I SUPORT ALS INFANTS I LES FAMÍLIES
5.3. LA GARANTIA DE LES CONDICIONS PER A UN SEGUIMENT ADEQUAT
2.1.1
2.1.1
2.1.1
Old and new peasantries (the peasant question)Old and new peasantries (the peasant question) Old and new peasantries (the peasant question)Old and new peasantries (the peasant question)
The most general way to define the peasantry is on basis of a particular production mode; peasants live from the land. However, rather than a neutral archetype of anyone working the land, peasants are defined by specific power relations they maintain with other social groups and states. Peasants are controlled and their resources extracted, yet uphold a certain degree of autonomy over their (family) labour and resource base (Van der Ploeg 2010, 22). More specifically, I follow the definition that peasants are
“members of rural, agricultural households who control the land they work either as tenants or as smallholders. They are organized in family bonds and village communities that meet a large part of their subsistence needs (production, exchange, credit, protection) and they pool different forms of income (from land, labor, and exchange). They are ruled by other social groups that extract a surplus either via rents, via (non-balanced) market transfers, or through control of state power (taxation).” (Vanhaute 2008, 42-4).
Their autonomous strategies for subsistence and protection convert peasantries into reserves of cheap labour, which links them to broader frameworks of production and control (Smith and Wallerstein 1992 in Vanhaute 2008, 40 and 47). Founded in the contested allocation of land and labour, peasantries constitute a social process (Shanin 1987, 6). They are “the historical outcome of an agrarian labor process which is constantly
adjusting to surrounding conditions, be it fluctuations of climate, markets, state exactions, political regimes, as well as technical innovations, demographic trends, and environmental changes” (Bryceson et al. 2000, 2–3). This adjustment shapes differentiated trajectories
moulded by internal reconfigurations, external pressures and articulations with “the outside world” in which land and labour figure as central vectors. Therefore, we should speak about peasantries in the plural, both old and new peasantries as the outcome of the (re)creation of essential (social and ecological) frontiers of the modern world-
system. This implies that “the role and fate of peasantries in the last few centuries can be
understood only in regard to the rise of historical capitalism as an integrated societal model”
(Vanhaute 2008, 52). The other way round, capitalist (labour division’s) expansion is inherently linked to the cycles of reconstruction and marginalization of peasant societies (Vanhaute, Cottyn and Wang 2014a).
Understanding the role of peasantries within broader processes of change is at the heart of what has been framed and reframed as “the peasant question” by Marxist thinkers, modernization theorists, dependency theorists, world-systems analysts, post- colonial theorists, etc. Gidwani lays the origins of the ongoing debate in “a gap between
observed phenomena and the predictions (and embedded political desires) of theory, concerning the prospects of a capitalist transformation of agriculture” (Gidwani 2008, xv). Within classic
Western modernization thinking, this gap is perceived as a wound, converting the peasant question in the challenge of how to suture this wound as a precondition for national development. In Marxist terminology, this equals the capitalist transformation of agriculture through industrialization, which implies processes of depeasantization and polarization (ibid, xvi). “Born” at the turn of the 20th century in a Russian context, the debate over that transformation was shaped by a dual economy view, first formulated by Chayanov in 1925, whose vision contrasted with that of Lenin and Kautsky formulated in 1899. The “Chayanov-Lenin debate” could be summarized as the discussion whether agrarian change is determined by respectively internal or external factors of the peasant household (Roseberry 1993, 334) and settled the peasant persistence vs. disappearance thesis as the determinant opposition of the field of peasant studies (Araghi 1995).68
In the latter half of the 20th century, Latin America has proven to offer particularly fertile ground for the re-discovery of the topic of agrarian change and its implications for peasant households (Roseberry 1993). It was here that a strong critique to the common assumption of a universal historical scheme based on modern-traditional separations, suggested by the Russian “founding fathers” developed. Departing from enquiries into the feudal or contrariwise capitalist character of the hacienda, dependency theorists reframed the question within a dialectical and mutually reinforcing relationship. Yet, this developmentalist phase of the peasant question continued to adopt a dichotomous framework in which the local (the villagers) and the global (“the structure of society”) appeared to exist disconnected from each other
68 One side of that field is occupied by the teleological disappearance thesis in which the expansion of
capitalism equals the eventual conversion and hence evaporation of peasant producers into capitalist and proletarized producers (Lenin and Kautsky). The other side holds to the essentialist permanence thesis in which peasant producers survive as capitalism expands (Chayanov).
(Roseberry 1993, 328-30; Edelman 2005, 337).69 From the middle of the 1970s on, a new generation of anthropologists and historians re-discovered the peasantry, taking up the effort to counter difficultly ineradicable reductions of peasant resilience to exceptional eruptions of an otherwise “inert force – dormant, traditional, or ineffectual” (Roseberry 1993, 318).70 By writing “from below”, they attempted to give more texture to the variety of peasant experiences, preferably as detailed as possible. However, while this generation includes authors whose work still counts as incontournable, their writings would eventually become condemned for propagating essentialist, dualistic and linear interpretations, although in a less direct way than the pioneering peasant literature such as Chayanov.
When the exclusive focus on local knowledge was identified as too disproportionate, the lens was redirected once more. In view of the effects of neoliberal globalization as well as the reinforced vitality of peasant resistance, the field of peasant and agrarian studies has witnessed a renewed interest in peasant disappearance and persistence theses over the last two decades (Bernstein 2003 and 2010; Barkin 2004; Johnson 2004; McMichael 2006; Van der Ploeg 2010).71 Averse from a-historical interpretations of rectilinear subsistence-to-capitalism transformations, the agrarian question has been taken beyond the parameters of its classic reading. As the important contribution compiled by Kay and Akram-Lohdi (2008) testifies, this goes together with an increasing attentiveness towards integrating a global perspective in a less or more balanced way with local narratives, and theoretical with empirical analysis.
Triggered by the rise and globalization of agrarian and food crises, the regained academic attention towards peasantries and their livelihood strategies demonstrates an increasing awareness of the environmental72 and the sovereignty73 dimensions of the
69
Influential peasant literature of the 1960s-70s include the work of Polanyi 1958; Wolf 1966; Moore 1966; Frank 1969; Stavenhagen 1970; Hobsbawm 1973; Mintz 1974; Kay 1974; Paige 1975; Bartra 1974; Pearse 1975; and Scott 1976.
70 Shanin 1987 delivered an essential contribution to the establishment of this generation. Peasant scholars
were particularly productive in the Andean region with key publications including Duncan and Rutledge 1977; Martínez-Alier 1977; Custred and Orlove 1980; Mallon 1983; Dandler and Calderón 1984; Figueroa 1984; Albó and Barnadas 1985; and Stern 1987.
71
Contrary to Hobsbawm’s interpretation (1994 ), the current that has gained most legitimacy upholds that the complexity of peasants’ “agrarian way of life” (in the sense that its internal family- and community-based labour regulations allow the coexistence of subsistence and commodity production) undermines linear interpretations of the disappearance of such way of life (Johnson 2004; Bryceson 2000). Indeed, “the campesino
of today is usually not the campesino of even 15 years ago” (Borras, Edelman and Kay 2008, 83), but the impact that
agro-food systems undergo due to shifts in the international division of labour is nothing new to that campesino, except for the acceleration and intensification of those shifts (Borras 2009).
72
Moore presents “the Agrarian Question as Ecological Question—whose world-historical import is profoundly
agrarian/peasant question and point to their political repercussions.74 Urbanization, land grab, the loss of food security and unequal income structures are just some of the high priorities on the world policy agenda that are intimately connected to the peasant question. This revitalisation of the field and its stronger global focus involves a more intensively mobilizing peasantry (McMichael 2008). From the local to transnational scales, peasant movements are asserting the importance of as well as the difficulties for family-based sustainable production modes within an ever more globalising world (Altieri 2002; Altieri and Nicholls 2005; Petras 2005). Movements such as the Via Campesina contest the supposed linear outcome of long-term incorporation.75 The declining centrality of rural zones in the modern world-system is just one aspect of a more complex process that involves the production (peasantization), erosion (depeasantization) and recovery (repeasantization) of a peasant lifestyle. These are interdependent processes that closely entangle with processes of de/re-ruralization (transformations in the spatial ordering of agriculture) and de/re-agrarianization (transformations in agricultural production) (Vanhaute 2008).76
As the effects of the widening (expansion) and deepening (intensification) of relations of commodification trigger a diversification of peasant livelihood strategies,
73 By posing the classical agrarian question as a “food question”, McMichael reveals the inherent question of
sovereignty, thereby inverting its original focus. “Rather than raising questions about the trajectory of a given
narrative, the food sovereignty movement questions the narrative itself” (McMichael 2008, 218-9).
74 Borras 2009; Boutsen 2008; Peemans 2008; De Schutter 2014. See also the contributions in the Symposium on
the 2007-2008 World Food Crisis published by Journal of Agrarian Change (Johnston 2010, 69-129).
75 Commenting on the international peasant movement Via Campesina, Borras concludes that “today, perhaps
more than ever, what happens in and in relation to the rural world is critical to our understanding of the broader world and the very future of human society” (Borras 2009, 25). See also http://viacampesina.org.
76 The break-up of local models for socio-economic organization and cultural-spiritual belonging through
state intervention facilitates a process of peripheralizing incorporation, defined as peasantization. The conscious creations of peasantries is particularly obvious in more extractive societies (Vanhaute 2012, 5) as in colonial regimes where collective forms of agricultural labour are replaced by more regulable forms of based on family firms with a more direct access to markets. But also post-colonial land reforms tend to have an agenda oriented at “peasantizing” the rural masses, think of Bolivia’s revolutionary land reform of 1953 (Rivera 1987, 100; Urioste 2001, 11-2). Ecological, technological and infrastructural changes, demographic trends, political-legal impositions and the intervention of new economic players may alter the access to land, labour and/or capital in these reorganized models, thereby undermining of the family basis of small-scale agricultural producers. The consequent process of depeasantization, goes together with deagrarianization as the income pooling strategies of peasant populations become less reliant upon agriculture (Vanhaute 2012, 6). Similarly, de-ruralization, most strongly observed in the reverse side of worldwide urbanization, can be considered as a major world-historical tendency (Mears 1997 cited in Johnson 2004, 60). Simultaneously, we can speak of a repeasantization, pushing non-rural workers to peasant spaces in times of market contraction or the creation of a New Rurality visible in urban-rural linkages, the diversification of rural livelihoods with non-agricultural income sources, political decentralization, etc. (Rosas-Baños 2013; Hecht 2010).
what globally seems to disappear in essence constitutes an essentially uneven and regionally diverse process. The fact that powerful, apparently universal, trends do not automatically nor inevitably proceed towards the vanishing and elimination of existing “to be incorporated”-zones, exposes peasants as “initiators of change as well as reactors to
it, as peoples simultaneously disposed to “adapt” to objective forces beyond their control and to “resist” inroads on hard-won rights and achievements” (Roseberry 1993, 318). Rather than
assessing this combination of autonomy and participation claims in terms of opposition (or even ineptitude to) versus openness to (or even craving for) capitalist incorporation, it attests to a “moral economy” according to which peasants bargain survival guarantees with their “extractors”, through “confrontations in the market-place” which may include rebellion as well as taxation and trade relations (Thompson 1970 and 1991, 259-351; Scott 1976; Edelman 2005). This resilience is key factor in the production of new and deviation of old frontiers of land control.