Back to the future?Marx, modes of production and the agrarian question

摘要

It has been almost 150 years since a specifically agrarian political economy emerged, originating in Karl Marx's (1976, orig. 1867) analysis of the genesis of capitalism, and the processes by which the core characteristics of capitalism came to be established: 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 a system that is, because of its capacity to develop the material forces of production, a necessary precondition of a more economically prosperous and more socially humane society.1 This is the terrain of what Karl Kautsky later called 'the agrarian question', which he defined when he asked 'whether, and how, capital is seizing hold of agriculture, revolutionising it, making old forms of production and of property untenable and creating the necessity for new ones' (Kautsky 1988: 12, orig. 1899). Terence J. Byres (1991) has argued that in order for agriculture to no longer pose any obstacles tocapitalist transformation, the agrarian question must be 'resolved' through some form of successful 'agrarian transition'. Byres's definition of a capitalist agrarian transition was 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).