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rhetoric about itself—the “liberal” ideology—has produced a myth: the “absolute and superior rationality” of economic management based on private and exclusive property in the means of production, which includes agricultural land. The dominant discourse applies the conclusions that it believes can be drawn from the construction of Western modernity and proposes them as the only “rules” necessary for the progress of all other peoples. To make land everywhere private property in the current sense of the term, such as practiced in the capitalist centers, is tantamount to spreading the policy of “enclosures” to the entire world, that is, to hastening the dispossession of the peasantry. This process is not new. It was started and pursued during the preceding centuries of capitalism’s world expansion, particularly in the context of colonial systems. Today, the WTO only envisages accelerating this process, while the coming devastation resulting from this choice is increasingly predictable and calculable, as is the resistance of the peasants and others. Such resistance might make possible the construction of a real and authentically human alternative.
In Africa, land tenure systems are still largely based on different principles than private property. This definition, clearly, is negative—not based on private property—and consequently cannot refer to a homogeneous category. Access to the land is regulated in all human societies. But the regulations are managed either by “customary communities,” “modern communities,” or the state, or more exactly and frequently, managed by a set of institutions and practices that involve individuals, groups, and the state.
“Customary” management (expressed in terms of customary law or called as such) has always (or almost always) excluded private property in the modern sense and always guaranteed access to the land to all families rather than individuals concerned, that is, to those forming a distinct “village community” that identifies itself as such. But it has never (or almost never) guaranteed “equal” access to the land. First, it most often excluded “foreigners” (vestiges of the most frequently conquered peoples) and “slaves” (of various statuses). Further, land was unequally distributed according to membership in clans, lineages, castes, or statuses: “chiefs,” “free men,” etc. Thus there is no reason to praise these customary rights unreasonably as, unfortunately, a number of anti-imperialist nationalist ideologues do. Progress will certainly require that they be challenged.
Customary management has never—or almost never—been carried out by “independent villages.” The latter have always been part of larger state bodies, stable or changing, strong or precarious, depending on circumstances, but rarely absent. The usage rights of communities and the families of which they are composed, then, have always been limited by the rights of a state, which collects a tribute (the reason why I call the huge family of pre-modern modes of production “tributary”). These complex forms of “customary” management, different from one country and time period to another, in the best of cases, exist only in extremely degraded forms, having been subject to the onslaught of the dominant processes of globalized capitalism for at least two centuries (in Asia and Africa), and sometimes five (in Latin America).
India is probably one of the clearest examples. Before British colonization, village communities managed access to the land or, more exactly, their dominant castes—ruling classes, excluding the lower castes—did so; the dalits were treated as a class of collective slaves similar to the helots of Sparta. The imperial Mughal state and its vassals (states of the rajahs and other kings), the collectors of the tribute, controlled and exploited these communities. The British elevated the zamindars, formerly charged with collecting the tribute, to the status of “landowners,” thereby forming an allied class of large landowners, in defiance of tradition. However, they maintained the “tradition” when it benefited them; for example, by “respecting” the exclusion of dalits from access to the land! Independent India has not called this unwieldy colonial heritage into question, which lies behind the incredible poverty of the majority of the peasantry and, consequently, its urban proletariat.6 The solution to these problems and the formation of a viable peasant family economy for the majority requires, consequently, an agrarian reform in the strict sense of the term (see below for the more precise meaning of this proposal). European colonialism in Southeast Asia and that of the United States in the Philippines have resulted in similar developments. Regimes of “enlightened despotism” in the Orient (the Ottoman Empire, Mohammed Ali’s Egypt, the Shahs of Iran) also mainly substituted private property in the modern sense of the term for the traditional arrangements, thereby benefiting a new class improperly called “feudal” (by the mainstream currents of historical Marxism) recruited from the higher level officials of the government system.
Consequently, private property in land is now characteristic of the majority of agricultural land—particularly the best of it—in all of Asia outside of China, Vietnam, and the former Soviet Central Asian republics. There remain no more than fragments of degraded semi-customary systems, particularly in the poorest regions, the ones that are the least attractive for capitalist agriculture. This structure is strongly differentiated, juxtaposing large landowners (rural capitalists), rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, and the landless. There is no peasant “organization” or “movement” that transcends these acute class conflicts.
In Arab Africa, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, the colonizers (except in Egypt) had granted to their settlers (or to the Boers in South Africa) “modern” private property, in general of the latifundia type. This heritage has certainly been eliminated in Algeria. But here the peasantry had practically disappeared, proletarianized (and turned into vagrants) by the expansion of colonial lands, while in Morocco and Tunisia, the local bourgeoisie took over the land (which was also partly the case in Kenya). In Zimbabwe, the revolution underway has challenged the colonial heritage, benefiting, in part, new, medium-sized landowners, of urban more than rural origin, and, in part, communities of poor peasants. South Africa is still not part of this trajectory. The fragments of the degraded semi-customary systems that still exist in the “poor” regions of Morocco, Berber Algeria, or in the Bantustans of South Africa, are subject 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.