Farmers and consumers 'marginal' to the industrial agro-food system occupy the interstices of this network . . . (t)hese tangential spaces represent sites of alternative strategies which build on traditional production practices centred on subsistence and 'informal' market networks, or are bound up with new social movements associated with non-agridturd or non-food issues. (Whatmore 1995, p. 47) The social basis for a democratic food policy lies in movements for employment and incomes, for safe and nutritious food, for environmentally sensitive agriculture (includmg treatment of animals) and for democratic participation . . . Democratic principles . . . emphasize proximity and seasonality -sensitivity to place and time.This means the use and development of technologies and markets to facilitate local enterprises in every possible link of agrofood chains. What is increasingly clear is that healthy food and environmentally sound agriculture must be rooted in local economies. (Friedmann 1993, p. 55) RGAMC AGRICULTURE IS frequently heralded as one of the frontiers of a 0 'new' environmentalism where concerns about food safety, land use and social justice are converging with a politics of re-localization.' Indeed, the provision of organic food crops -from farm to table -would appear to countervail many contemporary trends in the production, processing, distribution and marketing of food in general. Yet, explosive growth since the 1980s is both cause and effect of a proliferation of new entrants who are attempting to capture the lucrative niche markets lurking behind organic products and the organic label? Consequently, the field is experiencing rapid changes in production and marketing strategies, and a restructuring of economic imperatives. And while a plurality of economic and ideological actors continue to thrive within the

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Abtract: Based on extensive interviews, this study is the first systematic attempt to map the spatio-temporal evolution of production networks linking urban, state-owned enterprises and rural, township and village-owned enterprises in reform-era China. It identifies two distinct regimes of urban-to-rural subcontracting patterns and conventions. The first, which developed and prospered from the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s, brought rural workers and the countryside into a relatively extensive relationship with urban capital, and thus represented a partial transition to capitalism. Its violent reconfiguration in the wake of a series of sectoral crises in the late 1990s led to the widespread privatisation of rural enterprises, and the emergence and consolidation of a second regime that simultaneously constituted a significant intensification of relations, the capture of the rural by the urban, and a new stage in this region's transition. This paper argues that these regimes are analogous to the formal and real subsumption of labor to capital, respectively, and that subsumption may be a more useful analytic for understanding the process of capture and transition than primitive accumulation: the latter concept alone, without reference to the dynamics of the social/spatial division of labor, risks missing other ways that exploitive connections can be constructed between places. This paper thus seeks to recast the relationship between these two concepts, and to develop a larger vocabulary in which subsumption, like primitive accumulation, is both spatial and ongoing and internal to capitalist accumulation.

Manufacturing based on networks of small family firms is widely regarded to have been integral to Taiwan's development success. Many studies discuss the social embeddedness, flexibility, efficiency, and competitive advantage of these networks, but there have been few systematic attempts to theorize their origins. A processual analysis of the changing spatial structure of Taiwan's industry, in its social, political, and historical contexts, reveals that Taiwan's concentrated industries of the 1950s did not disintegrate into smaller firms. Rather, there was a proliferation of new rural firms after the mid-1960s. The construction of a disintegrated, decentralized, and networked structure was driven by the contingent actions of rural household entrepreneurs, pursuing strategies of social reproduction, under circumstances resulting from, among other things, an extensive land-reform program and redistributive agricultural policies. Transactions costs and neo-Weberian authority approaches elucidate important factors, but fail to explain the creation of this new class of petty entrepreneurs, and how the conditions of their entrance shaped the networked form of organization they created. Furthermore, their actions did not result from state-led development policies as much as they were the unintended consequences of state policies, preceding by several years government efforts to support the growth of small firms and rural industry. Finally, urban-push explanations assume a passive countryside, thus ignoring the ways rural actors energetically created new structures of production out of the resources at hand.

Primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession significantly strengthen our analyses of neo-liberalism, globalization, and capitalism in general. But processes that appear to be primitive accumulation are often better characterized as the subsumption of labor to capital. More than terminology is at stake in making this distinction: subsumption as opposed to primitive accumulation can highlight different sources of change, and different sites of possible contestation. It is time for a re-appraisal and broader conceptualization of subsumption and its relationship to primitive accumulation.

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