Marxism(s) and the Politics of Land

Abstract

This chapter attempts to present a coherent overview of land in the long and diverse histories of capitalist development, according to the ideas of Marx and subsequent Marxist scholarship and political positions, with all their divergences and contentions. It does so in five sections: “Landed Property and Rent in Capitalism,” “Transitions to Capitalism,” “Developments of Capitalism,” “Transitions to Socialism?” and “Marxism(s) and the Politics of Land.” The first locates Marx’s complex discussions of rent in his overall theorization of the capitalist mode of production and reports subsequent uses, adaptations, and extensions of that theory. The second section discusses several key questions in Marxist work on transitions to capitalism in the different times and places in the formation of a capitalist world economy. The third follows up on a central point in the second section—namely, the growing internationalization of capital and sometimes shifting forms of its interests in land and agricultural production. The fourth section offers brief overviews of the most important attempted transitions to socialist property and agriculture, in the twentieth-century Soviet Union and China. The final section includes a reminder of Marx’s brief encounter with the revolutionary Russian populism of his late life, and the inheritance of today’s agrarian populism from the Russian agricultural economist A. V. Chayanov, a near contemporary of Lenin. This section suggests that the positions of many Marxists and agrarian populists often overlap, but that irreconcilable differences remain between Marxist and populist understandings of peasant farmers.