But if
>> > someone said to me what Mark Jones said to Doug Henwood (I.e that I'd
>> > tell black people that sharecropping was progressive...), he or she had
>> > better hope that they were a lot bigger than me. Those are fighting
>> > words and do not put the struggle forward one bit.
Pranab Bardhan writes:
:...Marxist economists and sociologists often emphasize how given
exploitative 'relations of production' (like sharecropping) act as a
'fetter' on the development of the 'forces' of production' and cite that as
an instutional obstacle to the devlopment. The neo classical property righs
shcool, on the other hand, emphasizes how given well defined property
rights, efficient resource allocation is independent of the choice of land
tenure. The latter school often ignores the serious cases of market
failures, incomplete markets, and information asymmetry (which falsify the
presumption of reource allocation) that give rise to sharecropping as an
imperfect economic response. But the marxists often ignore the origin and
nature of the economic response: under a set of constraints (like market
failure), sharecropping does serve a real economic function, and its is
simple abolition without taking care of the factors that gave rise to this
institution in the first place may not necessarily improve the conditions
of the intended beneficiaries of the abolition program. Marxists have also
a tendency to equate sharecropping tenancy with a particular ('feudal')
mode of production, thus ignoring how in the real world the institution
adapts itself to the development of the forces of production,"
>From Land, Labor and Rural Poverty. Columbia, 1984
rb