The new Agrarian Question

Over the last decade I've been had the privilege of flying around the world, visiting cities and farms, studying and working in agriculture. Now again a student, I am integrating the images I absorbed during my travels into applied theories of social change.

I'm realizing that the expansive slums that I drove through outside of Deli corresponded with the enormous spaces of uninhabited farm land in the Punjab, now mechanically cultivated. And that this rural displacement is not isolated to their state. I've seen the same pattern the world over, Guatemala, India, Egypt. Massive agricultural zones characterized by heavily capitalized export cultivation, green revolution techniques, mechanization, the privatization of land as capital, the depopulation of rural landscapes, mass migration to cities, or immigration to new states. Marx's proletarianization. Doubtful he would have predicted the speed and scale in which it would occur. This new proletariate resides in black plastic mega-slums surrounding major metropolitan cities, the shiny black transitional scars resulting from world agriculture's rapid integration into the neoliberal new world order- the newest iteration of capitalism.

I knew much of the story before my travels. Neoliberal economic theory- comparative advantage, structural adjustment, deregulation of agriculture, free trade, etc etc-- but the relatively short history of agricultural capitalism and its systematic dismantling of the world's agrarian peasantry is new and overwhelming. Mass migration, urbanization, starvation, unraveling before me like some giant unwieldy puppet show. I'm now realizing that the slums, and hunger I've witnessed were not a steady-state of affairs, status quo for time eternal, but rather the most recent belch of the first world neoliberal capitalist agenda. To paraphrase Mike Davis, another capital casualty of 'oops a million more dead'.

Perhaps that was why, when I heard Elliot Coleman, one of the fathers of the small-scale organic farming movement in the US, speak last week- I was moved to stand and shout, when he proclaimed in the face of a popular organic food company's CEO that although organic was now a branded seal of the USDA, capitalism would never be able to deny that small scale agricultural producers are amongst the most subversive and powerful people on the planet. Because as long as peasant producers can hold on to their means of production, he argued, they and only they, have the power to resist the capitalist paradigm.

My aspiration to be a small-holder remains true.