Marx's model of capital and labour, dynamised by contradictions and the compulsion to accumulate, leaves deviations from the polar classes of capital and labour ignored, regarded as outliers or as ...

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Critical Perspectives on Agrarian Transition : India in the global debate

Awkward Classes and India's Development

This thesis presents a historical case study of small-scale peasant shrimp production and its forms of organisation in the region known as “La Costa” in the northwest Mexican state of Nayarit. This case study constitutes a good example of the evolution of peasant communities over a century of history in which various government policies left their mark on the development of the political economy of the region in the period following the Mexican Revolution. From that time, La Costa became the setting for a process of peasantisation and for a set of policies supporting the development of cooperatives for the exploitation of water resources. This period was defined by the struggle faced by these communities to consolidate their political, economic, and administrative autonomy. In the 1990s, these same communities and their cooperatives suffered the effects of neoliberal policies (privatisation, trade liberalisation, deregulation) in their Mexican incarnation, which have had the effect of undermining peasant production and promoting a search for new ways of surviving, along with the appearance of new strata and social actors. Using the concepts of early simple commodity production and advanced simple commodity production as used by Terence J. Byres (1996), the process described in this thesis constitutes an example of a process of capitalist development from below, in a region with a high population density and a significant level of state intervention in political and regulatory terms, in the context of a labour surplus (Lewis, 1954). It could be argued that it shows how neoliberalism has changed the way we need to conceptualise the "classical agrarian question" and to interpret the labour surplus in middle income societies as suggested by Bernstein (2009b).

State-mediated Capitalism From Below and the Small-scale Peasant Aquaculture in Nayarit (Mexico)

This contribution explores the role of the state in the contemporary food regime in light of critical theories of neoliberalisation. Heeding recent calls for downscaling food regime analysis, I sug...

Neoliberalising the food regime 'amongst its others': the right to food and the state in India.

This article introduces compounding aspirations as a key concept for interrogating complex and contradictory rural transformations in India. We argue that compounding aspirations are central to the...

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Compounding aspirations: grounding hegemonic processes in India's rural transformations

/pdf/the-failure-of-post-war-reconstruction-in-jaffna-sri-lanka-24i3dhx2p7.pdf

Critical Perspectives on Agrarian Transition : India in the global debate

Citations

Awkward Classes and India's Development

State-mediated Capitalism From Below and the Small-scale Peasant Aquaculture in Nayarit (Mexico)

Neoliberalising the food regime 'amongst its others': the right to food and the state in India.

Compounding aspirations: grounding hegemonic processes in India's rural transformations

The Failure of Post-War Reconstruction in Jaffna, Sri Lanka: Indebtedness, Caste Exclusion and the Search for Alternatives

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