Friday, February 5th 2-4pm
David Masondo - Vladimir Lenin and
Karl Kautsky and the agrarian question
in the South African historiography
Alavi and Shanin correctly point out that Vladimir Lenin and Karl Kautsky have had an enduring impact on the theorization of the relationship between capitalism and peasant production (Alavi and Shanin: 1988, p. 1). This paper serves as a literature survey on why and how the South African peasant production was destroyed and/or conserve by colonial capitalism, and how Lenin and Kautsky’s theories influenced answers to these questions.
I will show that the radical political economy literature, which significantly drew its theoretical insights from Lenin and Kautsky texts, has placed a huge emphasis on the role of white colonial business acting through the state in destroying and conserving the peasant production to generate economic growth. That is to say, they contend that the peasant production had been structured and conditioned by the needs of capitalist economic growth.