Agrarian Change and Peasant Studies Series

Current Book:
Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change
by Henry Bernstein, 2010 | PDF download

Pages: ~120 | Rate: 2 chapters/week
Location: Online | Next Meeting: 2024-04-16, 14:00 UTC
Contact: readinggroup@landrising.org

Development processes are never neutral. They impact various groups and classes of people differently. A high food price may benefit some rich peasants who produce and sell food surplus, but it may disadvantage landless rural laborers. A project on irrigation may benefit those who own the land, but not the landless tenants. Nowadays, official documents by governments and development agencies tend to lump different groups of people into vague categories like rural poor. This might be useful in some cases, but in large part this thinking can harm the poorest of the poor.

Using Marx’s theory of capitalism, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change argues that class dynamics should be the starting point of any analysis of agrarian change. It provides an accessible introduction to agrarian political economy while showing clearly how the argument for bringing class back in provides an alternative to inherited conceptions of the agrarian question. It illustrates what is at stake in different ways of thinking about class dynamics and the effects of agrarian change in today’s globalized world.

More info on the Agrarian Change and Peasant Studies Series can be found at ISS:
https://www.iss.nl/en/research/research-networks/initiatives-critical-agrarian-studies/icas-small-book-series

Books in Series

Peasants and the Art of Farming: A Chayanovian Manifesto
by Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, 2013

Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions
by Philip McMichael, 2013

Political Dynamics of Transnational Agrarian Movements
by Marc Edelman and Saturnino M. Borras Jr. 2016

Agrarian Change, Migration and Development
by Henry Veltmeyer and Raúl Delgado-Wise, 2016

Agroecology: Science and Politics
by Peter M. Rosset and Miguel A. Altieri, 2017

Speculative Harvests: Financialization, Food and Agriculture
by Jennifer Clapp and Ryan Isakson, 2018

Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right
by Walden Bello, 2019

Agriculture and the Generation Problem
by Ben White, 2020

Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles,
by Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and Jennifer C. Franco, 2023