The impact of the land reform politics under the Shah on the development and social formation of Iran

This dissertation investigates the land reform process. It examines whether the land reform, alongside other developmental and agricultural policies, did in fact: (1) develop the country's agriculture; and (2) transformed the existing social structure and relations of production in rural Iran. Since the study views the pattern of landownership as one of class relations, an economic as well as political and social problem, it follows a political economy approach involving theory and history, analysis and description. Although the inquiry draws upon previously published historical and statistical data and research efforts of earlier scholars, it represents a new approach which is based on class analysis, employing the concepts modes and relations of production in explaining the development of rural society and land reform processes. Further, it focuses on developments in agriculture in connection with development policies in other areas of the economy. The findings make clear that the objectives originally set for land reform were not achieved by the three stages of the reform. First, the overwhelming majority of peasants received plots which were rarely sufficient to sustain their families. They lacked marketable surplus products to become involved in exchange relations with the commodity market. Therefore, a class of self-reliant, prosperous and independent peasant proprietors was not created; social or class differentiation, a prerequisite for the development of capitalist relations and capital accumulation, did not develop among the new peasant holders. Second, land reform did not lead to the actual break-up of large landholdings; besides, many new landlords emerged and joined the ranks of the oldtimers. Third, the state's development strategy in general, and its agricultural and reform policies in particular, discouraged agricultural productivity, reinforced subsistence farming, led to severe inflation, and to the decline of agriculture. Overall, they failed to develop the economy; rather, the country became more dependent on the international market. In sum, the peasantry was not emancipated, the dominant production relations, characterized by sharecropping and subsistence farming, were not transformed, the predominant mode of production in rural Iran remained precapitalist, and the plight of agriculture and the cultivators continued.