Landing the middle peasantry: Narodism in Tanzania

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 2

The impacts of neo-liberal policy on Indian peasantry = 非洲經濟及土地政策

The sustainability of small-scale cultivation, which largely characterizes Indian agriculture, though not in a homogeneous or undifferentiated manner, has been one of the important casualties of the trajectory of neo-liberal policies into which the country embarked upon in the early nineties. Driven by fiscal fundamentalism, this amounted to a veritable withdrawal of the state from economic operations, more so from agriculture. A host of policies adopted like the rationalization of input subsidies, downsizing of incentive pricing, decline in public investments, shrinking public extension services and contraction of institutional credit availability in rural areas all precipitated a widespread agrarian crisis with deflation in farm incomes and emergence of indebtedness among the peasantry (Patnaik, 2002; Reddy and Mishra, 2009; Banerjee, 2009)

Asia's and Latin America's development in comparative perspective : landlords, peasants, and industrialization

Latin America;agrarian reform;industrialization;East Asia;Taiwan;agrarian structure;economic development;comparative analysis;Korea R;agricultural policy;development strategy;industrial policy;newly industrializing countries;peasantry

An Ideological War of \u27Blood and Soil\u27 and Its Effect on the Agricultural Propaganda and Policy of the Nazi Party, 1929-1939

“One then builds a whole system of thought on such a brief, crisply formulated idea. The idea does not remain limited to this single statement; rather it is applied to every aspect of daily life and becomes the guide for all human activity. It becomes a worldview.” Dr. Joseph Goebbels spoke those words on January 9, 1928 to an audience of party members at the “Hochschule fuer Politik,” a series of talks that investigated the role of propaganda in the National Socialist movement. A few months prior to this event, voters had elected a farmer, Werner Willikens, in the South Hanover-Brunswick district of the Reichstag over a railroad worker. Seemingly, this election was unrelated to Goebbels’s speech on the purpose of propaganda; however, Willikens’s election to the Reichstag reflected Goebbels’s call for diversified propaganda that would highlight “every aspect of daily life.

The agrarian question in Tanzania: the case of tobacco

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 32Since independence in 1961, Tanzania has pursued a policy of institutionalizing a middle peasantry, while stymieing the development of capitalism's principal classes. The policy has taken an extreme form following a 1973 decision to forcibly reorganize the majority of Tanzania's peasants on individual block farms within nucleated villages and to bring the sphere of production more directly under the control of the state and international finance capital. This attempt to subordinate peasant labor to capital by perpetuating middle peasant households increasingly confines capital to its most primitive state. The pursuit of this policy in an export-oriented agricultural economy has particular contradictions and limitations. As long as labor and capital are not separated, they cannot be combined in their technically most advanced form. Hence the contradiction of the state's attempts to extract greater surplus value while simultaneously acting to expand and preserve middle peasant households. This paper explores the implications of such a course of action within the framework of Marxist writings on the agrarian question. Using tobacco production as, an example, it discusses the ways in which middle peasant households are being squeezed and pauperized by this backward capitalist system. It argues that the system inhibits the formal and real subordination of labor to capital and tends to perpetuate the extraction of absolute as opposed to relative surplus value. Household production fetters the concentration of capital and prevents the socialization of labor, while perpetuating the hoe as the main instrument of production

Rural class differentiation in Nigeria: Theory and practice - a quantitative approach in the case of Nupeland

The knowledge of social stratification within the peasantry is a decisive precondition of sustainable economic and political measures for an effective support of agricultural production in least developed countries. This is one of the reasons why also in Nigeria social scientist focus on the problem of rural social structures recently. Up to now it was considered uncontested truth that, although there is considerable social and economic differentiation between the so-called small peasants, there is no class formation within the West African peasantry. However, these conclusions may rather reflect misinterpretations of the class concept than the actual situation of the peasants. A critical review of common misinterpretations of the historic-materialist class concept lays the base for the proposition of a new methodology for an analysis of the Nupe peasantry and rural social spaces in Northern Nigeria. Applied to the results an empirical investigation of four Nupe villages in Northern Nigeria in 1976, the proposed model reveals the early stages of a rural capitalist development, notably among rice producing marsh farmers of Cis-Kaduna, despite barriers of the semi-feudal land tenure system still in vigour in Nupeland. Widespread assumptions on the predominance of social mobility as great social equalizer in Northern Nigeria are not backed by the available data.rural development; class; land tenure; social differentiation; mobility; Nupe; Nigeria

The Desperate Rebels of Shimabara: The Economic and Political Persecutions And the Tradition of Peasant Revolt

The Shimabara Rebellion has been studied throughout history by historians of East Asia. Originally conceived by both Japanese and Western scholars as a religious revolt against the anti-Christian Tokugawa government, later scholars contended that the Rebellion was a demonstration by the mistreated and impoverished and only tacitly related to Christian influences. This paper sets out to build on that narrative and to show the connection between the Christian resistance to the Tokugawa government and the movement of impoverished and desperate peasants, pushed to the brink of existence. Furthermore, this paper hopes to explore the goals of the Rebellion and establish the Shimabara Rebellion within the context of other rebellions during the Tokugawa era

In search of liberal Tsarism: the historiography of autocratic decline

The idea that the autocracy might have successfully modernized itself has, in recent years, spread widely beyond academic circles. However, a look at traditional and recent historiography shows that very few historians support this line. Even those who argue that Russia itself was developing rapidly have seen little prospect of the autocracy surviving the process. Equally, those who argue that radical socialist revolution might have been avoided tend to suggest, often by implication rather than in an explicit fashion, that a democratic, capitalist, bourgeois, and constitutional revolution was the alternative path. Thus it was not so much a question of tsarism or revolution but rather what kind of revolution was Russia facing

The Ethnic 'Other' in Ukrainian History Textbooks: The Case of Russia and the Russians

This paper examines portrayals of Russia and the Russians in two generations of Ukrainian history textbooks. It observes that the textbooks are highly condemning of Ukraine's main ethnic other in the guise of foreign ruler: the tsarist authorities and the Soviet regime are always attributed dubious and malicious intentions even if there is appreciation for some of their policies. By contrast, the books, certainly those of the second generation, refrain from presenting highly biased accounts of the ethnic other as a national group (i.e. Russians). Instances where negative judgements do fall onto Russians are counterbalanced by excerpts criticizing ethnic Ukrainians or highlighting conflicting interests within the Ukrainian ethnic group. The negative appraisal of the ethnic other as foreign ruler is clearly instrumental for the nation-building project as it sustains a discourse legitimating the existence of Ukraine as independent state. However, recent trends in history education, the paper concludes, suggest that the importance of nurturing patriotism as a national policy objective is diminishing

Peasants and the Great Leap Forward

Countries following Marxist ideology have typically showed a disinterest of the peasantry and sometimes even outright hostility. When it came to revolutions within these Marxist countries, the peasantry was typically forced following their government’s demands. These countries used their peasantry, always on the government’s own terms. That is, they never asked the peasantry what could be done for them, but rather simply demanded the peasantry follow them. China, prior to the “Great Leap Forward,” suffered through a civil war, putting a new Party in charge of the government. This government chose to include peasants in their revolution and promised them what they desired in return. Due to this new function and ideology in leadership, collectivization within China was a relatively resistance free movement. This paper will focus on five political factors implemented within China just prior to their collectivization movement that will be used to explain the lack of resistance within China compared to Russia