Indian Farmers’ Struggle 2020–2021: Contemporary Agrarian Questions and Challenges for a Marxian Political Ecology of Agriculture

Abstract

This essay draws from critical agrarian studies and the history of farmer’s movements in India in order to shed light on a central problem that the Marxian political ecology of agriculture must confront: how can we develop an ecologically adequate approach to agrarian questions without falling into populism? Or, put differently, how can we reformulate the intuitions of food sovereignty movements through the perspective of the ‘global worker’, thus revealing the ‘unity of the diverse’? It does so by reflecting on debates surrounding the meaning of the agrarian questions in the 21st century, responses to the farmers’ struggle against the so-called new farm laws, and the crisis confronting capitalist world-ecology in the neoliberal era. In particular, the essay thinks through the Bernstein–McMichael debate in the context of the recent farmers’ struggle. It concludes by posing some problems that the Marxian political ecology must confront today.

Introduction: Marx, Ecology and Agriculture

Marx’s political ecology was finally revived at the turn of the century. None was more central to this than John Bellamy Foster. Foster’s work was a timely intervention, when ecological concerns were proliferating alongside a seeming consensus that Marx had little to say about ecological questions. Against prevailing opinion, Foster argued that Marx’s ‘entire dialectical framework rested on what would today be called an ecological … systems theory, connecting the materialist conception of history to that of nature’ (Foster & Clark, 2018). Marx’s framework is fundamentally ‘socio-ecological’, that is, it recognises the fundamental unity of social and ecological life (Araghi, 2009a, p. 115). As Araghi notes, through the reproduction of labour power, nature is recast for Marx as the ‘prolongation of the body of the individual’ [Marx quoted in Araghi (2009a, p. 117)]. Thus, through the category of labour power and its analysis vis-à-vis the capitalist mode of production, Marx has been able to transcend the Cartesian duality that has characterised analyses of the human-nature relationship in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought.

Foster presents a reconstruction of Marx’s ecology through the ‘theory of metabolic rift’ (Foster, 1999, p. 373). Marx argues that the separation of the peasants from their land (the basis of the capital/wage–labour relation) and the corresponding separation of town and country are accompanied by another ‘rift’ between the natural metabolism of the land/soil (i.e., nutrient cycles) and the socio-economic metabolism of agriculture under capitalism. Here, Marx demonstrates the fundamental link between agrarian and ecological crises/revolutions and, consequently, the essential role of political ecology in approaching agrarian questions. However, the ecological dimension of the classical agrarian question was neglected in its revival during the era of national-developmentalism and is now being revived and reworked in a profoundly different context as a new variant of ‘populism’, as we will see. Populism is understood as ‘the deliberate political act of aggregating disparate and even competing and contradictory class and group interests and demands into a relatively homogenised voice, that is, ‘we, the people’, against an ‘adversarial them’ for tactical or strategic political purposes’ (Borras, 2019, p. 3).

Two decades after Foster’s revival, the Marxian political ecology of agriculture still remains in its formative phase. This essay selectively draws from the long debates surrounding the meaning of the agrarian question and farmer’s movements in India in order to throw light on a central problem that Marxian political ecology of agriculture must confront. The ‘Introduction: Marx, Ecology and Agriculture’ section of the essay presents a brief account of the emergence and subsequent development of agrarian questions. Then, the ‘Classical Agrarian Questions’ section considers contemporary agrarian questions, inflected through interpretations of farmers’ movements in India. The section ‘Limits of Capitalist Development, Neoliberalism and Agroecology’ considers the relation between neoliberal and world ecology and its relevance to the themes examined in this essay. The conclusion reflects on these to pose some problems that Marxian political ecology needs to address.

Classical Agrarian Questions

‘Agrarian question(s)’ refers to certain analytical lenses within Marxist political economy/ecology used to make sense of the place of agriculture/peasantry in the development of capitalism (Akram-Lodhi & Kay, 2010). Classical approaches to the agrarian question partly emerged from a disjunction between the prevailing interpretations of abstract theory and historical reality (Araghi, 2009b): while Marx’s Capital seemed to predict the end of the peasantry as an effective force under capitalism, the peasants had not disappeared and remained ‘a very essential factor of the population, production, and political power’ (also see Chayanov, 1987; Engels, 2021) in the 1890s. Both Lenin and Kautsky sought to come to terms with the disjunction, albeit from two different ends (Araghi, 2009b). Kautsky tried to bridge the gap by refining theory; he recast the peasant disappearance thesis ‘as a tendency subject to countervailing influences’ (Araghi, 1995, p. 340). Alternately, Lenin, in his polemic against the Narodniks, that is, Russian agrarian populists, tried to show that history was in line with theory by demonstrating that capitalism was, in fact, developing in the countryside and that the (already differentiated) Russian peasantry was differentiating. Ever since Lenin’s polemic, the debate between Marxism and populism has fundamentally affected the terms in which agrarian questions are addressed. We will return to this debate in the following sections.

The ecological concerns that animated Marx’s critique of capitalist agriculture are found again in Lenin and Kautsky (see also Foster & Magdoff, 2000). For instance, Kautsky noted that ‘[t]echnical progress in agriculture, far from making up [for the constantly mounting loss of nutrients], is, in essence, a method for improving the techniques of wringing the goodness out of the soil’ [Kautsky quoted in Moore (2008, p. 57)]. Thus, Kautsky, echoing Marx, recognises that the metabolic rift is constitutive of the town-country antagonism—a defining geographical relation founded on the basis of the social division of labour characterising early capitalism. Put differently, Kaustky, like Marx, saw that the logic of accumulation impels the plunder of the earth. However, when the classical agrarian question was revived in the 20th century, these ecological concerns were largely forgotten. This was perhaps due to the prevailing concerns of the time, when the possibility and trajectory of national economic development were being contemplated in the context of largely ‘rural’ post-colonial societies. Consequently, national-developmentalism—that is, inward-oriented, nationally based industrial growth—came to signify the economic content of the political independence project (Araghi, 1995). In this ideological milieu, one of the central foci of the resurgent agrarian political economy was the relevance of varying historical experiences of agrarian change to the prospects of national economic development centred on industrialisation (Bernstein, 2016).

T. J. Byres ‘reinvigorated the agrarian question literature’ in this context (Lerche 2013, p. 383). He identified three distinct meanings that have ‘attach[ed] to the notion of an agrarian question’ (Byres 1986, p. 7): (AQ1) how development of capitalism in agriculture and rural class differentiation are co-constitutive; (AQ2) how agriculture contributes or, does not, to industrialisation and accumulation beyond agriculture; (AQ3) what implications the development of capitalism has for the politics of agrarian classes. Neglected in this schema is an understanding of the agrarian question as an ecological question, and the agrarian question of gendered labour ¹ . Thus, we must add another basic approach to the agrarian question: the agrarian question as an ecological question, which, while being intertwined with the others as a part of an organic whole, nevertheless constitutes a distinct problematic. Borrowing a phrase from Harvey (1985, p. 1), we may say that each of these problematics is ‘different windows from which to view the totality of capitalist activity’.

Rooted in a Marxian ‘class’ framework, for Byres, class structure and class dynamics are central to understanding how capitalism develops. AQ1 relates to the forms of class struggle and peasant differentiation that were integral to ‘agrarian transformations’ (Byres, 1996) and the development of productive forces. Byres (1986, p. 4) defines ‘successful agrarian transition’ as those changes that are necessary for the ‘overall development of capitalism or socialism … in a national social formation’. The agrarian question was now read as the continuing existence in the countryside of late-developing countries, of substantive obstacles to accumulation within, and beyond the countryside, namely, a lack of successful agrarian transition. Such transitions not only resulted in the expansion of the food surplus, driving down the cost of food and the cost of reproduction of labour power [‘cheap food’ (Moore, 2010)], but have also driven forward depeasantisation and proletarianisation (‘class differentiation’). Byres (1996) identified two broad ‘paths’ of agrarian transformation: (a) Capitalism from above—where the landlord class was the agent of transformation (‘Prussian path’); and (b) Capitalism from below—where the peasantry was the dynamic force behind the development of capitalism (‘the United States path’). The problematic of agrarian transformation, central to AQ2, emerged forcefully in the context of ‘primitive socialist accumulation’ for Soviet Industrialisation. Byres was the first to note that the problem of ‘primitive socialist accumulation’ added a new layer of meaning to the agrarian question (Akram-Lodhi & Kay, 2010). The terms of trade between industry and agriculture were central to this problematic rooted in a developmentalist épistémè.

With the demise of national-developmentalism, Byres’ position met with two challenges, represented by Philip McMichael and Henry Berntein. Both positions argue that the terms in which it was conceptualised need to be re-evaluated with the changes wrought by neoliberal globalisation.

Farmers’ Movement in India and Contemporary Agrarian Questions

The recent successful agitations by the Indian farmers (2020–2021) against the ‘new farm laws’ (NFLs) have rekindled interest in agrarian questions on a broader and more inclusive basis than before. The NFLs sought to reorganise the agrarian sector according to the programme of neoliberalism by laying the groundwork for contract farming, reversing land reforms, cutting public investment, and deregulating agricultural trade by undermining government-regulated markets (mandis) reducing the state’s role in the regulation of markets for primary agricultural products (Ramachandran, 2011). They also signalled the withdrawal of the state’s commitment from the inadequate but indispensable Public Distribution System (PDS), which provides poor households with subsidised foodstuffs. This would have negatively impacted women and girls, who already have poor nutrition and food availability situation (Sangwan & Singh, 2022).

While earlier regimes attempted to liberalise India’s agricultural sector by combining elements of reform with redistribution, Narendra Modi’s BJP, undergirded by an authoritarian populism, attempted to do so by diktat. There were no consultations with farmers (Jebaraj, 2021), and the state of exception (Agamben, 2008) ushered in by COVID-19 empowered the authoritarian regime. Despite coercion, harassment and harsh conditions, the steadfastness of farmers impelled the repeal of the ‘black laws’, and in a rare display of weakness, Modi apologised to the farmers of India (Schmall et al., 2021). This was a spectacular victory against authoritarian populism—this alone makes the struggle crucial and progressive. The struggle constructed, however fleetingly, an alternative to Hindutva-populism’s conception of ‘the people’ by stitching together a base that cut across class, caste and gender divisions (Kumar, 2022). This distinctive feature has structured discourse surrounding these protests.

Many have compared this struggle to the ‘new farmers’ movements’ (NFMs) of the 1980s, in order to ask (see also Baviskar & Levien, 2021): What has changed? According to the discourse in support of the NFMs, the contradiction addressed was one between the ‘peasantry and state-based exploiters’ (Omvedt, 1995, p. 126). They also argued that the NFMs, positioned against a project of national-developmentalism that could only unfold as it destroys nature and society, transcended the class struggle (ibid.) while offering a ‘distinctive form of homegrown anti-capitalism’ (Baviskar & Levien 2021, p. 1343). Critics argued that the NFMs reflected a class project rooted in the interests of the middle and large farmers and that they were, at best, negligent of, and at worst, antagonistic to the interests of labourers and small farmers.

The predominantly male leadership and base of the NFMs consisted of the dominant class of landowning castes who gained the most from the Green Revolution (GR)—for instance, Jats in Punjab, Patiadars in Gujarat and Marathas in Maharashtra. These accumulating castes organised politically in farmers’ unions such as the Shetkari Sanghatana (Maharashtra) and Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) (Punjab and Doab regions). Leaders of these unions functioned as ‘organic intellectuals’ (Gramsci, 1971) that articulated a class project in a populist language, projecting sectional interests as those of ‘rural society’ as a whole. This had led some to characterise the NFMs as a ‘conservative rural coalition’ (Banaji, 1995), which reflected ‘a class hegemony cloaked in populist discourse’ (Dhanagre, 1995, p. 89). Balagopal (1987, p. 1545) noted that the NFMs articulated the ideology of the ‘provincial propertied classes’ having ‘a landholding in its native village, cultivated by hired labour, … business of various descriptions in towns—trade, finance, hotels, cinemas and contracts’. Ironically, these dominant classes are the ones who actively posited the ‘India-Bharat’ (‘urban-rural’) divide as the basis of exploitation and oppression (ibid.). Marxists argued that though these movements may have selectively challenged the prevalent state-imposed development, they have been sustained by exploitative class- and oppressive caste-relations.

As the GR introduced modern high-yielding-variety seeds and pesticides, along with advancements in irrigation and mechanisation (particularly tractors—a major symbol of the 2020–2021 protests), agriculture became more capital-intensive, productive and closely linked to the larger economy. Landowners who were able to invest in the new technology consolidated themselves as ‘provincial propertied classes’ and organised themselves to engage in class-for-itself action as GR technologies spread (Byres, 1981). While ‘old’ peasant movements, positioned against landlords, demanded ‘land to the tiller’, the ‘new’ farmers movements reflect the consolidation of commodity production in the countryside and associated processes of differentiation; agency had transferred from the peasant to the farmer (Byres, 1995). Farmers’ demands centred around ‘price and other related issues’ (Byres, 1995)—remunerative prices, production costs, taxation of agriculture, loan waivers, etc. However, as neoliberalism consolidated, and as GR technologies began to dwindle in the face of ecological limits (Sethi, 2021), the NFMs receded. This was compounded by the diversification of economic activities (and interests) across both classes of labour as well as capital—being less dependent on agrarian capital for their social reproduction, labour could not be ‘cajoled’ to attend demonstrations (Pattenden & Bansal, 2021), and interest in ‘price and other related issues’ subsided for larger farmers who were able to successfully diversify out of agriculture and accumulate across the rural and urban.

Importantly, as the kisan (‘farmer’) identity no longer proved sufficient, farmers turned to their caste identity and mobilised for reservation and inclusion under the category of ‘Other Backward Castes’ (OBCs). As Jaffrelot (2000) notes, the sources of the prosperity of the Jats—post-Independence land reforms and the culmination of the GR—were also the basis of the kisan identity articulated by Charan Singh and the BKU. As neoliberalism and ‘Mandal’ politics eroded these sources, prideful aversion to ‘quota’ politics gave way to demands for Reservations. Indeed, these demands for reservation can be seen as an articulation of the crisis of dominant agrarian castes in the post-GR era (Mehta & Sinha, 2022). Their willingness to mobilise on this front might also reflect the process of ‘secularisation of castes’ set in motion by the GR, whereby the caste system was primarily expressed as a division between Dalits and non-Dalits (Teltumbde, 2020); the dichotomy between Dalits and non-Dalits came to the fore, however, as caste continued to insidiously structure the material life of the working poor.

GR technologies, initially introduced in the agro-ecologically favourable Punjab and Doab, began to spread to less fertile regions from the 1970s, where limited ecological surpluses implied more intensive use of inputs and higher costs of production (Vakulabharanam & Motiram, 2011). As the socio-ecological contradictions of ‘fossil capitalism’ (Jakobsen, 2018) unfold, smaller farmers aspiring to differentiate upwards by adopting new technologies are unable to do so; that is, accumulation ‘from below’ (Byres, 1996) is being throttled. Thus, despite significant differences in class context, the demands of left-led poorer farmers—centred around ‘price and other related issues’—are often not very different from those of dominant agrarian classes (Jodhka, 2018). Forgetting that technology is not imposed onto a homogenous social space and that agriculture may act as a ‘safety net’ for small and marginal farmers, dominant farmers and (quasi) state officials are quick to dismiss those who are unable to adopt new technologies as ‘bad farmers’ (Kumar, 2016). Accumulation by agrarian classes is more significant in the areas where the GR initially took off [Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh (UP)]—over 2001–2007 average farm income per acre in Punjab was six times higher than Maharashtra (Lerche, 2010). Furthermore, large farmers in Punjab have also been expanding the scale of accumulation by acquiring land across India and abroad (Lerche, 2010, p. 53). Thus, even as neoliberal-globalism consolidates and ecological crises precipitated by the GR push against the limits of accumulation (Jodhka, 2021), some are able to accumulate on an expanded scale, while many struggle to hold onto their land, and even more are engaged in daily battles for survival. The uneven development of capitalism in India poses the question of class differentiation starkly.

While the Jats, Marathas, Patels, Rajputs and other dominant class farmers were agitating for inclusion in the OBC category, there were strong progressive movements such as the Bhoomi Adhikar Andolan (‘Land Rights Movement’) and the Kisan Long March (KLM) in 2018. The All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC) organised the Kisan Mukti Sansat, where the Farmers’ Freedom From Indebtedness Bill, and the Farmers’ Right to Guaranteed Remunerative Minimum Support Prices for Agricultural Commodities Bill were presented (Dhawale, 2022). AIKSCC, a platform with about 150 farmers’ organisations, was formed in the aftermath of the killing of farmers protesting for debt relief and Minimum Support Prices (MSP) for crops like onions and pulses in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh, by police firing (Pandey, 2017; The Hindu, 2018).

Meanwhile, the AIKS was leading a series of agitations in Maharashtra that culminated in the KLM (Dhawale, 2019). The KLM not only reflected farmers’ loss of faith in a state that has betrayed them, but a crisis of social reproduction, which was reflected in widespread farmers’ suicides and the starvation of adivasi children (Dhawale, 2019). The farmers that marched to Mumbai, India’s financial capital, were largely adivasi farmers who combined petty commodity production (PCP) with wage labour. The marching farmer-labourers demanded, among other things, proper implementation of Forest Rights Act and the expansion of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the implementation of the recommendations of the Swaminathan Committee Report, loan waivers, drought relief and remunerative prices (ibid.). The March reflected processes of socio-economic differentiation under neoliberalism and the socio-ecological contradictions of the GR.

Nigam’s articles (2018, 2020, 2021) locate opposition to the NFLs in a wider movement, in which the struggle for food sovereignty is central. Patnaik (2020) echoes this view, reading the farmers’ protests as a struggle for food sovereignty against the encroachment of the international agro-food order. For Nigam, the food crisis is an expression of the ecological contradictions of capitalist agriculture. Other expressions include the ‘depletion of groundwater, toxicity in water, drying up of rivers, destruction of the soil through overuse of chemical fertilisers and pesticides’ (Nigam, 2020) and so on. These ecological issues affect farmers before anyone else and it is not surprising that the Charter of the AIKSCC reflects these concerns. The Charter marks a ‘decisive shift’, declaring that peasant farming is not irretrievably doomed under capitalism but rather offers a new paradigm for the organisation of agro-food systems. By recognising the fundamental links between ecological and agrarian crises, the ‘peasants/farmers’ are re-positioned as the revolutionary vanguard in the movement for a ‘new agro-ecological paradigm’ (ibid.). As such, ‘[t]he farmers … are not just fighting a battle for their own survival but one where the survival of all of us is at stake’. The broad base of the NFLs struggle is explained in reference to a new contradiction that is emerging in the Indian countryside, and class struggle takes a backseat.

Patnaik argues that the agrarian crisis has a ‘generalised nature affecting all the peasantry’ (Patnaik et al., 2011, p. 51), and that the corporatisation of Indian agriculture reflects the domination of peasant production by transnational capital. She emphasises the problem of dispossession over differentiation. What is missing in Patnaik’s recent (unlike earlier) approaches to the agrarian question is an organic link between accumulation by dispossession and the expanded reproduction of capital centred on the capital-labour relation—this essentially obfuscates the ‘class character’ of the agrarian crisis, which is handled and experienced differently by those who accumulate and the exploited (Lerche, 2011). In sum, she notes that ‘the principal contradiction is shifting rapidly in the agrarian sphere to that between the peasantry and the workers on the one hand and imperialism with its local landed collaborators on the other’ (ibid., p. 50). By ‘local collaborators’ Patnaik means the ‘collaborationist elements in key decision-making positions in the government [who] also have the support of … elements among the landlords’ (ibid., p. 52). The ‘Bharat-India’ divide appears to be re-scaled, and re-articulated on the terrain of world markets.

In a similar vein, the account provided by Ashok Dhawale locates two basic rural contradictions (Dhawale, 2022, p. 224): (a) the stark divide between the rural rich—landlords, capitalist farmers, traders, money-lenders—and the mass of the peasantry; (b) ‘the growing opposition to imperialist-driven neoliberal policies of the government, not only from the mass of the peasantry but also from sections of the rural rich’. Even some capitalist farmers are allies in the struggle against imperialism. As the repercussions of the 1991 economic reforms and market liberalism unfold, the anti-imperialist struggle gains prominence. Dhawale, like Patnaik, emphasises (b) as the primary contradiction, overlooking the class-specific nature of the agrarian crisis.

Dhawale, like Nigam and Patnaik, cannot recognise the caste-based mobilisation by Jats, Marathas, Patels and other intermediate castes as a precursor to the 2020–2021 farmers’ struggle. Thus, it is not surprising that Dhawale has also ignored the entry of the khaps—caste organisations in North India. Khap panchayats have often encouraged ‘honour killings’ and issued other caste-based diktats and ‘social-boycotts’ (Singh, 2022). Though the rich and middle-landowners constituted their base, khaps have not historically engaged in ‘farmers’ politics. However, they played an active role as evidenced in the toll-plaza protests of December 2020 in Haryana (ibid.). This populist perspective allows Dhawale to unproblematically skip the socio-economic contradictions involved in these developments. Furthermore, he makes no mention of the class conflict between the dominant classes and workers, which intensified in Punjab leading up to the protests (Bansal, 2020), as the ‘super-exploited’ labour from states like Bihar and Jharkhand was unavailable due to the COVID lockdowns. Dominant classes in turn sought to offset the cost of hiring local labour, which demanded higher wages by unilaterally fixing wages, restricting the movement of workers in order to make them dependent, and a ‘social boycott’ that threatened a monetary penalty for resisting the demands of landowners (ibid.).

These readings of the recent farmers’ movement have close affinities to McMichael’s (2006) re-reading of the contemporary agrarian question. According to McMichael (2016), contemporary farmers’ movements are ‘unthinkable’ within the classical agrarian question. The central contradiction in contemporary world agriculture is embodied in the struggle against the ‘corporate food regime’ (CFR), which ‘defines a set of rules institutionalising corporate power in the world food system’ (McMichael, 2009, p. 153). As the peasantry is dispossessed by an agro-food system increasingly planetary in scale, McMichael suggests that the agrarian crisis has been globalised, even generalised, under the CFR (McMichael, 2008). In such a context, the class- and nationally-based perspective of the classical perspective is transcended, and the peasantry emerges as a ‘radical world-historical subject’ (ibid., p. 224). McMichael sees in food sovereignty movements—in particular, La Via Campesina, which extended its support to the farmers in India (La Via Campesina, 2021)—the paradigmatic form of resistance against the CFR. Advocates of these movements give it a central location in the construction of alternatives to the agrarian programme of neoliberal capitalism and capitalist modernity more generally.

Food sovereignty is framed as a movement against corporate industrialised agriculture and a restatement of the socio-ecological superiority of peasant farming (Bernstein, 2014). Agroecology—the rational application of ecological principles for the development of sustainable food systems based on low (external) input small-holder farming (Akram-Lodhi, 2021)—is framed as a key expression of food sovereignty and ‘peasant-praxis’. Against neoliberal-globalism, which unfolds through the widespread dispossession of peasants and ‘ecological enclosures’ (Araghi, 2009a), agroecology is promoted on the grounds of ‘re-peasantisation’ and the ecological superiority of traditional ‘peasant’ knowledge (Altieri, 2009). The ‘peasantry’, imbued with a distinct agroecological rationality that persists independently of commodity relations, automatically emerges as a force representing the interests of ‘society’ against market expansion.

While McMichael’s re-framing of the peasant question must be credited for bringing ecological concerns to bear on agrarian questions, Bernstein has characterised McMichael’s perspective as a variant of populism undergirded by a ‘peasant essentialism’ that sees ‘qualities of ‘peasantness’ [in] different parts of the world in different periods of their histories’ (Bernstein, 2006b, p. 401). Such transhistorical qualities include the solidarity, egalitarianism, and reciprocity associated with ‘village communities’, household farming for simple reproduction, harmony with nature and locality, etc. Furthermore, generalised commodity production and the spread of capitalist relations ‘do not necessarily alter the concrete value peasants ascribe to their relationship to the land’ (McMichael, 2006, p. 477). Such essentialisms position ‘the peasantry’ as the antithesis of the CFR characterised by competition, large-scale industrial farming, ecological destruction, dispossession, depeasantisation, etc. Bernstein offers a different response to the classical agrarian question, which recognises multiple agencies shaped by class differentiation, complex alliances and contradictions (Jansen, 2014).

Bernstein argues that with neoliberal globalisation, agriculture becomes redundant to the needs of accumulation beyond the countryside, as other sources of surplus (e.g., international financial capital) are available for re-investment in industry. Accordingly, Byres’ emphasis on the agrarian transition as a prerequisite for the development of national capitalism is no longer valid. Furthermore, there are no longer any pre-capitalist landlord or peasant classes to lead the agrarian transition; rather, generalised commodity production pervaded agriculture in most postcolonial contexts. In Indian context, the spread of commodity relations, intensified by the GR, also saw the rise of ‘provincial propertied classes’.

Bernstein argues that the agrarian transition has been resolved or bypassed (see also Lerche, 2013). What remains is the ‘agrarian question of labour’ (Bernstein, 2006a), relating to the reproduction of ‘classes of labour’, which includes not only the classical proletariat, but also those who own some means of production (e.g., land) and reproduce themselves both as wage labourers and as PCP. Further, classes of labour pursue their reproduction in increasingly insecure, precarious, and scarce-wage employment, often combined with informal self-employment straddling the rural and urban (see also Lerche, 2010). Consequently, it is the ‘crisis of labour as a crisis of reproduction’, writes Bernstein (2006a, p. 455), ‘that compels attention, and that leads to consideration of an agrarian question of labour’. The shared basis that unites diverse socio-economic positions into ‘classes of labour’ is that they are net sellers of labour power who rely primarily on wage labour for social reproduction (Pattenden, 2017).

Seen through this perspective, the impressive social base that the struggle against the farm laws witnessed can be understood in terms of the structural changes accompanying a ‘bypassed’ agrarian transition (Lerche, 2013). The NFLs did not reflect any coherent project to bring about structural transformation in the economy or construct new inter-sectoral linkages. Rather, they threatened to ‘roll back the state’, even as the agrarian programme of neoliberalism fails to generate an agricultural revolution that might provide a basis for a new round of accumulation through the expansion of ‘cheap food’ (Moore, 2010). Further, the interests of transnational capital were prioritised at the expense of regional capital and the laws threatened to intensify the ‘double squeeze’ that most Indian farmers who combine PCP and wage labour face in the context of ‘bypassed’ transitions (Lerche, 2013). Lerche (2021) and Kumar (2021) also note that the contemporary structural conjecture loosened the grip of farmers over Dalit workers, who were now able to reproduce themselves across various spatial scales and sectors straddling the urban and rural (see also Pattenden & Bansal, 2021). This is not to say socio-economic conflicts have subsided; rather, despite ongoing class conflict and socio-economic differentiation, the present juncture structurally enables broader alliances and a greater possibility of ‘issue-based unity’. In such a context, rather than claiming the resurgence of kisan (‘peasant’) identity (Kumar, 2021, 2022; Nielsen & Nilsen, 2022; Suthar & Kumar, 2022), it might be more appropriate to see how farmers have reached beyond this identity to lead the mass protests (Lerche, 2021; Mehta & Sinha, 2022).

As the GR and its socio-ecological contradictions unfold unevenly, farmers across the dominant classes and the classes of labour have an interest in lobbying for ‘price and other related issues’, such as remunerative prices (MSP). However, the reasons are very different as the agrarian crisis is experienced very differently across different classes of capital and labour. Landless workers have an objective interest in resisting the farm laws that threatened to dismantle the basis of the PDS in India: state procurement in mandis at MSP (Lerche, 2021). In a context marked by intensifying food shortages, the spread of GR was operationalised by the state towards ensuring food security (Basu, 2022). This led to the formation of the Food Corporation of India and the Commission for Cost and Agricultural Prices in 1963 to govern the process through which grains were obtained from farmers through public procurement at MSP and distributed through the PDS (ibid.). The PDS is the largest anti-poverty programme in India, and while its implementation is inadequate, its erosion would deal a serious blow to India’s classes of labour beyond agriculture (Lerche, 2021). Furthermore, the all-embracing character of authoritarian populism, which appropriates all divisions and contradictions into its divisive Hindutva politics, necessitated a broad social base. The fight against Hindutva and authoritarian populism is the first step in any progressive or radical agenda in India today. The convergence of such interests led to the participation of a wide variety of unions and organisations that represented a diversity of positions, engendering an ‘issue-based unity’. However, as Lerche (2021, p. 1392) notes, at the end of this, ‘one should not expect all farmers to stand up for demands by Dalits, Muslims, informal workers, let alone agricultural labourers’.

Lerche’s wariness should not be seen as a dismissal of kisan or ‘peasant’ politics or its potential. Centering socio-economic differentiation, political economy, and expressing scepticism regarding features of ‘peasant’ movements is not to withdraw political support for ‘peasants’ who do not follow an idealised model of class struggle. Rather, it is to underscore the class-specific nature of the agrarian crisis (Lerche, 2011) and to warn against a singular narrative of crisis (Jodhka, 2018).

Limits of Capitalist Development, Neoliberalism and Agroecology

As Moore (2010) has argued, Marx’s theory of overproduction and the tendency towards a declining rate of profit was given alongside a theory of underproduction (of basic inputs—especially energy and non-energy inputs for the centres of production). This is grounded in the ‘general law of accumulation’ according to which the rate of profit in value terms is inversely proportional to the value of raw materials. Marx goes on to argue that the very dynamism of the capitalist mode of production impels the ‘portion of constant capital that consists of fixed capital … [to] run significantly ahead of the portion consisting of organic raw materials, so that the demand for these raw materials grows more rapidly than their supply’ [Marx quoted in Moore (2010, p. 393)]. There is, then, a tension between the overproduction of fixed capital, and the underproduction of organic raw materials. Put differently, there is a tension between the capitalist world-system’s capacity to appropriate organic raw materials at low cost, and capital’s tendency to capitalise the reproduction of human and extra-human natures (ibid.). As Moore has argued, historically, this tension has been resolved in favour of expanded accumulation through the combination of intensive capitalisation and extensive appropriation:

… epoch-making innovations have joined together productivity and plunder in a world-historical act that drives down the share of world nature directly dependent on the circuit of capital. … The result is a (temporary) downward ratchet of the systemwide organic composition of capital—thereby providing a crucial condition for the revival of profitability—even as capital formation leaps forward in metropolitan and hegemonic centres. (ibid., p. 393)

Thus, every major revolution in capitalist accumulation has been accomplished through an expansion of the ecological surplus—obtained through colonialism and imperialism, and socio-technical innovation. ‘Ecological surplus’ simply refers to the mass of unpaid work/energy relative to the mass of accumulated capital, and it is manifested in cheap labour, cheap food, cheap energy and cheap non-energy inputs (ibid.). These are ‘cheap’ to the extent that they are available at low cost to capital—that is, at costs substantially lower than the systemwide average, thereby driving down the systemwide cost of production (ibid.). Hitherto, frontiers of appropriation have been crucial in securing ecological surpluses—for instance, capitalism under British hegemony in the 19th century had its colonies, and America had the Midwest, California and Latin America as untapped frontiers (Moore, 2010, p. 401). The availability of cheap food, in particular, has been central to every regime of accumulation since it is tied directly to the cost of reproduction of labour. All such regimes have had, at their heart, agricultural revolutions that have not only resulted in the expansion of the food surplus, driving down the cost of food and the cost of reproduction of labour power at the level of the world-system (‘cheap food’), but also have driven forward depeasantisation and proletarianisation (‘class differentiation’). Thus understood, agrarian transitions are agrarian revolutions (Byres, 1986); and they have been at the heart of global hegemonic processes. Of course, the cost of reproduction of labour power is suppressed in multiple other ways as well—based on location, gender and race/caste. Nevertheless, even if labour is exchanged at its value, cheap food subsidises the cost of reproduction of labour power.

Regimes of forced underconsumption have historically been the basis of securing ecological surplus, and have been central in resolving the tension between capitalism’s tendency to capitalise/commodify the means of reproduction of labour and extra-human nature and its need for low-cost inputs in favour of expanded accumulation (Araghi, 2009a). Such regimes rely centrally on strategies of under-reproduction, which ‘increase current surplus labor time (profit) at the expense of premature destruction of labor power and the ecological conditions of its reproduction’ (ibid., pp. 120–121). Such regimes have consolidated not only through overconsumption and appropriation of nature [i.e., ‘ecological enclosures’ (ibid., p. 124)], but also through the linked processes of depeasantisation, (de)proletarianisation and, importantly, the creation of a vast reserve army of labour. Thus, as Araghi (ibid., pp. 123–124) notes, while ‘global regimes of production of absolute surplus value subsidise regimes of relative surplus value production, the latter has always dominated the field of vision of bourgeois modernity’.

Here, we must remember that though Marx assumed labour power is exchanged at its value in the Capital, he was keenly aware that this was never the case in history. This assumption was necessary for Marx in order to demonstrate, contra-Ricardo, that the exploitation of labour under capitalism does not depend on unequal exchange (Araghi, 2003)—for, if it did, so-called ‘fair trade’ under capitalism would end exploitation. Abstract relations like division of labour, value, class, etc., therefore, should not be ‘hypostasized and conflated with reality’ (ibid., p. 49); rather, they must be understood as historically concrete overdeterminations that reveal the ‘unity of the diverse’ (ibid.) in real processes. Thus, while the 1870s were marked by the onset of the ‘second’ industrial revolution (Bernstein, 2010), they also saw the culmination of European colonialism and the emergence of a world food regime (henceforth, ‘first food regime’) that organised an international social division of labour centred on Britain’s ‘workshop of the world’ model and its associated regime of international trade (Friedmann & McMichael, 1989). Insofar as the reproduction of the English industrial worker was subsidised by regimes of forced underconsumption—organised through plantation slavery, coercive peasant labour, etc.—the exploitation of the English working class was linked to the exploitation and oppression of colonised peasantries and societies. Indeed, the English worker and the colonised peasant together constituted a ‘global worker’ and regimes of forced underconsumption extended the ‘global working day’ (Araghi, 2003).

While the first food regime (1850s–1914) was centred on Britain’s workshop of the world model and imports from settler and tropical colonies in Africa and Asia, the second food regime (1945–1973) was ‘rooted in unusually strong state protection and the organisation of the world economy under US hegemony’ (ibid., p. 103). The second food regime saw the emergence of former European ‘colonies of occupation’ as independent states, and the culmination of US hegemony in the capitalist world market (through US food aid and concessional sales), and, on the other, the transnational restructuring of agricultural sectors by agro-food capitals (ibid.). Importantly, the second food regime saw massive export of US grain to Third World countries, and the newly emerging post-colonial states ‘internalised the model of national agro-industrialisation, adopting Green Revolution technologies, and instituting land reform to dampen peasant unrest and extend market relations to the countryside’ (McMichael, 2009, p. 141). These developments, enabled by agricultural revolutions, were the basis of consolidation of the international division of labour.

What is important to my central argument, however, is that the US grain surpluses that made possible its management of temporary spatio-temporal fixes that undergirded its hegemonic position were made possible by the consolidation of the family farm. As Friedmann (1978) notes, specialised household production of wheat accompanied the rise of a US-centred global wheat market. Friedmann also draws attention to the specificities of the internal organisation and labour processes inherent in such production. This unique mode of organising labour brought with it unique cost categories, different sources of labour, different methods of ensuring the reproduction of labour; importantly, different foundations determining the continued viability or failure of the unit. Fundamentally, however, this different mode of organising the production process is characterised by ‘its internal supply of labor and its lack of a structural requirement for surplus product’ (ibid., p. 559). This mode of organising labour was crucial in structuring the pattern of capitalist development in the US—above all, it provided a home market for the realisation of manufacturing sector products. Moore (2010, p. 402), drawing on Friedmann, notes in passing that this particular mode of organising labour ‘relaxed the operation of the law of value through the deployment of family rather than wage labour’. Moore has also argued that neoliberalism has exhausted ecological surpluses that might offset the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. As he puts it, the ‘closure of resource, labour and waste frontiers has cut off a key avenue of capital’s escape from the rising costs of production’ (ibid., p. 402). What is more, neoliberalism has also failed to generate an agricultural revolution that might provide a basis for a new round of accumulation through the expansion of cheap food (GMO and biotechnology have not delivered on expectations in terms of yield).

In this context, we might ask, do food sovereignty strategies, centred on agroecological transitions and household production, provide the basis for another agrarian revolution? If so, how can we ensure that this will not be co-opted by capital? Will it provide the basis for a countervailing tendency for the systemwide falling rate of profit? In the rest of this section, I will consider reasons why we must take these questions seriously, while, nevertheless, leaving them open.

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg differentiates the peasant farms from ‘entrepreneurial farms’: ‘While the former centre on autonomy, family labour and a self-controlled resource base, the latter focuses on market integration and competiveness’ (van der Ploeg, 2010b, p. 100). The corporate food regime of capital privileges the entrepreneurial script and the integration of farms into global value chains. In response to this, van der Ploeg argues (2010a) that we are witnessing the ‘re-emergence of the peasantry’, as farmers are oriented away from the entrepreneurial mode to the re-creation of peasant-like farming. In other words, the ‘peasant-praxis’ (Bush & Martiniello, 2017) is re-emerging in opposition to the depredations of the corporate food regimes.

Peasant-praxis, which is said to be aligned against the contemporary food regime and oriented towards agroecological practices, is characterised by its resistance to commodification. ‘Commodification’ refers to the penetration of commodity relations into processes of (social and technical) reproduction (van der Ploeg, 2010a). Further, resistance to commodification can be said to be present if reproduction of the peasant unit (both as a site of production as well as consumption) is mediated through non-monetary/non-market ties to other households/groups, thereby limiting the subsumption of reproduction to commodity relations (ibid.). In other words, resistance to commodification occurs through the extrication from direct dependence on the circuits of capital. This is one of the hallmarks of agroecology: self-provisioning and autonomy. One of the most important aspects of peasant-praxis, according to van der Ploeg, is its re-centering of ‘ecological capital’. Ecological capital, in van der Ploeg’s framework, is specified by its reproduction outside circuits directly dependent on capital. Thus, ‘the more that farming is grounded on ecological capital the lower the monetary costs of production will be’ (ibid., p. 4). Further, cost reduction in cultivation founded on self-provisioning and ecological capital is not a function of scale, unlike entrepreneurial/industrial farming. Ecological capital gives us, then, another line of difference: while peasant-praxis grounds its activities on ecological capital, entrepreneurial farming is based on the extension of commodity flows (ibid.).

Thus understood, one might ask, can ecological capital be understood as a revival of the bases of ecological surpluses, thereby reviving the conditions of profitability for a capitalist system that is plagued by a crisis of overproduction and overaccumulation? If agroecology were to become institutionalised under capitalism, then might agriculture become viable once again? Certainly, the proponents of agroecology argue that the cost of production will be lower—a crucial condition for the revival of profitability at a systemwide scale. Those advocating the ‘peasant-way’, certainly do think that agroecological transitions will generate growing yields and increase food production while lowering costs of production and preserving the ecological base of farming (Altieri, 2009).

That food sovereignty movements—centred on agroecology and peasant-praxis—are under threat of being co-opted by international finance institutions and global capitalism is also expressed by proponents of food sovereignty and agroecology (see also Giraldo & Rosset, 2018; Rosset & Altieri, 2017). In 2014, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN held its first event on agroecology. However, several critics questioned whether this approach to agroecology was more technical than political (Rosset & Altieri, 2017). More recently, however, reports by the science and policy experts (i.e., the High Level Panel of Experts) of the FAO have begun to acknowledge the ‘transdisciplinary nature’ of agroecology, which is at once a set of techniques as well as a social movement (Jayaraman, 2021, p. 78). What is more, these reports attach much weight to the views of La Via Campesina and other similar organisations (ibid.). Confronted by such trends, the fear that agroecology is susceptible to co-optation by mainstream institutions—with budgets designated for it, corporations investing in it, and NGOs becoming invested in it—is well-founded.

Rosset and Altieri (2017) and Giraldo and Rosset (2018) note that the ongoing co-optation of agroecology is rooted in capitalism’s attempt to overcome (albeit temporarily) its internal contradictions. Like Moore (2010), these authors also start with the fact that ‘technology used by capitalism degrades the naturally occurring conditions of production, putting capital’s profits at risk’ (Rosset & Altieri, 2017, p. 127). There is, they argue, a decrease in profits due to an increase in production costs that accompanies ecological plunder (ibid.). Further, the eroding bases of profit are linked to ‘the propensity of capitalism to have recurrent overproduction crises linked to an output capacity that tends to increase significantly faster than effective demand’ (Giraldo & Rosset, 2018, p. 549). Systemically, this leads to the production of surplus unrealisable as profit. Hence, agroecology not only serves as a source of differential rent (where capital does not want to invest directly), but also as a terrain on which a new market for ‘agroecological inputs’ can potentially be constructed (ibid.). What Moore highlights with reference to the overproduction-underproduction dialectic is the fact that capitalism is approaching its developmental limits, and that the eroding basis of profit has not so much to do with the lack of the system’s capacity to consume (i.e., effective demand), but rather that it has to do with the end of the ‘four cheaps’—labour, food, energy and non-energy inputs—that have hitherto been central to all waves of accumulation. In such a situation, will co-opted agroecology enable capital to bypass, albeit partially and temporarily, some of these problems for accumulation on an expanded scale? Finally, it may be added that the co-optation of agroecology and peasant-praxis cannot be divorced from the question of populism. The strategic aggregation of diverse and contradictory class/group interests inherent in populism gives it ‘a very generic character that is open-ended and flexible, facilitating easy adaption by various ideological camps, even competing ones’ (Borras, 2019, p. 3). Perhaps, the way out of such co-optation is to pose contemporary agrarian questions, food sovereignty and agroecology from the point of view of worker-praxis (‘classes of labour’).

Conclusion

I have not tried to argue that we must withdraw support for food sovereignty movements since they do not follow an idealised model of class struggle. Nor am I arguing that the recent farmers’ movement in India was not progressive; there can be no doubt that the struggle constructed, however fleetingly, an alternative to Hindutva-populism’s conception of ‘the people’. Indeed, as Bernstein (2018, p. 1146) notes, while ‘Marxism retains its analytical superiority in addressing the class dynamics of agrarian change, for a variety of reasons agrarian populism appears a more vital ideological and political force.’ Thus, in terms of capturing power, agrarian populism may present itself as a potent strategy. However, the process, integral to populism, of creating the ‘we’/‘us’ and ‘them’/‘other’ includes and excludes socio-economic groups differentially.

In such a context, Borras (2019) calls for a ‘class-conscious left-wing populism’. Borras suggests that class-conscious left-wing populism may be thought of as something similar to the Marxist-Leninist notion of ‘united front’ and ‘hegemony’—understood as a worker-‘peasant’ alliance where classes of labour play a leading role. Since the politics of PCP are inherently contradictory, it is important for left-wing farmers’ organisations to consciously build alliances that will contribute to a left-wing agrarian populism that articulates class interests ‘from below’; in the interests of classes of labour. By neglecting differentiation, populist narratives tend to flatten out differences between movements led and supported by different classes and risk suppressing emerging forms of class consciousness among the poor farmers and workers. Not only do such narratives obfuscate the circumstances under which ‘peasants’ desire to be, resist, or acquiesce to integration into commodity chains dominated by corporate capital (Agarwal, 2014), but they also hide the contradictory sources of solidarity and conflict that any multi-class movement inevitably negotiates. In order to counter this populist tendency and to develop a ‘united front’ that can go beyond defending the status quo ante, left-wing unions and parties will have to take class differentiation seriously, and think about history and strategy in terms of class struggle. Indeed, they must revive the revolutionary praxis of Marx and Lenin. If a class-conscious left-wing agrarian populism is to emerge as a genuine possibility, it must be centred on differentiated farmer-labourers and classes of labour in their struggle for social reproduction, democracy, and, ultimately, socialism.

The selective and schematic survey presented in this essay points to challenge that any Marxian political ecology of agriculture must confront, in addition to more general problems in political ecology such as developing adequate epistemologies for transcending the human-nature binary and developing the requisite praxis to confront the urgent ecological crises of our times (see also Moore, 2015). Namely, how can we develop an ecologically adequate approach to agrarian questions without generating a populist analysis? More concretely, this question will have to interrogate specific problems, for example, what are the post-capitalist futures of agroecology and food sovereignty movements? How can we reformulate the intuitions of food sovereignty movements through the perspective of the ‘global worker’, thus revealing the ‘unity of the diverse’ (Araghi, 2003)? For the time being, however, we may note that if ecological concerns have been brought to bear on agrarian questions from the point of view of the world-historical peasant-subject, then Marxian political ecology must re-frame it from the point of view of the world-historical proletarian (‘global worker’), and centre class struggle and differentiation in the analysis once again.