H Bernstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 44015 |
|---|---|
| NAME | H Bernstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | H |
| FAMILY NAME | Bernstein |
| SIGNATURE | BERNSTEIN H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Department of Development Studies School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London Russell Square London WC1H 0XG UK |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1489-6816 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 428 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Retour sur les études agraires critiques
Dans cet entretien, Henry Bernstein revient sur la fondation des études agraires critiques et les principaux concepts qu’il a développés pour une étude marxiste de la sociologie rurale. Il montre comment l’opposition entre léninisme et populisme se rejoue dans l’épistémologie de la structure de classe de la paysannerie
"Where is population in "surplus population
Is the impetus toward "surplus population" in Marx's analysis an effect of capital's law of accumulation or a "function" of it? How might a Marxist analysis of "surplus population" aid in theorizing demographic change under the capitalist mode of production? And to what extent are individuals who lack a "proper job" superfluous to capital accumulation? This article engages these questions through a survey of Marxist and marxisant attempts to theo…
Russian to modern world history: Teodor Shanin and peasant studies
This paper is a retrospective of Teodor Shanin's work, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, the principal period of his publications in English. It may also serve as a guide to tracing Shanin's main themes and issues, which included establishing a ‘generic’ peasant studies (‘peasantology’) and how he aimed to do so; his explorations of the development of capitalism and its impact on peasantries in Russia from the late 19th century to the contemporary T…
"Round Table "In Memory of Teodor Shanin
Shanin, Chayanov and Peasant Studies of Russia and Beyond
s paper in press, which surveys Shanin's work of the 1970s and 1980s. The author provides a guide to tracing Shanin's main themes and issues. First, the family farm is usually if not invariably featured first in Shanin's characterizations of peasants as a general or generic type. Second, Shanin sought explanations of peasant household reproduction in his model of 'multidirectional and cyclical mobility' against the 'biological determinism' linked…
Collective violence and the agrarian origins of South African apartheid, 1900–1948
John Higginson’s newest book provides a detailed socioeconomic and political history of two adjoining districts of the western Transvaal—the ‘backlands’ of Rustenberg and Marico, or, as the authors
Some Reflections on Agrarian Change in China
This is a paper of two parts. The first suggests a number of questions concerning agrarian change in capitalism, grouped by their concern with social forces and dynamics internal to the countryside, rural-urban interconnections internal to the 'national', the contributions of agriculture to industrialization likewise within the 'national' and those 'external' determinants grounded in capitalist world economy. The second part draws on the papers i…
Historical Materialism and Agrarian History
Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation , by Jairus Banaji . : , 2010 . Volume 25 . Pp. xix+406. €101 (hb). ISBN 978‐90‐04‐18368‐1 The collection provides an opportunity to assess Jairus Banaji's original and provocative contributions over more than three decades. This review tries to chart a path across the range of the essays as a whole, marked by three themes and their connections and possible disconnections: what con…
Commercial Agriculture inSouthAfrica since 1994: Natural, Simply Capitalism
The paper provides a survey of commercial agriculture inSouthAfrica since 1994. It emphasizes, first, how effectively 'organized agriculture' positioned itself for the new dispensation, with the help of the last apartheid government, and, second, the importance of the removal of limits on the international mobility ofSouthAfrican capital and commodities imposed on the apartheid regime. The lacunae and ambiguities of theAfricanNationalCongress con…
Introduction: Agrarian Change, Rural Poverty and Land Reform in South Africa since 1994
This introduction sketches the context and dynamics of agrarian change, rural poverty and land reform since the end of apartheid in 1994, drawing attention to structural continuities and new elements in the countrysides of South Africa, and of the Southern African region in which South Africa must be located. Two key historical and theoretical reference points help focus attention on some central issues: the 'classic' model of dispossession/accum…
Zimbabwe's Land Reform. Myths and Realities - By Ian Scoones, Nelson Marongwe, Blasio Mavedzenge, Jacob Mahenehene, Felix Murimbarimba and Chrispen Sukume
Introduction: Some Questions Concerning the Productive Forces
This introduction suggests an inherited weakness of 'orthodox' materialist conceptions of the development of the productive forces in capitalist agriculture, and the intellectual deficit of an uncritical and ahistorical stance that embraces such development as forever 'progressive'. The best recent work in political ecology presents agrarian political economy with a challenge to address that intellectual deficit by interrogating and problematizin…
Favored Flowers: Culture and Economy in a Global System - By Catherine Ziegler
Favored Flowers: Culture and Economy in a Global System , by Catherine Ziegler . Durham, NC and London : Duke University Press , 2007 . Pp . 306 . US$79.95 (hb); $22.95 (pb) . ISBN 978-08223-4026-3 and 978-0-8223-4007-2 In 2003, Catherine Ziegler tells us, the value of global trade in fresh-cut flowers was about US$4.6 billion. The ‘fresh-cut flower global commodity chain’ makes for a somewhat clumsy acronym, namely FCFGCC, but Ziegler's study of…
From the Retiring Editors
Still Searching for Security. The Reality of Farm Dweller Evictions in South Africa by Marc Wegerif, Bev Russell and Irma Grundling
Once were/still are peasants? Farming in a globalising ‘south’
Commodity Studies and Commodity Fetishism II: Profits with Principles
The two edited collections and the monograph reviewed here provide the means to consider an extended range of commodities, locations, commodity/value chains, and issues of theory and method in political economy, beyond those presented by Gibbon and Ponte (2005) that we considered in the first part of this essay. Our discussion here touches on issues concerning how 'global' global commodity/value chains are; the symbolic attributes of commodities …
Commodity Studies and Commodity Fetishism I: Trading Down
This first instalment of a two-part review essay on current work in commodity studies considers, at some length, an important and distinctive text by Peter Gibbon and Stefano Ponte. It draws on a unique set of case studies of African export commodities, using (and developing) the framework of Global Value Chain (GVC) theory, of American provenance, together with elements of the mostly French literature on quality conventions. Gibbon and Ponte als…
Considering Africa's Agrarian Questions
The Boys from Bothaville, or the Rise and Fall of King Maize: A South African Story
This paper tells the story, for the first time, of a maverick maize farmers' association in South Africa during the period of apartheid. NAMPO (National Maize Producers' Organization), that grew out of SAMPI (South African Maize Producers' Institute), ultimately achieved a unique, if short-lived, breach in the normal operations of 'organized agriculture': a set of relations and practices that bound together white farmers, the National Party and t…
Changing Before Our Very Eyes: Agrarian Questions and the Politics of Land in Capitalism Today
This paper endorses the criticisms of neo-classical populism and its advocacy of redistributive land reform provided by other contributions to this special issue of the Journal, to which it adds several further points. If GKI propose a version of an agrarian question of 'small' or 'family' farming, and its resolution through a familiar (Chayanovian) path of development, much of the critique rests, in one way or another, on the 'classic' agrarian …
Land Reform: Taking a Long(er) View
The paper proposes a broad argument that the end of state-led development from the 1970s coincided with (i) the final wave of major redistributive land reform, and its place within transitions to capitalism, that lasted from about 1910 to the 1970s, and (ii) the beginnings of contemporary 'globalization'. Self-styled 'new wave' agrarian reform in the age of neo-liberalism, centred on property rights, is unlikely to deliver much on its claims to b…
Philip Raikes (1938 -2001)
Telling Environmental Change Like It Is? Reflections on a Study in Sub-Saharan Africa
From Peasant Studies to Agrarian Change
This inaugural essay surveys themes and approaches in agrarian political economy over the last three decades, especially with reference to contributions to, and debates in, the Journal of Peasant Studies of which T. J. Byres was editor from 1973 to 2000 and Henry Bernstein editor from 1985 to 2000. We indicate intellectual strengths and lacunae, new approaches to longstanding issues, and new concerns which emerged over that period, and which info…
Changing Before Our Very Eyes: Agrarian Questions and the Politics of Land in Capitalism Today
This paper endorses the criticisms of neo-classical populism and its advocacy of redistributive land reform provided by other contributions to this special issue of the Journal, to which it adds several further points. If GKI propose a version of an agrarian question of 'small' or 'family' farming, and its resolution through a familiar (Chayanovian) path of development, much of the critique rests, in one way or another, on the 'classic' agrarian …
From Peasant Studies to Agrarian Change
This inaugural essay surveys themes and approaches in agrarian political economy over the last three decades, especially with reference to contributions to, and debates in, the Journal of Peasant Studies of which T. J. Byres was editor from 1973 to 2000 and Henry Bernstein editor from 1985 to 2000. We indicate intellectual strengths and lacunae, new approaches to longstanding issues, and new concerns which emerged over that period, and which info…
Land Reform: Taking a Long(er) View
The paper proposes a broad argument that the end of state-led development from the 1970s coincided with (i) the final wave of major redistributive land reform, and its place within transitions to capitalism, that lasted from about 1910 to the 1970s, and (ii) the beginnings of contemporary 'globalization'. Self-styled 'new wave' agrarian reform in the age of neo-liberalism, centred on property rights, is unlikely to deliver much on its claims to b…
Commercial Agriculture inSouthAfrica since 1994: Natural, Simply Capitalism
The paper provides a survey of commercial agriculture inSouthAfrica since 1994. It emphasizes, first, how effectively 'organized agriculture' positioned itself for the new dispensation, with the help of the last apartheid government, and, second, the importance of the removal of limits on the international mobility ofSouthAfrican capital and commodities imposed on the apartheid regime. The lacunae and ambiguities of theAfricanNationalCongress con…
Commodity Studies and Commodity Fetishism I: Trading Down
This first instalment of a two-part review essay on current work in commodity studies considers, at some length, an important and distinctive text by Peter Gibbon and Stefano Ponte. It draws on a unique set of case studies of African export commodities, using (and developing) the framework of Global Value Chain (GVC) theory, of American provenance, together with elements of the mostly French literature on quality conventions. Gibbon and Ponte als…
Commodity Studies and Commodity Fetishism II: Profits with Principles
The two edited collections and the monograph reviewed here provide the means to consider an extended range of commodities, locations, commodity/value chains, and issues of theory and method in political economy, beyond those presented by Gibbon and Ponte (2005) that we considered in the first part of this essay. Our discussion here touches on issues concerning how 'global' global commodity/value chains are; the symbolic attributes of commodities …
Introduction: Some Questions Concerning the Productive Forces
This introduction suggests an inherited weakness of 'orthodox' materialist conceptions of the development of the productive forces in capitalist agriculture, and the intellectual deficit of an uncritical and ahistorical stance that embraces such development as forever 'progressive'. The best recent work in political ecology presents agrarian political economy with a challenge to address that intellectual deficit by interrogating and problematizin…
Once were/still are peasants? Farming in a globalising ‘south’
Introduction: Agrarian Change, Rural Poverty and Land Reform in South Africa since 1994
This introduction sketches the context and dynamics of agrarian change, rural poverty and land reform since the end of apartheid in 1994, drawing attention to structural continuities and new elements in the countrysides of South Africa, and of the Southern African region in which South Africa must be located. Two key historical and theoretical reference points help focus attention on some central issues: the 'classic' model of dispossession/accum…
Considering Africa's Agrarian Questions
Some Reflections on Agrarian Change in China
This is a paper of two parts. The first suggests a number of questions concerning agrarian change in capitalism, grouped by their concern with social forces and dynamics internal to the countryside, rural-urban interconnections internal to the 'national', the contributions of agriculture to industrialization likewise within the 'national' and those 'external' determinants grounded in capitalist world economy. The second part draws on the papers i…
Telling Environmental Change Like It Is? Reflections on a Study in Sub-Saharan Africa
Historical Materialism and Agrarian History
Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation , by Jairus Banaji . : , 2010 . Volume 25 . Pp. xix+406. €101 (hb). ISBN 978‐90‐04‐18368‐1 The collection provides an opportunity to assess Jairus Banaji's original and provocative contributions over more than three decades. This review tries to chart a path across the range of the essays as a whole, marked by three themes and their connections and possible disconnections: what con…
The Boys from Bothaville, or the Rise and Fall of King Maize: A South African Story
This paper tells the story, for the first time, of a maverick maize farmers' association in South Africa during the period of apartheid. NAMPO (National Maize Producers' Organization), that grew out of SAMPI (South African Maize Producers' Institute), ultimately achieved a unique, if short-lived, breach in the normal operations of 'organized agriculture': a set of relations and practices that bound together white farmers, the National Party and t…
From the Retiring Editors
Retour sur les études agraires critiques
Dans cet entretien, Henry Bernstein revient sur la fondation des études agraires critiques et les principaux concepts qu’il a développés pour une étude marxiste de la sociologie rurale. Il montre comment l’opposition entre léninisme et populisme se rejoue dans l’épistémologie de la structure de classe de la paysannerie
"Where is population in "surplus population
Is the impetus toward "surplus population" in Marx's analysis an effect of capital's law of accumulation or a "function" of it? How might a Marxist analysis of "surplus population" aid in theorizing demographic change under the capitalist mode of production? And to what extent are individuals who lack a "proper job" superfluous to capital accumulation? This article engages these questions through a survey of Marxist and marxisant attempts to theo…
Shanin, Chayanov and Peasant Studies of Russia and Beyond
s paper in press, which surveys Shanin's work of the 1970s and 1980s. The author provides a guide to tracing Shanin's main themes and issues. First, the family farm is usually if not invariably featured first in Shanin's characterizations of peasants as a general or generic type. Second, Shanin sought explanations of peasant household reproduction in his model of 'multidirectional and cyclical mobility' against the 'biological determinism' linked…
Zimbabwe's Land Reform. Myths and Realities - By Ian Scoones, Nelson Marongwe, Blasio Mavedzenge, Jacob Mahenehene, Felix Murimbarimba and Chrispen Sukume
Still Searching for Security. The Reality of Farm Dweller Evictions in South Africa by Marc Wegerif, Bev Russell and Irma Grundling
African Women in Rural Development: Research Trends and Priorities
Festschrift fur Konrad Zweigert
Telling Environmental Change Like It Is? Reflections on a Study in Sub-Saharan Africa
From Peasant Studies to Agrarian Change
This inaugural essay surveys themes and approaches in agrarian political economy over the last three decades, especially with reference to contributions to, and debates in, the Journal of Peasant Studies of which T. J. Byres was editor from 1973 to 2000 and Henry Bernstein editor from 1985 to 2000. We indicate intellectual strengths and lacunae, new approaches to longstanding issues, and new concerns which emerged over that period, and which info…
Land Reform: Taking a Long(er) View
The paper proposes a broad argument that the end of state-led development from the 1970s coincided with (i) the final wave of major redistributive land reform, and its place within transitions to capitalism, that lasted from about 1910 to the 1970s, and (ii) the beginnings of contemporary 'globalization'. Self-styled 'new wave' agrarian reform in the age of neo-liberalism, centred on property rights, is unlikely to deliver much on its claims to b…
Philip Raikes (1938 -2001)
Considering Africa's Agrarian Questions
The Boys from Bothaville, or the Rise and Fall of King Maize: A South African Story
This paper tells the story, for the first time, of a maverick maize farmers' association in South Africa during the period of apartheid. NAMPO (National Maize Producers' Organization), that grew out of SAMPI (South African Maize Producers' Institute), ultimately achieved a unique, if short-lived, breach in the normal operations of 'organized agriculture': a set of relations and practices that bound together white farmers, the National Party and t…
Changing Before Our Very Eyes: Agrarian Questions and the Politics of Land in Capitalism Today
This paper endorses the criticisms of neo-classical populism and its advocacy of redistributive land reform provided by other contributions to this special issue of the Journal, to which it adds several further points. If GKI propose a version of an agrarian question of 'small' or 'family' farming, and its resolution through a familiar (Chayanovian) path of development, much of the critique rests, in one way or another, on the 'classic' agrarian …
Once were/still are peasants? Farming in a globalising ‘south’
Commodity Studies and Commodity Fetishism II: Profits with Principles
The two edited collections and the monograph reviewed here provide the means to consider an extended range of commodities, locations, commodity/value chains, and issues of theory and method in political economy, beyond those presented by Gibbon and Ponte (2005) that we considered in the first part of this essay. Our discussion here touches on issues concerning how 'global' global commodity/value chains are; the symbolic attributes of commodities …
Commodity Studies and Commodity Fetishism I: Trading Down
This first instalment of a two-part review essay on current work in commodity studies considers, at some length, an important and distinctive text by Peter Gibbon and Stefano Ponte. It draws on a unique set of case studies of African export commodities, using (and developing) the framework of Global Value Chain (GVC) theory, of American provenance, together with elements of the mostly French literature on quality conventions. Gibbon and Ponte als…
Still Searching for Security. The Reality of Farm Dweller Evictions in South Africa by Marc Wegerif, Bev Russell and Irma Grundling
Favored Flowers: Culture and Economy in a Global System - By Catherine Ziegler
Favored Flowers: Culture and Economy in a Global System , by Catherine Ziegler . Durham, NC and London : Duke University Press , 2007 . Pp . 306 . US$79.95 (hb); $22.95 (pb) . ISBN 978-08223-4026-3 and 978-0-8223-4007-2 In 2003, Catherine Ziegler tells us, the value of global trade in fresh-cut flowers was about US$4.6 billion. The ‘fresh-cut flower global commodity chain’ makes for a somewhat clumsy acronym, namely FCFGCC, but Ziegler's study of…
From the Retiring Editors
Introduction: Some Questions Concerning the Productive Forces
This introduction suggests an inherited weakness of 'orthodox' materialist conceptions of the development of the productive forces in capitalist agriculture, and the intellectual deficit of an uncritical and ahistorical stance that embraces such development as forever 'progressive'. The best recent work in political ecology presents agrarian political economy with a challenge to address that intellectual deficit by interrogating and problematizin…
Zimbabwe's Land Reform. Myths and Realities - By Ian Scoones, Nelson Marongwe, Blasio Mavedzenge, Jacob Mahenehene, Felix Murimbarimba and Chrispen Sukume
Historical Materialism and Agrarian History
Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation , by Jairus Banaji . : , 2010 . Volume 25 . Pp. xix+406. €101 (hb). ISBN 978‐90‐04‐18368‐1 The collection provides an opportunity to assess Jairus Banaji's original and provocative contributions over more than three decades. This review tries to chart a path across the range of the essays as a whole, marked by three themes and their connections and possible disconnections: what con…
Commercial Agriculture inSouthAfrica since 1994: Natural, Simply Capitalism
The paper provides a survey of commercial agriculture inSouthAfrica since 1994. It emphasizes, first, how effectively 'organized agriculture' positioned itself for the new dispensation, with the help of the last apartheid government, and, second, the importance of the removal of limits on the international mobility ofSouthAfrican capital and commodities imposed on the apartheid regime. The lacunae and ambiguities of theAfricanNationalCongress con…
Introduction: Agrarian Change, Rural Poverty and Land Reform in South Africa since 1994
This introduction sketches the context and dynamics of agrarian change, rural poverty and land reform since the end of apartheid in 1994, drawing attention to structural continuities and new elements in the countrysides of South Africa, and of the Southern African region in which South Africa must be located. Two key historical and theoretical reference points help focus attention on some central issues: the 'classic' model of dispossession/accum…
Some Reflections on Agrarian Change in China
This is a paper of two parts. The first suggests a number of questions concerning agrarian change in capitalism, grouped by their concern with social forces and dynamics internal to the countryside, rural-urban interconnections internal to the 'national', the contributions of agriculture to industrialization likewise within the 'national' and those 'external' determinants grounded in capitalist world economy. The second part draws on the papers i…
Collective violence and the agrarian origins of South African apartheid, 1900–1948
John Higginson’s newest book provides a detailed socioeconomic and political history of two adjoining districts of the western Transvaal—the ‘backlands’ of Rustenberg and Marico, or, as the authors
"Round Table "In Memory of Teodor Shanin
Shanin, Chayanov and Peasant Studies of Russia and Beyond
s paper in press, which surveys Shanin's work of the 1970s and 1980s. The author provides a guide to tracing Shanin's main themes and issues. First, the family farm is usually if not invariably featured first in Shanin's characterizations of peasants as a general or generic type. Second, Shanin sought explanations of peasant household reproduction in his model of 'multidirectional and cyclical mobility' against the 'biological determinism' linked…
Russian to modern world history: Teodor Shanin and peasant studies
This paper is a retrospective of Teodor Shanin's work, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, the principal period of his publications in English. It may also serve as a guide to tracing Shanin's main themes and issues, which included establishing a ‘generic’ peasant studies (‘peasantology’) and how he aimed to do so; his explorations of the development of capitalism and its impact on peasantries in Russia from the late 19th century to the contemporary T…
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Agriculture (17 works) · Economics (17 works) · Agrarian society (16 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (13 works) · History (12 works) · Law (12 works)