State and revolution

Conclusion Our brief examination of the conditions underlying the political crises of the Meiji Restoration and the Prussian Reform Movement has tended to reinforce by contrast our central arguments about the causes of revolutionary political crises in France, Russia, and China. Bourbon France, Hohenzollern Prussia, Tokugawa Japan, Manchu China, and Romanov Russia - all became subject to military pressures from more economically developed nations abroad and all experienced in response societal political crises. Yet only France, Russia, and China were plunged into the upheavals of social revolution, while Prussia and Japan, relatively speaking, adapted speedily and smoothly to international exigencies through reforms instituted from above by autocratic political authorities. The different fates of these agrarian monarchical regimes faced with the challenges of adapting to the exigencies of international uneven development can be explained in large part by looking at the ways in which agrarian relations of production and landed dominant classes impinged upon state organizations - though it is also important to assess the severity of the pressures from abroad with which each regime had to cope.In Russia, the revolutionary crisis of autocratic rule and dominant class privilege was due to the overwhelming stress of World War I upon an early-industrializing economy fettered by a backward agrarian sector. The Imperial regime was strong enough to override dominant class interests and enforce modernizing reforms after the shock of defeat in the Crimean War, but it was not able to reorganize agrarian class relations that were inimical to modern economic development or rapid increases in productivity. Even extraordinary successes of state-propelled industrialization were not enough to allow TsaristRussia to make up her economic lag behind the West, and she remained entangled within the European states system as it careened toward World War. By contrast, neither Japan nor Prussia was so agriculturally backward or internationally pressed during early industrialization as Tsarist Russia.Both Bourbon France and Manchu China had fairly prosperous agrarian economies and experienced foreign pressures no greater than those experienced by Tokugawa Japan and Hohenzollern Prussia. Another pattern is the differentiating cause here: specifically, the presence or absence of a landed upper class with insitutionalized political leverage at extralocal levels, over against fiscal and military policing functions centrally organized by royal administrations. If such politically organized and administratively entrenched landed classes were present, as they were in France and China, then the reactions of these classes against autocratic attempts to institute modernizing reforms deposed the monarchies and precipitated breakdowns of administrative and military organizations. This meant that externally induced political crises developed into potentially social-revolutionary situations. But if, as in Japan and Prussia, politically powerful landed classes were absent, so that the oldregime states were more highly bureaucratic, then foreign-induced crises could be resolved through political struggles confined, broadly speaking, within the established governing elite and administrative arrangements. And this precluded the possibility for social revolution from below.Social revolutions in France, Russia, and China were launched, it has been argued here, by crises centered in the structures and situations of the states of the Old Regimes. Still, the actual occurrence of social revolutions in these three countries depended not only upon the emergence of revolutionary political crises, but also upon the conduciveness of the agrarian sociopolitical structures of the Old Regimes to peasant revolts. To go on with the analysis from here, therefore, we would have to reexamine the prerevolutionary societies from the opposite perspective, no longer from the top down with emphasis on the state, the dominant class, and the international context, but from the bottom up with emphasis on the structural situation of the peasants in the agrarian economy and in local political and class relations. While this task cannot be accomplished here, it is undertaken in the larger study of which this analysis is only a part.     

Analogien, Subsistenztechnologien Und (Nicht-)moralische Allmächtige Schöpfergötter In Vorindustriellen Gesellschaften

The aim of this paper is to explain the relationship of humans with their god(s) during different stages of technological development. We answer the question under which circumstances what image of God becomes popular. To do so we use Lenski’s ecological evolutionism and combine this macrotheory with Topitsch’ micro-hypothesis that people reason by analogy and explain the unknown in terms of what is known and what is important in a society. The known can consist of a vital process, a social structure or a technological achievement. Using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas, we find that high gods are less common in the technologically less advanced societies. High gods are most likely to occur in the advanced horticultural, herding and agrarian societies. When we distinguish between non-moral and moral high gods we see that non-moral ones are most often found in the advanced horticultural and moral ones in the herding and agrarian societies. The relationship between subsistence technology and godly images is to a large extent mediated by a society’s economical and political structure.     

上海新型工业化道路的探索与实践

工业化是一个国家和地区经济实力的象征,也是经济发展和社会进步的必经阶段。新型工业化既不同于发达国家已经走过的工业化发展道路,也不同于我国传统的工业化道路。上海在推进新型工业化进程中,深入贯彻落实科学发展观,坚定不移走科技含量高、经济效益好、资源消耗低、环境污染少、人力资源优势得到充分发挥的新型工业化之路,在实践中探索,在探索中提升,逐步提高对新型工业化的具体内涵、实现途径和发展模式等认识,努力走出一条符合客观规律、体现国家要求和具有上海特点的新型工业化道路。     

The Political Dimension in the Agrarian Question: Strategies of Resilience and Political Entrepreneurship of Agrarian Elite Families in a Philippine Province1

ABSTRACT This paper on the rural political sociology of a Philippine province relates the strategies of political resilience of landed oligarchies to the political dimension of the agrarian question in the Philippines. Bukidnon in Northern Mindanao is used to illustrate how pioneer agrarian families have protected their economic privileges and survived the political challenge posed by migrant politicians. Despite differences in their economic bases and social backgrounds, pioneer families and migrant politicians share strategies of political entrepreneurship and rent-seeking that have maintained oligarchic rule: (1) establishment and maintenance of kinship networks, through intermarriage, and non-kinship, ritual ties; (2) diversification into non-agricultural economic activities; (3) control of political parties and state patronage (primarily electoral) machinery; (4) cooptation or mobilization of political symbols, issues, and movements; (5) use of political power to obstruct progressive legislation, particularly on land reform and taxation; and (6) the strategic management of political violence. Analysis of provincial and national political dynamics, as played out in Bukidnon, shows how the nexus of property, power, and privilege is consolidated, contested, and reconstructed in the ongoing competition among Bukidnon elites. These strategies are integral to the political practices of a landed capitalist class and have serious implications for agrarian transition and industrialization in the Philippines.     

Extending Lenski's Schema to Hold Up Both Halves of the Sky—A Theory‐Guided Way of Conceptualizing Agrarian Societies that Illuminates a Puzzle about Gender Stratification

This paper suggests that Lenski's classification of agrarian societies into simple versus advanced, based on the use of iron in the latter, obscures important variations in the gender division of labor and the level of gender stratification. In particular, his categories lump the gender egalitarian irrigated rice societies of Southeast Asia with the great majority of agrarian societies, which are strongly patriarchal. Based on my general theory of gender stratification and experience coding and analyzing gender stratification in the ethnographic databases and fieldwork in 39 countries worldwide, I propose a three‐category alternative. First, agrarian societies are divided according to the technological criterion of irrigation into dry (rain‐fed) and wet (irrigated rice) categories. This distinguishes two gender divisions of labor: a male farming system in dry agrarian and an "everybody works" system in labor‐intensive rice cultivation, in which women are important in production. Second, irrigated rice societies are divided into patri‐oriented‐male advantage and those neutral to positive for women, based on the nature of the kinship system. This distinguishes the gender egalitarian Southeast Asian wet rice societies from the highly gender stratified majority of irrigated rice societies. Furthermore, these distinctions in gender equality are predicted by my gender stratification theory.     

Employment Conditions in the Senegalese Horticultural Export Industry: A Worker Perspective

The rapid transformation of the agri‐food sector in developing countries has created rural off‐farm employment opportunities, especially for women. There is growing concern about worker welfare and employment conditions in agri‐food and export sectors, but empirical evidence on this issue is scant. We analyse contractual preferences of female workers in the horticultural export sector in Senegal. We use a discrete choice experiment to assess women's preferences for a labour contract and employ a latent class model to capture preference heterogeneity. We find that women have a high willingness to accept a labour contract in the horticultural export industry, and that differences in preferences for contract attributes can be explained by women's empowerment status.     

Paths of Citizenship and the Legacy of Human Rights Violations: The Cases of Redemocratized Argentina and Uruguay

Through a comparison of redemocratized Argentina and Uruguay, this article shows how distinct historical paths of citizenship affect the strategies and practices enacted in different political communities. The analysis focuses on the societal confrontation with the legacy of human rights violations as the new democratic governments attempted to balance normative principles with political contingencies. Embedded in their particular paths of citizenship, both societies adopted different strategies of post-dictatorial justice and reconciliation, with Argentina achieving a tenuous institutional resolution of this confrontation, while Uruguay achieved a shared resolution, bolstered by popular mobilization and debate, which reinforced the component of civility in its collective identity.     

Toward an Ecological–Evolutionary Theory of the Incidence of Warfare in Preindustrial Societies

Prompted by the lack of attention by sociologists and the challenge of materialist explanations of warfare in "precivilized" societies posed by Keeley (1996), this paper tests and finds support for two materialist hypotheses concerning the likelihood of warfare in preindustrial societies: specifically, that, as argued by ecological–evolutionary theory, dominant mode of subsistence is systematically related to rates of warfare; and that, within some levels of technological development, higher levels of "population pressure" are associated with a greater likelihood of warfare. Using warfare measures developed by Ember and Ember (1995), measures of subsistence technology originally developed by Lenski (1966, 1970), and the standard sample of societies developed by Murdock and White (1969), this study finds evidence that warfare is more likely in advanced horticultural and agrarian societies than it is in hunting–and–gathering and simple horticultural societies, and that it is also more likely in hunting–and–gathering and agrarian societies that have above–average population densities. These findings offer substantial support for ecological–evolutionary theory and qualified but intriguing support for "population pressure" as explanations of cross–cultural variation in the likelihood of warfare.     

Rural-to-Urban Transition and the Division of Labor: Evidence from Saudi Arabia

Abstract Ecological theory proposes that the evolution of societies from rural-based to urban-based forms of organization occurs as cities coordinate a widening territorial division of labor. This research assesses the efficacy of this model in Saudi Arabia and represents a crucial test of the generalizability of ecological theory. The rural-to-urban transition in that country did not proceed, as it did in much of the rest of the world, in the context of a substantial extraction of surplus from the agrarian sector and difficulties in absorbing displaced agricultural labor by the industrial sector. Despite this, and other rather extraordinary departures from typical patterns, the strong association between urbanization and the division of labor predicted by ecological theory emerges.     

对我国城市化健康发展的理论思考——城乡统筹发展的视角

本文简要回顾了我国近10年来城市化快速发展的理论和政策背景,指出快速城市化进程中存在土地、能源等自然资源过渡消耗和浪费问题,也存在重城轻乡等突出社会问题;采用人口供需平衡的方法,分析评价了我国人口城市化水平同经济发展水平、工业化水平和土地城市化的关系;对城市化加速理论进行剖析,认为我国当前工业化技术体系不适用于机器技术体系下城市化加速的经验规律,应该结合我国新型工业化的要求走资源节约型的新型城市化道路;建议适当降低城市化发展目标与速度,纠正城市化过程中＂城市偏向＂和＂以物为本＂的做法,体现国家赋予城市化带动农村发展的重任,实现城乡统筹发展。     

Civic Sectors in Transformation and Beyond: Preliminaries for a Comparison of Six Central and Eastern European Societies

The paper presents a comparative analysis of the recent developments in the civil societies in six Central and East European (CEE) countries: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Focusing on the level of civil society organizations (CSO), it first discusses the changes in their role as social actors and co-operation within the civic sector itself. Second, it examines the process of civic–public sector partnership consolidation, and third, some of the more recent challenges that the civic initiatives in these countries are facing. It aims to highlight the diversity of patterns of civil society development in the region and argues for a reassessment of its ‘weakness’ thesis.     

Culture, Capital and Class Conflicts in the Political Economy of Cape Breton

Abstract This paper examines the unprecedented rapid unionization of fish processing plant workers in the industrial town of Glace Bay, Cape Breton. The explanation for union militancy is tied to historical dynamics in local labour markets and the transposition of working class consciousness from the mining sector to the fish processing sector. Historically forged household and community dynamics and cultural values provide the key to the mobilization of the Cape Breton fish plant workers. While the contradictory and complex nature of local culture allowed for the emergence of resistance, the conditions which inspired such action also nurtured social patterns well accommodated to the region's marginal economic conditions. Thus, the circumstances under which strategies for resistance are forthcoming must hold particular and locally meaningful cultural significance. Paternalistic control of the labour force in local fish plants successfully manipulated local cultural values. Impersonal corporate management strategies violated these codes of conduct and provoked rapid collective response.     

Adjustment strategies revisited: Agricultural change in the Welsh Marches

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, much attention was paid by British agricultural geographers to the restructuring of the farm sector under pressures of national, European and global change. The need to adopt a perspective capable of looking beyond the farm gate inspired the introduction of modified political economy approaches into agricultural research. One important cornerstone of the empirical application of this thesis was the concept of the ‘farm adjustment strategy’. This attempted to map out the responses, especially those of survival, made by farm family businesses to rapidly changing agrarian conditions. Subsequently, the farm adjustment strategy became remarkable for its popularity as a way to organise research into agricultural change in developed market economies. Following a retreat in the 1990s, there has been something of a recent revival in the use of the term ‘strategy’ relating to agricultural adjustment. Revisiting this concept is therefore timely. Using empirical evidence from studies of farming change in the Welsh Marches, this paper examines two issues. First, it makes a critical re-examination of the concept to resolve differences with interpretation linked to theoretical perspectives so that future misuse can be minimised. Second, an attempt is made to assess the relevance of defined elements of farm adjustment strategies to analyses of farm business change. In so doing, there is an attempt to recover our knowledge of agrarian restructuring and to help situate newly encultured investigations into the likely survival of family labour-based forms of production.     

Understanding 2016: China,Brexit and Trump in the history of uneven and combined development

This article uses the theory of uneven and combined development (U&CD) to produce a novel explanation of ‘Brexit and Trump’ – the two shock political events of 2016. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, we identify the global conjuncture of historical unevenness in which the votes occurred: how the neoliberal transformation of the advanced capitalist countries was synchronized with the radically different process of primitive accumulation in China. Second, we apply the theory of U&CD to this peculiar ‘simultaneity of the non‐simultaneous’: the ‘big country’ effects of China's industrialization, we find, were thrice multiplied by its combination with the advanced sectors of the world economy, which accelerated China's take‐off, brought forward its export phase, and widened its export profile at a moment of maximum openness in international trade. Finally, this produced the pattern of development that led to the events of 2016: the resultant trade shocks intensified the internal inequalities of British and American societies in ways that match the geography of the Leave and Trump votes. The analysis has a wider intellectual implication too, for the phenomena of historical unevenness and combination are intrinsic to the history of the global political economy; and the theory of U&CD therefore has a unique contribution to make to the field of International Political Economy.     

The Social Foundations of Latin America's Recurrent Populism: Problems of Popular Sector Class Formation and Collective Action

The article is an attempt to offer a 'bottom-up' explanation of political instability in Latin America by examining patterns of class formation in the region. It argues that the heterogeneous class structure characterizing the popular sectors creates collective action problems that historically have resulted in popular sector mobilization by populist elites, if not apathy or civil war. The possibility of an alternative basis for popular sector mobilization that is more favorable to democratic consolidation is explored on the basis of a neo-Marxist interpretation of class formation. By incorporating variables dealing with the state and the nature of civil society that are not directly related to the relationship of individuals or groups to the means of production, an effort is made to outline the basis of a new popular sector collective identity which offers a totalizing synthesis of this social heterogeneity. Some of the implications of this are briefly discussed in a concluding section.     

Producing More with Less? Community Forestry in Durango,Mexico in an Era of Trade Liberalization*

Abstract Through a qualitative case study of peasant‐organized forestry in Durango, Mexico, this paper examines how neoliberal policy reform is reshaping the community forestry sector. Post‐1992 agrarian and forestry laws facilitate the emergence of new forms of association in ejidos (collective property communities created by agrarian reform) and agrarian communities, and reorganize the delivery of forestry technical services. These developments indirectly undermine peasants' capacity to deal with the sector's long‐standing internal problems, putting at risk their ability to provide themselves with the services they need for sustainable community livelihoods and forest exploitation. Nevertheless, this study of a forest peasant federation shows that institutional change is a process peopled by groups of social agents who respond creatively to external structure from local organizational and community contexts. Ethnographic methods can be used fruitfully to study complex interactions between multiple levels of political‐economic structure and local action, which both constrain and provide opportunities for the organization of common‐pool resource management regimes.     

Manuel Castells and the New South Africa

The revisionist literature of the 1970s approached social stratification in South Africa with the insistence that proper ‘weighting’ of the race and class factors should occur. Arguing that class and not racial consciousness was the key determinant of social structure in pre‐industrial South Africa, it concluded that eighteenth century Cape society in certain areas of the colony was characterised by greater fluidity than the caste system of the American South or industrialised South Africa. George Fredrickson's comparative analysis of American and South African history rejects the first mentioned approach but agrees with the conclusion. This article argues that Fredrickson erred by characterising Cape society as being largely based on class and a permeable colour line. The extent to which Cape Town or frontier society can be categorised as such was limited, while the agrarian Western Cape, in terms of manumission rates and the incidence of mixed marriages, was one of the most rigid caste societies in the world. The article concludes by observing that only by studying how political and class relationships reinforced each other can the full complexity of eighteenth century Cape society be revealed.     

The Ecological-Evolutionary Typology of Human Societies and the Evolution of Social Inequality

Gerhard Lenski's ecological-evolutionary typology of human societies, based on the level of technology of a society and the nature of its physical environment, is a powerful predictor of various dimensions of social inequality. Analysis of comparative data shows that while some dimensions of the stratification system (such as measures of social complexity) exhibit a monotonic trend of increasing inequality with level of technology from the hunting-and-gathering to the agrarian type, others (such as measures of freedom and sexual inequality among males) exhibit a pattern of "agrarian reversal" in which inequality increases from the hunting‐and‐gathering to the advanced horticultural type but then declines with the agrarian type. Theoretical and empirical implications of the agrarian reversal pattern for the study of social inequality are discussed.     

Entwurf einer Theorie religiös-säkularer Konkurrenz

This article presents the basic elements of a theory of religious secular competition. The theory claims that individuals in many societies may choose between religious and secular options, creating a situation of competition between religious and secular organizations. The paper assumes (bounded) rationality for individuals and organizations and describes religious and secular organizations, religious and secular goods, as well as three important parameters that influence religious secular competition: regulation of supply, regulation of demand and level of societal modernization. The theory of religious secular competition explains a whole range of different phenomena, such as variations in church going in US states, variation in the attractivity of monasteries, the late secularization of Ireland, the strong religiosity of agrarian societies or the success of megachurches since the 1960s.     

Value Chain Development and the Agrarian Question: Actor Perspectives on Native Potato Production in the Highlands of Peru

Value chain development seeks to integrate smallholder farmers into competitive markets to promote economic and social development. This article, conceptually based on the agrarian question, considers how the perspectives of various value chain actors, with particular focus on smallholders, have important implications for the outcomes of these market‐oriented initiatives. Utilizing Long’s concept of social interface, we present a mixed‐methods case study that analyzes how smallholders, an NGO, and agrifood corporations, including PepsiCo, partnered to establish value chains for native potatoes in the Peruvian highlands. We find that a thorough understanding of the various perspectives held by value chain actors provides important insight into why value chain initiatives have divergent trajectories. Based on the findings, we conclude that accounting for how actors are responding to development initiatives and one another helps explain development outcomes and that therefore the agrarian question remains relevant in current agricultural development discourse and practice.