to the threat of private appropriation, encouraged by forces from both inside and outside of these societies. In all these situations, the character of peasant struggles (and possibly the organizations that lead them or join forces with them) should be carefully defined: do these movements and demands represent “rich peasants,” in conflict with the direction of particular state policies (and the influence of the dominant world system on these policies), or do they represent poor peasants and the landless? Can they form an “alliance” against the dominant (so-called neoliberal) system? Under what conditions and to what extent? Can the demands—whether expressed or not—of the poor peasants and the landless be overlooked?
In subtropical Africa, the apparent continuation of “customary” systems is probably more visible. Here the colonization model was different and referred to as a “trading economy” (économie de traite). Management of access to land was left to so-called customary authorities, yet still controlled by the colonial state via authentic traditional chiefs or false ones fabricated by the administration. The aim of such control was to force the peasants to produce, beyond their own subsistence needs, a quota of products specifically for export (peanuts, cotton, coffee, cacao). The preservation of a land tenure system that did not include private property was the result of colonization since no land rent entered into the composition of the prices for the designated products. This system resulted in soil mismanagement, destroyed, sometimes permanently, by the extension of cultivation (as can be seen in the desertification of the groundnut-growing areas of Senegal). Once more, capitalism demonstrated that its inherent “short-term rationality” was well and truly behind an ecological disaster. The juxtaposition of subsistence food production and production for export also made it possible to pay peasants for their labor at rates close to zero. In these conditions, to speak of a “customary land tenure system” is to overdo it considerably. This is really a new system that preserves only the appearances of traditions, often the less valuable parts.
China and Vietnam are unique examples of a system for managing access to land that is not founded on private property or on “custom,” but on a revolutionary new right, unknown almost everywhere else: all peasants, defined as inhabitants of a village, have equal access to the land (I emphasize the term “equal”). This right is the greatest achievement of the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions.
In China—and even more in Vietnam, which was more thoroughly colonized—the old land tenure systems (those I have called “tributary”) were already quite eroded by capitalism. The old ruling classes of the imperial system of government largely monopolized agricultural land as private or almost private property, while capitalist development fostered the formation of new classes of rich peasants. Mao Zedong is the first—and probably the only one, followed by Chinese and Vietnamese communists—to have defined a strategy for agrarian revolution based on the mobilization of the majority of the poor, landless, and middle peasants. The victory of this revolution straightaway allowed the abolition of private land—replaced by state-owned land—and the organization of new forms of equal access to the land for all peasants. This organization has certainly passed through several successive phases, including one inspired by the Soviet model of production cooperatives. The limitations of the latter’s achievements led the two countries to return to peasant family farms. Is this model viable? Can it produce continuous improvement in production without generating surplus rural labor? Under what conditions? What state support policies are required? What forms of political management can meet the challenge?
Ideally, the model implies parallel rights: of the state as sole landowner, on the one hand, and of the usufructuary (the peasant family), on the other. The state guarantees equal distribution of village lands among all families. It prohibits any use other than family cultivation, such as renting out the land. It guarantees that the product of the investments made by the usufructuary returns to him, in the short term, through his ownership of all of the farm’s production (freely marketable, although the state guarantees it by its purchases at a minimum price) and, in the long term, through the inheritance of the usufruct by the children who remain on the farm (the emigrant, when leaving the village, loses the right of access to the land, which returns to the basket of land for redistribution). Since this is certainly about rich soils, but also small (even tiny) farms, the system is viable only as long as vertical investment (a well-organized green revolution—not the one pushed by agribusiness—without large-scale motorization) proves to be as effective in allowing an increase in production per rural farmer as horizontal investment, that is, expansion of the farm supported by intensification of motorization.
Has this “ideal” model ever been implemented? It was probably close to being implemented in China during the Deng Xiaoping era. It remains the case that, while it could produce a strong degree of equality within a village, it had never been able to avoid inequalities among communities, which were a function of soil quality, population densities, and proximity to urban markets. No system of redistribution, even via cooperatives and state marketing monopolies during the Soviet phase, was up to the challenge.
What is certainly more serious is that the system itself is subject to internal and external pressures that erode its social scope and significance. Access to credit, under satisfactory conditions for the provision of inputs, is subject to all kinds of bargaining and interventions, both legal and illegal: “equal” access to the land is not synonymous with “equal” access to better conditions of production. The popularization of “market” ideology encourages this erosion. The system tolerates (even legitimates once again) the leasing of land (tenant farming) and the use of wage labor. The rhetoric of the right—encouraged from the outside—repeats that it will be necessary to give to the peasants “ownership” of the land and to open the “market in agricultural land.” It is more than obvious that the rich peasants (even agribusiness) who aspire to increase their property, lie behind such views.
This management system that regulates peasant access to the land has up till now been undertaken by the state and its ruling party. It is clearly possible to envision a system managed by actually elected village councils. That is probably necessary because there is not really any other way to mobilize the majority opinion and reduce the intrigues of a minority who might profit from a more pronounced capitalist development. The “dictatorship of the party” has been proven to be prone to sink into careerism, opportunism, even corruption. There are social struggles underway in the rural areas of China and Vietnam. They are just as prominent elsewhere in the world. But they are mainly defensive, that is, they are committed to defending the heritage of the revolution—the equal right for everyone to the land. Such defense is necessary insofar as this heritage is more threatened than it appears, in spite of repeated affirmations to the contrary by the two governments that “state ownership of land will never be abolished in favor of private property”! But this defense today requires recognition of the right to engage in such practices through organizing those who are concerned—that is, the peasants.
Forms of organizing agricultural production and land tenure systems are too diverse throughout Asia and Africa to construct a single path for the “peasant alternative” that can work for everyone. Hence, agrarian reform should be understood as a redistribution of private property when it is considered to be too unequally distributed. This is not a matter of a “reform of the land tenure system,” since this system is still managed by the principle of ownership. Nevertheless, this reform is necessary both to satisfy the perfectly legitimate demand of the poor and landless peasants, and to reduce the political and social power of large landowners. But where it has been implemented, in Asia and Africa after the liberation from imperialist and colonial domination, it was accomplished by hegemonic non-revolutionary social forces, meaning that these reforms were not managed by the majority of poor and dominated classes, except in China and Vietnam. In the latter, there was not any “agrarian reform” in the strict sense of the term, but, as I have said, a suppression of private property in land, an affirmation of state property, and an implementation of the principle of “equal” access to land use for all peasants. Elsewhere, true reforms dispossessed only the large landowners to the ultimate benefit of middle and even (in the longer term) rich peasants, while neglecting the interests of the poor and landless. That was the case in Egypt and
