Abstract
China, with its large tracts of land not fully capitalized and a peculiar “uneven” structure that articulates different modes of production together—the smallholdings, the nominal collective ownership, and the advanced form of post-Fordist capitalism—presents an interesting case for Marxian theory of accumulation. In this paper, I analyze how collective land ownership and subsistence agriculture serve to generate a huge army of cheap, flexible, and disposable labor force, and how the “small peasant family,” a crucial institution notable for its accumulation of “unwaged labor” and its capacity for “intensification of labor”, functions as an important institution to sustain such large-scale rotation of migrants between country and city. However, “collective ownership” still contains the possibility of dissociating laborers from the urban capital and reintegrating them with land for more productive use and thus indicates an alternative direction for China’s future development.
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Notes
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Wen Tiejun points out, while most underdeveloped states would have to rely on the economic aid of foreign countries to accomplish the primitive accumulation for their industrialization, which often result in their political dependence on foreign capital, China chose the path of “internal primitive accumulation,” by extracting surplus value from the vast rural area to support the state’s industrialization . See Wen Tiejun, Baci weiji: Zhongguo de zhenshi jingyan 八次危机:中国的真实经验 1949–2009 (Eight Crises: Lessons from China, 1949–2009) (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 2012), 5. Lin Chun points out, the “primitive accumulation” was done through the unequal “scissor price” in the exchange between the industry and agriculture, by trading the cheapened agricultural products with more expensive industrial goods. See Lin Chun, The Transformation of Chinese Socialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 66.
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Chen, X. (2020). The Ambiguous Role of China’s Collective Land Ownership Under Global Capitalism. In: Silver, M. (eds) Confronting Capitalism in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13639-0_10
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