Tom Brass is an academic who has written widely on peasant studies. For many years he was at the University of Cambridge as an affiliated lecturer in their Faculty of Social and Political Sciences and at Queens' College, Cambridge as their Director of Studies of the Social and Political Sciences. For many years he was an, and then the, editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies . [1] [2] Murray reports Brass as being "dismissive of the cultural turn in peasant studies" and the rise of post-modern perspectives and his notion that this has been a conservative process and that it has lent support to neoliberalism. [3]
Born on 3 March 1946, Tom (Thomas Ferdinand Norman) Brass was educated at boarding schools run by the Dominicans (Blackfriars, Llanarth and Laxton), studied social sciences (sociology, anthropology) at the new universities (Essex, Sussex) and then taught these same subjects at the old ones (Durham, Cambridge). He conducted fieldwork research in eastern Peru during the mid-1970s and in Northern India during the 1980s. An account by him of his arrest, interrogation, imprisonment and expulsion from Peru is contained in ‘The Sabotage of Anthropology and the Anthropologist as Saboteur’, The Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford , Vol. XIII, No. 2 (1982). (Reprinted together with a postscript in Labour Markets, Identities, Controversies, pages 181-191).
Described by James Petras ( Science and Society , Vol. 77, No. 3, 2013, p. 434) as ‘one of the United Kingdom’s leading Marxist scholars’, much of what Brass has published deals with two contentious and much-debated issues in the area of development studies: the link between unfree labour and capitalism, and the political impact of the ‘new’ populist postmodernism. His views have influenced others writing about these same issues.
First, he challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that capitalist transformation of the agrarian sector automatically leads to the replacement of unfree workers with free equivalents. Where a worker is unable to sell his/her own labour-power, such a person is not free, and thus according to political economy not part of a proletariat. This is regardless of employment duration, whether s/he receives a wage, is a local or a migrant, or has access to land. In their conflict with rural labour, employers reproduce, introduce or reintroduce unfree relations, a process of workforce decomposition/recomposition Brass calls deproletarianisation. Its object is to discipline and cheapen labour-power, an economic advantage in a global context where agricultural producers have to become increasingly cost-conscious to remain competitive.
And second, he has challenged the prevailing view that the ‘cultural turn’ is a politically progressive contribution to development studies. According to Brass, the ‘new’ populist postmodernism recuperated a specifically cultural dimension of ‘peasant-ness’, a discourse associated most powerfully with the Subaltern Studies project, formulated initially in the context of Asian historiography and latterly with regard to Latin American history. For the ‘new’ populist postmodernism this analytical re-essentialization of peasant did two things. It rejected Enlightenment discourse as an inauthentic Eurocentric colonial imposition, thereby recovering a hitherto unheard grassroots voice that was authentically nationalist.
For this reason, postmodern interpretations of agrarian mobilisations in Latin America and India nowadays insist that these are ‘new’ social movements, the defining characteristic of which is the non-class identity (religion, ethnicity, gender, regionalism, nationalism) deployed by their participants. Consequently, postmodernists claim, such mobilisations are antagonistic to socialism, unconnected with fundamental changes in production relations, and thus incompatible with revolutionary transformation. What is at stake, Brass argues, is not just the form to be taken by economic growth in rural areas of the so-called Third World, but the very fact of development itself.
Agrarianism is a social and political philosophy that advocates for a return to subsistence agriculture, family farming, widespread property ownership, and political decentralization. Those who adhere to agrarianism tend to value traditional forms of local community over urban modernity. Agrarian political parties sometimes aim to support the rights and sustainability of small farmers and poor peasants against the wealthy in society.
Populism is a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of the common people and often position this group in opposition to a perceived elite group. It is frequently associated with anti-establishment and anti-political sentiment. The term developed in the late 19th century and has been applied to various politicians, parties and movements since that time, often as a pejorative. Within political science and other social sciences, several different definitions of populism have been employed, with some scholars proposing that the term be rejected altogether.
Fredric Ruff Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, or violence, including death or other forms of extreme hardship to either themselves or members of their families.
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Left-wing populism, also called social populism, is a political ideology that combines left-wing politics with populist rhetoric and themes. Its rhetoric often includes elements of anti-elitism, opposition to the Establishment, and speaking for the "common people". Recurring themes for left-wing populists include economic democracy, social justice, and skepticism of globalization. Socialist theory plays a lesser role than in traditional left-wing ideologies.
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The Journal of Peasant Studies, subtitled Critical Perspectives on Rural Politics and Development, is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research into the social structures, institutions, actors, and processes of change in the rural areas of the developing world. It is published by Routledge and the editor-in-chief is Saturnino "Jun" Borras Jr..
Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri (Sinhala: ආචාර්ය නිර්මාල් රංජිත් දේවසිරි ) born on 18 October 1965 is Senior Lecturer of the department of history at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Currently he is the head of Department. He specialises in social transformation in agrarian societies, history and ideology, European colonialism in Asia, post-colonial state-building, and ethno-nationalism.
Henry Bernstein is a British sociologist and Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the University of London: School of Oriental and African Studies. He has worked for several decades on the political economy of agrarian change, social theory, peasant studies, land reform, and the rural economy in South Africa.
Terence J. Byres is a peasant studies scholar and a professor emeritus of Political Economy at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Byres was a founding editor of the Journal of Development Studies (1964), the Journal of Peasant Studies (1973) and Journal of Agrarian Change (2001).
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Political economy in anthropology is the application of the theories and methods of historical materialism to the traditional concerns of anthropology, including but not limited to non-capitalist societies. Political economy introduced questions of history and colonialism to ahistorical anthropological theories of social structure and culture. Most anthropologists moved away from modes of production analysis typical of structural Marxism, and focused instead on the complex historical relations of class, culture and hegemony in regions undergoing complex colonial and capitalist transitions in the emerging world system.
Karl Johann Kautsky was a Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theorist. A leading theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Second International, Kautsky advocated orthodox Marxism, which emphasized the scientific, materialist, and determinist character of Karl Marx's work. This interpretation dominated European Marxism for two decades, from the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
Agrarianism is social philosophy or political philosophy which values rural society as superior to urban society, the independent farmer as superior to the paid worker, and sees farming as a way of life that can shape the ideal social values. It stresses the superiority of a simpler rural life as opposed to the complexity of city life.
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