Horizontal concentration and vertical concentration in capitalist agriculture: Re-interpreting Marx and Chayanov

• Main Author: ZHANG, Qian Forrest
• Format: text
• Language: Chinese
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: smallholder; capitalist agriculture; agrarian change; agribusiness; dispossession; peasants; Agribusiness; Asian Studies; Rural Sociology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/4108; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/5367/viewcontent/2024_04_农大学报.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

How capitalism transforms peasant farming is a central question in agrarian studies. The two most important theoretical perspectives on this question—Marxist and Chayanovian theories—both have limitations. The former overlooked how commercial capital can transform smallholders’ production through vertical integration and extract surplus from smallholders through commodity relations; the latter neglected how labor commodification transforms smallholders’ family economic behaviors. These two theories, however, complement each other on these two fronts. Through critically re-interpreting Marxist and Chayanovian theories, this paper offers a synthesis that integrates the two perspectives into a coherent theoretical framework and proposes that capitalist agriculture expands through both “horizontal concentration” and “vertical integration”. Using the experience of China’s agrarian transition, this paper illustrates how these two dynamics gave rise to a variety of ways through which capital transforms smallholders’ family production and extracts surplus from them.