jeffery paige, agrarian revolution (1976)

(6-7): summarizing stinchcome--"family-sized tenancy most likely to produce intense class conflict..."

(7-8): summarizing wolf--"middle peasant provides mass base"

(11): the infamous graph of rural class conflict

(16-17): small-holding as the most efficient form of organization (political factors prevent this form from proliferating, he's suggesting--this is obviously very important in the Angolan case)

(18-25): thus, for noncultivators

1. (18): draws income from land, is economically weak and needs coercion; draws income from capital, is economically strong
   
2. (21): draws income from land is dependent on servile labor; draws income from capital, can tolerate free labor
   
3. (23) zero-sum conflict over static agricultural product; reform possible in other situation
   

(21): graph of three noncultivator attitudes

(22): no labor unions possible here--where dependent on servile labor [?]

(26-34): thus, for cultivating classes

1. (26) land for cultivators important, they will avoid risk; income, they can afford risk
2. (30) importance of land as source of income, stronger incentive for economic competition and weaker incentive for organization (and vice-versa)
3. (34) the greater the importance of land, the more the structural isolation of noncultivators and thus the weaker the pressures for political solidarity
   

(28): quoting Mao on the middle peasants

(33): export agriculture, where there are wages, tends to be equalizing (he puts a lot of emphasis on this, like Marx with working-class, he's saying)

(29): graph of three cultivator attitudes

(40-45): LAND and LAND--agrarian revolt [he's giving the example of El Salvador--but it's difficult, as was noted, to discard this as simple 'agrarian revolt' because it was crushed. it certainly doesn't indicate that we have a quiescent, unorganized, structurally isolated peasantry!]

(42): German Peasant Wars and Bolivian revolution--here the introduction of organizational strength comes from without, he is suggesting. [hone in on this, seems dubious again]

(45): CAPITAL and LAND--the reform commodity movement (focusing on control of the commodity market, not asking for radical demands for redistribution of property)

(48-58): CAPITAL and WAGES---the reform labor movement (a radical class-conscious proletariat focused on limited political questions, because the costs of revolution are higher given the higher probability of reform)

(51-58): discussion the exception of the Malaya plantations [see graph on 57], where 'rubber' means that behavior of the elite is more and more like one who depends on land, due to

1. labor input much less onerous in rubber, thus very difficult for small-holder to cultivate; thus rubber plantations have competition, whereas the tea estates in Ceylon dont
2. rubber took indentured immigrant laborers, servile labor
3. fixed incomes in rubber; expanding in Ceylon

(58): LAND and WAGES--agrarian revolution (you have a well-organized peasantry and a landed elite that can't make concessions, basically)

(62): decentralized sharecropping and irrigated rice production, in particular, will give you revolutionary socialism

(65): graph comparing cotton sharecropping, though, to rice sharecropping (stability of tenure, centralized management, and dependence on landlord in the former). but see graph, since the latter is better on only two out of three.

(66): the migratory labor estate will give you revolutionary nationalism--Algeria and Kenya are the examples. [arguing, on 68, that workers are organized from without--this is the weakest part of the book, since it is impossible to make this distinction in the way that he does

(69): account of the Mau Mau, and the role of the Kikuyu

(70-71): summary of the four outcomes

(95): describing how he distinguishes revolutionary socialism from revolutionary nationalism. [problematize]

(104): quite robust statistical results, having done this

(120-123): summary of chapter 2, his empirical data and the support it lends to chapter 1

(212): Portugese kill 30,000 to 40,000 putting down the Angolan rebellion in 1961

(230): again, SH viable, but the estates were dominant; the graph is useful

(237): estate managers were dependent on colonial controls of (1) labor and controls of (2) land

(250): migratory patterns were prohibiting class-based organization [but here, again, we have to remember that, actually, the class-based organization won!]

(254): no flexibility --> zero-sum conflict

(278): sharp contrast between N. and S. Vietnam

(292): population in N. Vietnam, he's arguing, had a 'conservative interest' in their subsistence plots, and a 'consequent resistance' to political innovation [this is going to be difficult to sustain, my man!]

(300): the point about ecological disaster upsetting the North completely [this is how he makes sense of rebellion, presumably--but weak!]

(322): his highly selective graph of uprisings and 'revolutionary socialist events'

(324): important--here is the most odd aspect of his argument, where the claim is that there was a military dimension to the base in the North, but a political aspect to the insurgency in the South. [interrogate here]

- - - -

[1] 'political organization' from outside vs. from inside--particularly apparent in the case of Vietnam. on the one hand, they had mass support; on the other hand, they were a party 'imposed' in any normal sense of the word. his argument actually hinges on the very thin presentation of 'revolutionary socialist events'

[2] the notion of 'agrarian revolt', and how this squares with anticipated apathy in the 'LAND and LAND' case?

[3] market as enabling reformism. as skocpol rightly says, the market can put inordinate pressures and make upper-classes more stubborn than ever.

[4] wolf and skocpol talk of the importance of a lack of repression in allowing political organization to build--this is fundamentally why the middle peasant matters for wolf, he can avoid the incompetence that comes with being completely subjugated

[5] confusion of Marxism with Materialism--given that there isn't a one-to-one between crops and source of income, might we not have to talk of class struggle as itself determining 'income source'. why is land/income the first mover, always?

[6] in Angola, the importance of political structures in conditioning the character of rebellion, rather than income source. he notes the traditional structures, for example--income source ceases to matter in determining that this was a 'revolutionary nationalist' cast. [and let's not forget, also, that it was the MPLA, the class-conscious segment, that finally won.]