Tom Brass
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 5192089 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Tom Brass |
| NOMBRES | Tom |
| APELLIDO | Brass |
| FIRMA | BRASS T |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Cambridge |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 87 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 621 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 85 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1980 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
Critiques
Critiques presented here in defence of development range across a number of issues, all of which are central to discussions about the desirability or undesirability of this historical process. These include one particular aspect – labour market competition – of the debate about racism, why the reproduction of this ideology is more acute at some historical conjunctures but not others, the same question that can also be asked of the industrial rese…
Did Someone Mention Socialism
Marxism Missing, Missing Marxism
Examining how Marxist theory is missing but necessary, this book traces the theoretical maze in which Marxism currently finds itself, and from which it is trying to exit whilst at the same time remaining epistemologically intact. When stripped of any or all of its core elements – such as class formation/consciousness/struggle, and a socialist transition – it ceases to be what historically Marxists have claimed it is. Consequently, the book consti…
Introduction
Given continuing debate about the plantation system, this introduction examines some of the theoretical issues surrounding the recruitment, reproduction, and dissolution of its workforce, and in particular the free/unfree character of its social relations of production. It begins by confronting two interrelated revisionist interpretations of production relations on the plantation: on the one hand neoclassical economic theory, and on the other the…
Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia
Revolution and Its Alternatives
Against the usual argument heard most frequently on the left, that there is no subject for a radical politics together with its form of political mobilization, there is – but in the absence of a radical leftist project, this subject has in the past transferred, and in many instances is still transferring, his/her support to the radical politics on offer from the other end of the ideological spectrum. The combination of on the one hand a globally …
Power Wanting, but Wanting Power? Betraying Revolution (Again)
Considered here are both the fact of and the reasons for the current disappearance of revolutionary agency from leftist theory/practice. In the centenary year of the Russian revolution, this process of vanishing, not just of direct action designed to capture state power but also of socialism itself, is traced from the advocacy of evolution of and latterly resistance to - but not transcendence of - capitalism. This reformist trend is linked in tur…
The Incompatibles? Socialism, Academia, Populism
Traced here is the historical role of academia in the way revolution and socialism have vanished from the leftist agenda, together with its political and ideological effects and implications. Thus a similar path was followed from the late 19th century onwards by the reformism/revisionism of katheder -socialists, and from the 1980s onwards by the ‘new’ populist postmodernism in academia. Both privileged culture and reified peasant and ethnic ident…
Reinventing India
Labour Markets, Identities, Controversies
Debates about labour markets and the identity of those who, in an economic sense, circulate within them, together with the controversies such issues generate, have in the past been confined by development studies to the Third World. Now these same concerns have shifted, as the study of development has turned its attention to how these same phenomena affect metropolitan capitalist nations. For this reason, the book does not restrict the analysis o…
Marxism, “Marxism,” Or Populism? A Reply to Van Der Linden and Roth
Festina Lente
Class Struggle and Unfree Labor
Late 18th- and 19th-century laissez-faire ideology approved/disapproved of a wide range of social and economic categories: landownership, free/unfree labor-power, class formation and struggle, industrial production, and the state. Much of this discourse is shared by a variant of Marxism, the semi-feudal thesis, an influential participant in Third World development debates from the 1960s onwards. Currently, however, another variant of Marxist theo…
Viva La Revolución? Reassessing Hobsbawm on peasants
Examined critically here are the writings by Hobsbawm on peasants in Latin America. Eschewing participant/observation, his analyses missed crucial aspects of rural society in Peru during the pre-reform era, a consequence being the mistaken belief that production relations on latifundia were obstacles to economic growth and would therefore vanish once landlords were expropriated. Because they are compatible with capitalist development, however, th…
Who These Days is Not a Subaltern? The Populist Drift of Global Labor History
The rejection by current global labor history of Marxist political economy, and replacing of its class analysis with a more inclusive concept of “proletarian multiverse,” both have serious political and theoretical implications. In keeping with similarly broad categories (“subaltern,” “multitude”) advocated by the “new” populist postmodernism, among the key components regarded by global labor history as agents of a progressive anti-capitalist mob…
Houellebecq, anthropologist
Taking liberties
Free Markets, Unfree Labour
Reviewed here are contrasting approaches to the same locus of marginalisation: the precariat in the informal sector. In developed and underdeveloped countries alike, neo-liberal economic growth is increasingly dependent on insecure, temporary and low-paid employment. Such laissez faire capitalism demonstrates additionally that – contrary to earlier views about the capitalism/unfreedom link – bonded labour is not an obstacle to accumulation, since…
Peasants, academics, populists
Traced here is the way peasant economy/culture has been reconceptualized in academic studies over the past three decades. The pre-war image of innate family farmers as embodiments of national identity, a populist discourse mobilized by the political right in Europe and Asia, was replaced by modernization theory during the post-war era. The object was to promote economic development, thereby challenging populist images of unchanging and unchangeab…
Modern Capitalism and Unfree Labor
Examined here are recent contributions to an important and longstanding debate in political economy, about the link between capitalist development, the employment of unfree labor, and its role in a transition to socialism. These contributions maintain that, because Marxist theory failed to understand the centrality of unfreedom to modern capitalism, a new explanation of this link is needed. It is argued here that, although many of these new chara…
Debating Capitalist Dynamics and Unfree Labour
Examined here are recent contributions to an important and longstanding debate in political economy, about the link between capitalist development and the employment of unfree labour. These contributions maintain that, because Marxist theory failed to understand the centrality of unfreedom to modern capitalism, a new explanation of this link is needed. However, it is argued here that many of these new characteristics are in fact no different from…
Is the industrial reserve army a racist concept
A stroll in Zuccotti Park
David Graeber Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House Publishing, New York, 2011; 534 pp: 9781933633862, US$37 (hbk) David Graeber The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, Allen Lane, London, 2013; xxi + 326pp: 9781846146633, 14.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) These two books are important, bur not in the way their author intended. Together, they reveal as clearly as need be the seductions and pitfalls awaiting those who announce th…
Good companions or usual suspects
Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho (eds.) The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, 2012; xiii + 419 pp: 9781848445376, 135 [pound sterling] (hbk) In a variation on an old cliche, it might be argued that every epoch gets the Marxist dictionary - written by Marxists, about Marxism, for actual/potential Marxists - that it deserves. Those published during the 1930s and 1940s (Burns 1936, 1939; Gould 1947; Selsam 1949) emphasis…
Intern Nation
Ross Perlin Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy, Verso: London, 2011, xviii + 258 pp: 9781844676866 14.99 [pounds sterling] (hbk) Readers of this journal need no convincing as to just how 'feral' neoliberalism has become. Having first undermined the ability to oppose politically (anti-strike legislation, union busting, employment outsourcing, the fall of communism, the rise of 'New Labour') and ideological…
Moral economists, subalterns, new social movements, and the (re-) emergence of a (post-) modernized (middle) peasant
This article examines the way in which peasant movements in both India and Latin America have been reinterpreted by the postmodern and politically revisionist project of the subaltern studies series on India and the new social movements theory on Latin America. It is suggested that much of the conceptual analysis embodied in both these frameworks is prefigured in the earlier 'moral economy' approach, incorporating the middle peasant thesis of Wol…
Class struggle and the deproletarianisation of agricultural labour in Haryana (India)
This article considers the way in which labour attachment is theorised, both in the 1950s Agricultural Labour Enquiries, and subsequently in the work of Rudra, Bardhan, and Breman. Common to all these texts is a positive conceptualisation of attached labour, and consequently the elimination of its element of unfreedom. Instead, the relation is presented in terms of a materially reciprocal exchange between landholder and worker, a transaction whic…
Unfree labour and capitalist restructuring in the Agrarian sector
Based on fieldwork in La Convención, Peru, and the Indian Punjab, this article examines the contribution of unfree labour to capitalist restructuring in the agrarian sector, a process whereby free wage labour is replaced by bonded labour. Debt bondage is analysed in relation to class struggle in these labour-scarce contexts, specifically with regard to its utilisation by capitalist producers to lower the cost and simultaneously maintain control o…
Some Observations on Unfree Labour, Capitalist Restructuring, and Deproletarianization
Both historically and actually, there is a complex interrelationship between the existence of unfree labour and the process of class formation and struggle in the course of agrarian transformation. However, much current writing about rural labour in the Third World is based on three interrelated assumptions. First, that labour market imperfections are always the fault of peasants resisting the attempts of capital to proletarianize them; second, t…
Medieval Working Practices'? British Agriculture and the Return of the Gangmaster
The Select Committee Report reviewed here outlines both the fact of and the dynamics structuring the return to British agriculture of the gangmaster system. Wrongly described by some observers as an aspect of a developing capitalism, by conservative historiography as benign/non-coercive, and by the present British government as the resurgence of 'medieval working practices', this highly exploitative form of labour contracting was condemned earlie…
Why Unfree Labour is Not 'So-Called
In a recent critique of the deproletarianization thesis, which links the reproduction of unfree labour mainly - but not only - in Third World agriculture to class struggle prosecuted by capitalist producers, Banaji maintains in effect that there is no such thing as unfree labour. Equating the latter with nineteenth-century liberal ideas about freedom as consent, he conceptualizes all historical working arrangements simply as 'disguised' wage-labo…
Introduction
1994). Introduction: The new farmers’ movements in India. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 21, New Farmers' Movements in India, pp. 3-26
Latin American peasants - new paradigms for old
2002). Latin American peasants - new paradigms for old? The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 29, No. 3-4, pp. 1-40
The agrarian myth, the 'new' populism and the 'new' right
It is argued here that the 'new' populism and the 'new' right, both of which emerged after the 1960s and consolidated during the 1990s, are structured discursively by the agrarian myth, and with it the reaffirmation of peasant essentialism. Whereas the earlier variants of the 'new' populism associated with the views of Marcuse and Fanon expressed fears about alienation involving the estrangement from an 'authentic' peasant selfhood, in the Thirdw…
Debating Capitalist Dynamics and Unfree Labour
Examined here are recent contributions to an important and longstanding debate in political economy, about the link between capitalist development and the employment of unfree labour. These contributions maintain that, because Marxist theory failed to understand the centrality of unfreedom to modern capitalism, a new explanation of this link is needed. However, it is argued here that many of these new characteristics are in fact no different from…
Introduction
1992). Introduction: Proletarianisation and deproletarianisation on the colonial plantation. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 19, Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia, pp. 1-40
Weapons of the week, weakness of the weapons
Over the past half century the theory, practice and politics informing development studies have followed contrasting trajectories, a tangled epistemological pattern displayed inadvertently by some of the contributions to three of the four books reviewed here. This inconsistency has resulted in confusion, not least where current Marxist approaches to the agrarian question are concerned. Unsurprisingly, therefore, misinterpretations of unfree labou…
Rural labour in agrarian transitions
Additional informationNotes on contributorsTom BrassFormerly lectured in the Social and Political Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge
Peasants, academics, populists
Traced here is the way peasant economy/culture has been reconceptualized in academic studies over the past three decades. The pre-war image of innate family farmers as embodiments of national identity, a populist discourse mobilized by the political right in Europe and Asia, was replaced by modernization theory during the post-war era. The object was to promote economic development, thereby challenging populist images of unchanging and unchangeab…
Scott's “Zomia,” or a Populist Post-modern History of Nowhere
Peasant essentialism and the Agrarian question in the Colombian Andes
Our Daily Bread: The Peasant Question and Family Farming in the Colombian Andes, by Nola Reinhardt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Pp.xv + 308. US$35. This review article considers a number of problems which arise from an incorrect theorisation of the agrarian question. Instead of a transformation in which some peasants become small capitalists and others de facto workers, rural change is said to involve an absolute oppositio…
Capitalism and Bonded Labour in India
Examined here is the way the link between capitalism and bonded labour has been interpreted and reinterpreted in the debate over the past half century about rural development in India. A number of those who initially equated debt bondage with a pre-capitalist production relation, and dismissed arguments that unfree labour and accumulation were compatible, changed their minds and espoused the interpretation they had previously opposed. Among the r…
On which side of what barricade? Subaltern resistance in Latin America and elsewhere
The Latin American enganche system
(1990). The Latin American enganche system: Some revisionist reinterpretations revisited. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 74-103
Primitive Accumulation, Capitalist Development and Socialist Transition
Examined here is the view that, as primitive accumulation is characterised by production relations that are not free, and primitive accumulation itself chronologically prefigures capitalism proper, what is on the political agenda is a transition not to socialism but – still – to a “fully-functioning” capitalism. Against this, it is argued that the social relations of production generally confined to primitive accumulation interpreted simply as th…
Capitalist Unfree Labour
Disputed here is the view that a 'fully functioning' accumulation process cannot operate efficiently - let alone profitably - without workers who are free. In non-Marxist political economy which eschews class struggle the idea that unfree labour might be acceptable to capitalists was dismissed on the grounds that such workers would necessarily be inefficient, unskilled, costly, and scarce. Because it was an obstacle both to market formation and e…
How agrarian cooperatives fail
Given current interest in the agrarian cooperative as an egalitarian institutional form to counter the economic effects of neoliberalism, considered here is how class divisions/distinctions operated inside one such unit in the 1970s. Of particular interest is the way idioms and forms of struggle used by bureaucrats, peasants and agricultural labourers in a Peruvian agrarian cooperative during that decade challenge one of the enduring myths of dev…
Neoliberalism and the rise of (peasant) nations within the nation
This analysis places the causes and objectives of the Zapatista uprising in relation both to those of other agrarian movements, and to debates about them. Longstanding disagreements on the political left about indigenous autonomy and micro-level nationalist aspirations are examined with particular reference to 'from above' and 'from below' variants of indigenista discourse in Mexico. Of particular interest is the way in which the discourse about …
Trotskyism, Hugo Blanco and the ideology of a Peruvian peasant movement
During 1958-62 the province of La Convención in the eastern lowlands of Peru was the site of one of the most important peasant movements in Latin America. A central paradox is that although the movement was led by and reflected the economic interests of an emerging stratum of capitalist peasants, its principal mobilising ideology in the struggle against the landlord class over this period was Trotskyism. For this reason, the politico-ideological …
The politics of gender, nature and nation in the discourse of the new farmers’ movements
1994). The politics of gender, nature and nation in the discourse of the new farmers’ movements. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 21, New Farmers' Movements in India, pp. 27-71
Class formation and class struggle in la convention, Peru
This paper has as its object the analysis of class formation, class struggle and its effects in the province of La Convention, Peru. The first section of the paper examines this process at the level of the province as a whole during the 1940-68 pre-agrarian reform period, while the second and third sections focus on the same process in more detail as it relates to one particular rural estate during the period between 1973 and 1975 following the a…
Populism in Peru
Agrarian reform and the struggle for labour‐power
This paper examines conflict over labour‐power, and argues for its centrality to an understanding of class struggle taking place in the Peruvian province of La Convención during the pre‐ and post‐reform era. Initially, this conflict involved landlord and tenants over the issue of labour‐rent. When additional land became available as a result of the expropriation of the landlord class, the implementation of the agrarian reform deprived the peasant…
Of human bondage
Robin Shoemaker, The Peasants of El Dorado: Conflict and Contradiction in a Peruvian Frontier Settlement, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981. Pp. 265; £13.75. This review article considers the way a recent study analyses a colonisation settlement in a coffee growing area located on the Eastern sub‐tropical forest area of Peru during the post‐reform era. It is argued that the study ignores both the presence within this ‘community ‘ of cl…
Permanent transition or permanent revolution
David Goodman and Michael Redclift, From Peasant to Proletarian: Capitalist Development and Agrarian Transitions, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981. Pp. xii + 244, £15 (cloth). This review article considers a book which attempts to present and evaluate Marxist debates on agrarian transition without at first clarifying its own position on Marxist theory and concepts. It is suggested here that this omission, combined with a compressed treatment of complex ar…
Coffee and Rural Proletarianization
In a recent article in this journal, Dr Bergad argues that the production of coffee for the export economy in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico was accompanied by the emergence of a rural proletariat, and suggests that the latter process in fact predated the development of a sugar plantation economy in the twentieth century, with which capitalist free wage labour is commonly associated. This characterization of the coffee hacienda workforce raises d…
Free and Unfree Rural Labour in Puerto Rico during the Nineteenth Century
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Unfree labour and capitalist restructuring in the Agrarian sector
Based on fieldwork in La Convención, Peru, and the Indian Punjab, this article examines the contribution of unfree labour to capitalist restructuring in the agrarian sector, a process whereby free wage labour is replaced by bonded labour. Debt bondage is analysed in relation to class struggle in these labour-scarce contexts, specifically with regard to its utilisation by capitalist producers to lower the cost and simultaneously maintain control o…
Cargosand conflict
This article considers the fact of and reasons for pre- and post-reform change in the structure of the fiesta system on a rural estate in the province of La Convención, and its effect on the development of a capitalist agriculture. In economic terms, this process involves a transformation of the fiesta from a context in which the landlord extracts rent from his tenants to one in which different peasant strata struggle for control over means of pr…
Coffee and Peasants
Beer Drinking Groups in a Peruvian Agrarian Cooperative
Trotskyism, Hugo Blanco and the ideology of a Peruvian peasant movement
During 1958-62 the province of La Convención in the eastern lowlands of Peru was the site of one of the most important peasant movements in Latin America. A central paradox is that although the movement was led by and reflected the economic interests of an emerging stratum of capitalist peasants, its principal mobilising ideology in the struggle against the landlord class over this period was Trotskyism. For this reason, the politico-ideological …
The Latin American enganche system
(1990). The Latin American enganche system: Some revisionist reinterpretations revisited. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 74-103
Class struggle and the deproletarianisation of agricultural labour in Haryana (India)
This article considers the way in which labour attachment is theorised, both in the 1950s Agricultural Labour Enquiries, and subsequently in the work of Rudra, Bardhan, and Breman. Common to all these texts is a positive conceptualisation of attached labour, and consequently the elimination of its element of unfreedom. Instead, the relation is presented in terms of a materially reciprocal exchange between landholder and worker, a transaction whic…
Peasant essentialism and the Agrarian question in the Colombian Andes
Our Daily Bread: The Peasant Question and Family Farming in the Colombian Andes, by Nola Reinhardt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Pp.xv + 308. US$35. This review article considers a number of problems which arise from an incorrect theorisation of the agrarian question. Instead of a transformation in which some peasants become small capitalists and others de facto workers, rural change is said to involve an absolute oppositio…
Market essentialism and the impermissibility of unfree labour
(1991). Market essentialism and the impermissibility of unfree labour: A reply to Shlomowitz. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 225-244
Moral economists, subalterns, new social movements, and the (re-) emergence of a (post-) modernized (middle) peasant
This article examines the way in which peasant movements in both India and Latin America have been reinterpreted by the postmodern and politically revisionist project of the subaltern studies series on India and the new social movements theory on Latin America. It is suggested that much of the conceptual analysis embodied in both these frameworks is prefigured in the earlier 'moral economy' approach, incorporating the middle peasant thesis of Wol…
Twenty years of the JPS
Introduction
1992). Introduction: Proletarianisation and deproletarianisation on the colonial plantation. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 19, Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia, pp. 1-40
Contextualizing sugar production in nineteenth‐century Queensland
Cane and Labour: The Political Economy of the Queensland Sugar Industry 1862–1905. ADRIAN GRAVES. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 1993. Pp. xxi + 282. £35. ISBN 0–7486–0117–1
The politics of gender, nature and nation in the discourse of the new farmers’ movements
1994). The politics of gender, nature and nation in the discourse of the new farmers’ movements. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 21, New Farmers' Movements in India, pp. 27-71
Introduction
1994). Introduction: The new farmers’ movements in India. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 21, New Farmers' Movements in India, pp. 3-26
Some Observations on Unfree Labour, Capitalist Restructuring, and Deproletarianization
Both historically and actually, there is a complex interrelationship between the existence of unfree labour and the process of class formation and struggle in the course of agrarian transformation. However, much current writing about rural labour in the Third World is based on three interrelated assumptions. First, that labour market imperfections are always the fault of peasants resisting the attempts of capital to proletarianize them; second, t…
Post-script
Old conservatism in ‘new’ clothes
This review article considers two books about development theory and practice informed by what is variously referred to as an 'impasse'/'post‐impasse'/'post‐Marxist' framework. The latter, its adherents maintain, is a new approach to development that transcends economic reductionism and instead recognises/celebrates cultural 'difference', 'diversity' and 'choice'. By contrast, it is argued here that many of the allegedly 'new' claims/arguments ad…
Political science (75 obras) · Law (57 obras) · Sociology (54 obras) · Economics (44 obras) · Politics (44 obras) · Law (43 obras) · Political economy (39 obras) · Political Economy and Marxism (35 obras) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (31 obras) · Peasant (22 obras)