The major argument presented to legitimate the WTO’s competition doctrine is that such development did happen in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe and the United States where it produced a modern, wealthy, urban-industrial and post-industrial society with modern agriculture able to feed the nation and even export food. Why should not this pattern be repeated in the contemporary third world countries?
The argument fails to consider two major factors that make the reproduction of the pattern in third world countries almost impossible. The first is that the European model developed throughout a century and a half along with labour-intensive industrial technologies. Modern technologies use far less labour and the newcomers of the third world have to adopt them if their industrial exports are to be competitive in global markets. The second is that, during that long transition, Europe benefited from the massive migration of its surplus population to the Americas.
The contention that capitalism has indeed solved the agrarian question in its developed centres has always been accepted by large sections of the left, an example being Karl Kautsky’s famous book, The Agrarian Question, written before the First World War. Soviet ideology inherited that view and on its basis undertook modernization through the Stalinist collectivization, with poor results. What was always overlooked was that capitalism, while it solved the question in its centres, did it through generating a gigantic agrarian question in the peripheries, which it can only solve through the genocide of half of humankind. Within the Marxist tradition only Maoism understood the magnitude of the challenge. Therefore, those who accused Maoism of a ‘peasant deviation’ show by this very criticism that they lack the analytical capacity to understand imperialist capitalism, which they reduce to an abstract discourse on capitalism in general.
Modernization through capitalist market liberalization, as suggested by WTO and its supporters, finally aligns side by side, without even necessarily combining, the two components: the production of food on a global scale by modern competitive farmers mostly based in the North but also possibly in the future in some pockets of the South; and, the marginalization, exclusion, and further impoverishment of the majority of the three billion peasants of the present third world and finally their seclusion in some kinds of reserves. It therefore combines a pro-modernization and efficiency-dominant discourse with an ecological-cultural-reserve set of policies allowing the victims to survive in a state of material (including ecological) impoverishment. These two components might therefore complement, rather than conflict with, one another.
Can we imagine other alternatives and have them widely debated? Ones in which peasant agriculture would be maintained throughout the visible future of the twenty-first century, but, which simultaneously engage in a process of continuous technological and social progress? In this way, changes could happen at a rate that would allow a progressive transfer of the peasants into non-rural and non-agricultural employment.
Such a strategic set of targets involves complex policy mixes at national, regional, and global levels.
At the national level it implies macro policies protecting peasant food production from the unequal competition of modernized farmers and agribusiness corporations—local and international. This will help guarantee acceptable internal food prices—disconnected from international market prices, which are additionally biased by the agricultural subsidies of the wealthy North.
Such policy targets also question the patterns of industrial and urban development, which should be based less on export-oriented priorities (e.g., keeping wages low which implies low prices for food) and more attentive to a socially-balanced expansion of the internal market.
Simultaneously, this involves an overall pattern of policies to ensure national food security—an indispensable condition for a country to be an active member of the global community, enjoying the indispensable margin of autonomy and negotiating capacity.
At regional and global levels it implies international agreements and policies that move away from the doctrinaire liberal principles ruling the WTO—replacing them with imaginative and specific solutions for different areas, taking into consideration the specific issues and concrete historical and social conditions.
THE NEW LABOUR QUESTION
The planet’s urban population now represents about half of humanity, at least three billion individuals, with peasants making up all but a statistically insignificant percentage of the other half. The data on this population allow us to distinguish between what we can call the middle classes and the popular classes.
In the contemporary stage of capitalist evolution, the dominant classes—formal owners of the principal means of production and senior managers associated with bringing them into play—represent only a very minor fraction of the global population even though the share they draw from their societies’ available income is significant. To this we add the middle classes in the old sense of the term—non-wage-earners, owners of small enterprises, and middle managers, who are not necessarily in decline.
The large mass of workers in the modern segments of production consists of wage-earners who now make up more than four-fifths of the urban population of the developed centres. This mass is divided into at least two categories, the border between which is both visible to the outside observer and truly lived in the consciousness of affected individuals.
There are those who we can label stabilized popular classes in the sense that they are relatively secure in their employment, thanks among other things to professional qualifications which give them negotiating power with employers and, therefore, they are often organized, at least in some countries, into powerful unions. In all cases this mass carries a political weight that reinforces its negotiating capacity.
Others make up the precarious popular classes that include workers weakened by their low capacity for negotiation (as a result of their low skill levels, their status as non-citizens, or their race or gender) as well as non-wage-earners (the formally unemployed and the poor with jobs in the informal sector). We can label this second category of the popular classes ‘precarious’, rather than ‘non-integrated’ or ‘marginalized’, because these workers are perfectly integrated into the systemic logic that commands the accumulation of capital.
From the available information for developed countries and certain Southern countries (from which we extrapolate data) we obtain the relative proportions that each of the above-defined categories represent in the planet’s urban population.
Although the centres account for only 18 per cent of the planet’s population, since their population is 90 per cent urban, they are home to a third of the world’s urban population (see Table 1).
Table 1. Percentages of Total World Urban Population
Note: Percentages may not add up exactly due to statistical approximations.
The popular classes account for three-quarters of the world’s urban population, while the precarious subcategory represents two-thirds of the popular classes on a world scale. (About 40 per cent of the popular classes in the centres and 80 per cent in the peripheries are in the precarious subcategory.) In other words, the precarious popular classes represent half (at least) of the world’s urban population and far more than that in the peripheries.
A look at the composition of the urban popular classes a half century ago, following the Second World War, shows that the proportions that characterize the structure of the popular classes were very different from what they have become.
At the