The invisible hand and the visible foot: peasants, dispossession and globalization

Abstract

Markets and movies have one thing in common: the hands that create them are not to be seen (Polanyi 2001).1 They both mask the very processes that bring them into being; in both, the illusion of a self-generating reality requires masking the reality that generates them. Hence, I use the metaphor of the visible foot to step outside the theatre, as it were. The visible foot is a Brechtian device to show that the invisible hand is not a reality sui generis; it is rooted in political power, and its power is to make its politics invisible. Here, the visible foot is a metaphor for the ‘global push factors’ (Araghi1991, 1995) that are derived from politically constructed global agrarian relations, the postwar food order, food aid and dumping, which cumulativelylay the preconditions for the massive transfer of the world’s peasant populations to camps of surplus labour in urban locations. The invisible hand, the theory would tell us, plays a necessary role in eliminating inefficient producers – indeed, this is a central message of the World Bank’s (2007) World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development. However, we can very widely see the visible foot, in state policies that dismantle social welfare systems; deregulate land markets; remove import controls and food subsidies; impose agro-exporting regimes; and expose millions of agrarian petty producers in the South to competition with heavily subsidized food transnational corporations and highly capitalized agricultural producers in the North. We also see the visible foot in the population movements that I call ‘enclosure-induced displacement’, which have been well documented in the literature. Two documentations are typical: a World Bank Environment Department (1994) study of the Bank’s own ‘development projects’ in the South, which concluded in the early 1990s that an estimated 4 million people would have to be forced off their lands each year; as well as Cernea’s (1996) study of World Bank-assisted and other development projects, which concluded that in one decade at least 80 to 90 million people had been forcibly displaced, almost four times the number of people worldwide displaced as a result of war and conflict (McDowell 1996; Van Hear 1998). The visible foot is also reflected in the extensive policy advice that will shape Bank lending, and which is offered in the World Development Report 2008. Global peasantries, to borrow the unforgettable words of Walter Benjamin (2006), are caught in a storm of violent forces that uproot, dispossess, and propel them into emerging vast spaces of informal labour in the global slums, spaces outside the traditionally rural but not even past the margins of urbanity; what Mike Davis (2006) calls ‘existential ground zero’. These existential ground zeroes are, as we will see, expanding: Wednesday 23 May 2007 marked a demographic milestone of world-historical significance, in that the earth’s population, for the first time in human history, became more urban than rural (Population Reference Bureau 2007; Kulikowski 2007). The storm that is depeasantizing the Earth’s population, as Benjamin might have said today, is what we call globalization. This chapter is an attempt to delineate the relationship between globali-zation and depeasantization from a world-historical perspective. I relate peasant studies, food regime analysis, and human geography literatures to specify the global spatiotemporal coordinates of the ongoing, massive process of ‘dispossession by displacement’ (Araghi 2000; Harvey 2006) of the world’s peasantries. This perspective allows a coherent linking of three central processes that can now be witnessed as everyday occurrences:• global depeasantization as ‘the great global enclosure of our times’ (Araghi 1991, 1995, 2000); and the special component of this process reflected in• global deruralization on the one hand; and• global hyperurbanization on the other hand (Araghi 1995, 2000, 2003; Davis 2006).