part of the required agenda in India, Southeast Asia, South Africa, and Kenya.
Even where agrarian reform is an immediate and imperative requirement, it would still be an ambiguous progress because of its longer-term significance. It reinforces attachment to “small property” that becomes an obstacle to challenging a land tenure system based on private property. The history of Russia illustrates this. Changes begun after the abolition of serfdom (1861) and stimulated by the 1905 Revolution, followed by Stolypin’s policies, had already produced a demand for property that the 1917 Revolution recognized through a radical agrarian reform. As is well known, the new small landowners were unenthusiastic about giving up their rights in favor of the unfortunate cooperatives organized in the 1930s. Another path to development based on peasant family farming, organized around generalized small property, perhaps might have been possible. It was not attempted.
But what about regions (other than China and Vietnam) where the land tenure system is not (yet) based on private property? Here we are talking about inter-tropical Africa. This is an old debate. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, in his correspondence with the Russian Narodniks (Vera Zasulich, among others), Marx dared to assert that the absence of private property can be an asset for the socialist revolution, allowing the leap to a system for managing access to the land other than the one governed by private property. But he did not specify what form(s) this new system should take, with the qualifier “collective,” as true as it is, being inadequate. Twenty years later, Lenin concluded that this possibility no longer existed, eliminated by the penetration of capitalism and the accompanying spirit of private property. Is this judgment correct or not? I will not express an opinion on this question, for which my knowledge of Russia is insufficient. Still it is the case that Lenin was not inclined to give critical importance to this question, having accepted Kautsky’s view expressed in The Agrarian Question. Kautsky generalized the scope of the modern European capitalist model and concluded that the peasantry was destined to disappear due to capitalist expansion itself. In other words, capitalism would be able to “resolve the agrarian question.” This is true for the capitalist countries of the triad (15 percent of the world population), but it is false for the rest of the world (85 percent of the population). History demonstrates not only that capitalism has not settled this question for the 85 percent of the world’s population, but even that in continuing its worldwide expansion, it will not be able to settle it (except by genocide—a “beautiful” solution!). It was thus up to Mao Zedong and the Communist parties of China and Vietnam to give an adequate response to the challenge.
The question arose again in the 1960s with the independence of countries in Africa. The continent’s national liberation movements, and the states and party-states that resulted from those movements, had benefited, to varying degrees, from the support of the peasant majorities. Their natural propensity toward populism led them to imagine a specifically African path to socialism. This could probably be described as quite moderately radical in its relationship to imperialism as well as to the local classes connected to its expansion. It nevertheless posed the question of the reconstruction of peasant society in a humanist and universalist spirit. This often turned out to be strongly critical of the “traditions” that the foreign masters had attempted to use for their benefit.
All—or almost all—African countries adopted the same principle, formulated in the “state’s right to eminent domain” over all land. I am not one of those who consider this proclamation an error or that it was motivated by extreme “statism.” An examination of the real ways that the current system of managing the peasantry operates, along with its integration into the capitalist world economy, allows us to assess the scope of the challenge. The system’s management is effected by a complex system that simultaneously calls on “custom,” (capitalist) private property, and the rights of the state. The “custom” in question is degraded and serves only as decoration for the speeches of bloody dictators appealing to “authenticity,” a fig leaf they believe hides their thirst for looting and treason in the face of imperialism. The propensity to expand private appropriation encounters no serious obstacle other than the victims’ possible resistance. In some regions, well placed for cultivating rich crops (irrigated zones, truck farming in suburban areas), the land is bought, sold, and leased without any formal land title. The state’s eminent domain, the principle of which I defend, becomes a vehicle for private appropriation. The state can thus “give” the land required for setting up a tourist zone, a local or foreign agribusiness enterprise, or even a state farm. The land titles necessary for accessing the managed areas are rarely distributed with any transparency. In all cases, the peasant families that occupied these lands, and ordered to leave, are the victims of practices that are abuses of power. But to abolish the state’s eminent domain to transfer property to its occupants is not feasible in reality (it would require surveying and registering all village territories!), and insofar as it would be attempted, such an operation would allow rural and urban notables to get hold of the best parcels.
The correct response to the challenges of managing a land tenure system not based on private property (or at least one not dominated by it) requires reform of the state and its active involvement in establishing a modernized, economically effective, and (to avoid, or at least reduce inequalities) democratic system to manage access to land. The solution in any case is not a return to “custom,” which is actually impossible, and would only serve to accentuate inequalities and open the way to unbridled capitalism.
We cannot say that any of the African states have ever attempted to follow the path recommended here. Mali, the Sudanese Union, following its independence in September 1961, initiated what has been quite incorrectly called “collectivization.” In fact, the cooperatives set up were not production cooperatives. Production remained the exclusive responsibility of family farms. They were a form of modernized collective authority replacing supposed “custom” on which the colonial power had based itself. The party that took on this new modern authority had, besides, a clear awareness of the challenge and had set itself the aim of abolishing customary forms of authority—considered to be reactionary, even “feudal.” Undoubtedly, this new peasant authority, formally democratic (the leaders were elected), was in reality only as democratic as the state and party. In any case, it exercised “modern” responsibilities: assured that access to the land was “correctly” carried out, that is, without “discrimination,” managed credits, distribution of inputs (supplied by state trading entities), and marketing of the products (also, in part, delivered to state trading organizations). Nepotism and abuses of power were certainly never eradicated in this activity. But the only response to these abuses would have been progressive democratization of the state, not its retreat, as subsequently forced by liberalism (through an extremely violent military dictatorship) to the benefit of merchants (dioulas). In other areas, such as the liberated zones of Guinea-Bissau (under the influence of the theories advanced by Amílcar Cabral) and Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara, these challenges were directly confronted, sometimes resulting in unquestionable advances that today are conveniently erased from public awareness. In Senegal, the establishment of elected rural collectives is a response to the principle of which I will unhesitatingly defend. Democracy is a practice that requires an unending learning process, in Europe as much as in Africa.
What the currently prevailing view understands by “reform of the land tenure system” is the exact opposite of what is required to build an authentic and prosperous peasant economy. The view propagated by the propaganda instruments of collective imperialism—the World Bank, most development agencies, but also a number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) having large financial support—is that reform consists of rapidly increasing privatization of land and nothing more. The objective is obvious: creating conditions that would allow the “modern” pockets of agribusiness (foreign or local) to get hold of lands that are necessary for their expansion. But the additional production that these pockets could provide (for export or the profitable local market) will never be able to meet the challenge of building a prosperous society for everyone, which involves progress for the peasant family economy as a whole.
On the contrary, land reform designed with the aim of building a true, effective, and democratic alternative, based on thriving peasant family
