Peasants, Capitalists, and Historians: A Review Article (reviewing Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry; Clarence-Smith, Slaves, Peasants and Capitalists in Southern Angola; Beinart, thesis on Pondoland)

Literature › Works

Frederick Cooper (1981). Peasants, Capitalists, and Historians: A Review Article (reviewing Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry; Clarence-Smith, Slaves, Peasants and Capitalists in Southern Angola; Beinart, thesis on Pondoland). Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2. Taylor & Francis.

Type	journal article
Scope	Comparative and methods
Method	synthesis review
Period studied	1840–1950s (with comparative material to the 1970s)
Regions	South Africa, Pondoland, Southern Angola, Kenya, Zanzibar, Northern Rhodesia, West Africa
Themes	agriculture land, origins segregation, mining migrant labour, comparative theory, labour markets wages, resistance social movements
Citation key	cooper1981

Argument

Cooper reviews three studies of southern African agrarian change (Bundy, Clarence-Smith, Beinart) and uses them to criticise the concepts of peasantry, underdevelopment and peripheralization. He argues that these concepts derive class structure and direction of change from market incorporation and neglect relations of production, labour control and class struggle. He praises Bundy's evidence that the South African peasantry was destroyed by mining capital, white landowners and the state, but says Bundy never analyses the landlord-tenant relationship or the household. Beinart's Pondoland study is held up as a model of analysis from the inside. The South African transformation to capitalist agriculture is shown to be exceptional, resting on land alienation and intense labour control. Comparison with Kenya, Zanzibar and Angola shows how hard such control was to achieve elsewhere.

Evidence and method

Secondary literature and the three reviewed works (Bundy's book, Clarence-Smith's book, Beinart's PhD thesis), plus a wide comparative secondary literature on Kenya, Zanzibar, West Africa, Tanganyika, Zambia, Latin America and the US South. No original archival or statistical data.

Findings

• Summarises Bundy's thesis: the gold mines' demand for labour and the viability of white capitalist farming reversed the African peasant response to markets. (p. 5)

  This trend was reversed after the gold mining industry developed its voracious appetite for cheap labour and the produce market finally made capitalist forms of production on white-owned farms economically viable

• Cooper endorses Bundy's core conclusion that the peasantry was destroyed by deliberate state and class action rather than by inevitable processes. (p. 11)

  Whether or not the peasant is doomed to die a 'natural' death through the inevitable course of the world economy, Bundy has shown that the South African peasant was murdered.

• Critique of Bundy: he never analyses how differentiated peasants formed classes or how the household and relations of production changed. (p. 8)

  This Bundy does not do: indeed, he barely discusses the peasant household - big or small - and gives no more than hints about the impact of the market on relations of production.

• Underdevelopment theory is criticised for teleology and for treating production as a derivative of the world market. (p. 6)

  it substitutes a grand teleology for analysis of causation and process; it gives the market a deterministic role in the world economy

• Following Morris, the shift from labour tenancy to wage labour was gradual and regionally uneven, lasting well beyond the 1920s. (p. 9)

  Labour tenancy dominated until the 1920s, and the predominance of remuneration in cash wages developed through 'imperceptible' changes, and persisted even longer in some regions.

• Labour tenancy was a capitalist control device born of African resistance to total separation from land, and its abandonment brought escalated coercion. (p. 10)

  While far from an antiquated labour system distinct from capitalism, the various forms of labour tenancy represent a particular type of solution to the problems of control and supervision of farm labour

• The demise of labour tenancy coincided with the crisis of migrant labour in industry and mining, and migrancy was preserved in agriculture through coercion. (p. 10)

  The demise of labour tenancy occurred at the very time when the contradictions of migrant labour in industry and mining were coming to the fore

• Beinart's Pondoland evidence contradicts the view that labour migration simply followed the decay of rural production. (p. 16)

  Labour migration and crop production expanded together in the early decades of this century.

• Capitalist agriculture depended on land alienation and control of workers, which made it hard to achieve outside South Africa. (p. 17)

  The problem with capitalist agriculture was that it depended on two of the most coercive and difficult acts possible in agricultural societies: the once-and-for-all alienation of land and the daily struggle to make workers obey.

• Capitalist agriculture required a systematic double alienation of workers from land and from their own time. (p. 18)

  Capitalist accumulation implied this double alienation - from land and from time - and it had to be applied systematically and generally.

• The articulation thesis explains sub-reproduction wages but misses the instability of migrancy. South Africa chose escalated coercion over the stabilization pursued on the Zambian Copperbelt. (p. 29)

  At the very least, this 'articulation' explains why it was possible for capitalists to pay wages below the cost of reproducing their labour force.

• When migratory labour's contradictions mounted in the late 1940s, the South African state escalated coercion rather than stabilizing labour. (p. 29)

  in South Africa, after some consideration of a similar direction of change, the state escalated coercion