[lbo-talk] pain & development

Grant Lee grantlee at iinet.net.au
Tue Nov 4 07:15:39 PST 2003


Michael Pollak said:


> When was there land reform in France? The French Revolution? Are you
> saying you're against that? :o)

No, but I wish Babeuf had been able to take it a step further ;-)


> As for land reform producing a class that is dependent on state largesse
> and resistant to further reform -- this differs from the class of
> unreformed landholders exactly how?

There are more of them.


> No class of any kind has ever favored reforms that looked like they would
> weaken or extinguish it. Have they?

One of the stated purposes of the Bolshevik NEP was the gradual abolition of the kulak class through market forces and taxation (as opposed to the methods favoured by Preobrazhensky, Trotsky and Stalin). Nevertheless the NEP was very popular with the kulaks because they did very well under it, if only in the short term.


> The general argument about land reform being progressive is that it is
> redistributes power more equally in the countryside.

The Bolsheviks, being old-school Marxists, were very careful to distinguish between kulaks, sredniaks and bednaks. Deliberately or otherwise, such distinctions are rarely made by capitalist/proto-capitalist states implementing agrarian reform, and the end result is increased accumulation at the higher end of the peasant strata.


> And while it doesn't
> lead by itself to political democracy, if you do try to set up a political
> democracy, such redistribution seems like a necessary support -- countries
> that skip it end up being run by the same old rural oligarchies. What
> would you say, for example, to the argument that one of the main barriers
> to Pakistan ever developing a real democracy was that it never undertook
> the sort of Zamindar reforms that India undertook in its comparable
> northern territories in 1952?

Maybe true. But I'm not advocating the maintenance of feudal/semi-feudal/etc relations.



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