Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World

First, a warning. This is not casual reading. This is a dense academic tome, with detailed statistical analysis and in-depth case studies. And the writing style is pretty dry, although there are occasional, unexpected touches of humor (for instance, pg. 236: "Many bush traders felt that after years of unrewarding trade the millenium had finally arrived and rushed to invest in consumer goods including foreign automobiles and even refrigerators, which, considering the absence of electrification in the region, were of limited utility."). If you want to get the main gist of the book, you can probably get away with reading only the first and last chapters. For those who are interested in the political economy of social movements, particularly in the third world, this is a valuable work. Paige looks at the various class systems in rural areas that export cash crops to the world market and breaks them down into four main types, while noting there are many intermediary varieties. He discusses the barriers different sorts of class systems can create to organizing--for instance, on what he refers to as the commercial hacienda, the peasants have little of their own organization horizontally with each other; instead, social ties run vertically between peasants and the estate-owner, which is a major obstacle to social movement organization. Typically, some outside force needs to get involved to stimulate a movement. Paige also analyzes why some class systems produce revolutionary movements and some movements that are reformist in their goals (even though they may officially adopt a radical ideology like socialism). For instance, in large commercial plantations (often owned by multinational corporations), the owners can afford to invest in their estates, boosting productivity; this means they have some economic wiggle room and can bargain with labor unions, making concessions to them. Thus, plantation systems produce reformist labor movements. Sharecropping systems on the other hand, involve local estate-owners whose major source of wealth is their land and can't afford to invest anything in their land to make it more productive; they are locked in a zero-sum game with their tenants. This pushes the tenants to revolutionary socialism, since expropriation of the estate-owners' lands is the only way they can better their condition. The distinctions Paige makes between different rural systems are very important to understanding what opportunities and constraints social movements face. Too often, scholars just lump all rural class structures together and attempt to analyze them all as being more or less the same. Unfortunately, Paige's underlying theoretical perspective--a synthesis of orthodox Marxism and rational choice theory--is somewhat reductionist. According to Paige, class structure is the driving force in social dynamics and people make their choices based on decisions about economic gain. Both these things are important, but they are certainly not the

To lead with some of the strongest evidence about the importance of this book, is to say that it was awarded the highesthonor, the Sorokin award, by the American Sociological Assn.So why in the 20thC did some areas of the Third World spawn violent communist revolutions and others did not? Paige, using what now has become know as "rational choice Marxism", (which is the use of models that are prevalent in economics and game theory in order to illuminate class conflict, historical change, etc.), developed a theory which explains why some countries, for example, Vietnam and Angola spawned communist peasant revolutions while other equally or more oppressed ex-colonial nations did not. Paige argues that the contours of politcal conflict are based on the pattern (or "mode") of agricultural production, and not because of "communist subversion". In short, tenant farming created a zero-sum game in which agrarian elites were increasingly driven to brutally extract surplus value from peasants via taxation and land appropriation. Paige's work spawned a large literature within the field of peasants studies, including many, joining a very old debate, who criticized Paige for being too economistic in his analysis. In any case, it remains an important landmark in sociology and continues the traditions of political sociology associated with Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol et al.

This book was the Sorokin Award winner of the American Sociological Association. So why in the 20thC do some areas of the Third World spawn violent communist revolutions and others don't? Paige, using what now has become know as "rational choice Marxism" (which is to say the use of models that are prevalent in economics and game theory in order to illuminate class conflict, historical change etc.), developed a theory which explains why, for example, Vietnam and Angola spawned communist peasant revolutions based on their pattern of agricultural production. In short, tenant farming creates a zero-sum game in which agrarian elites are increasingly driven to brutally extract surplus value from peasants via taxation and land appropriation. Paige's work spawned a large literature within the field of peasants studies, including many, joining a very old debate, who criticized Paige for being too economistic in his analysis. In any case, it remains an important landmark in sociology and continues the traditions of political sociology associated with Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol et al.