Agroecology and Political Economy: The Peasant World and the Contradictions of Capital

Abstract

This article examines agroecology from a political economy perspective and opens a line for an interdisciplinary approach between economics and ecology. To this end, the logic of capital in capitalist production and in peasant agriculture is analyzed along with its relationship to nature and the land. In this vein, based on the concept of the thing-process duality in capital, an attempt is made to relate the logic of capital to the economic and ecological rationality present in capitalist and peasant agriculture. Using a concrete example, it is shown how ecological rationality, over and above capital, centralizes and corrects productive processes. From this perspective - the workings of its antagonist —agribusiness—is explored, presenting concepts that support the contention that an agroecological movement makes sense in current times.

El artículo examina a la agroecología desde la economía política y abre una línea de aproximación interdisciplinaria entre economía y ecología. Para ello se analiza la lógica del capital en la producción capitalista como también en la agricultura campesina y su relación con la naturaleza y la tierra. En esta línea, a partir del concepto de dualidad cosa-proceso del capital, se intenta relacionar la lógica del capital con la racionalidad económica y ecológica presente en la agricultura capitalista y campesina. A partir de un ejemplo concreto se muestra como la racionalidad ecológica, por sobre el capital, centraliza y disciplina los procesos productivos. Desde esta perspectiva se indaga sobre el funcionamiento de su antagonismo –el agronegocio-, presentando conceptos que permiten argumentar sobre el porqué tiene sentido un movimiento agroecológico en estos tiempos actuales.

Introduction

The word “agroecology” is a polysemic concept that alludes to dimensions that are binding and complementary, which respond to different historical moments of construction of this concept. The first is based on ecological principles and their relation to the peasant world (Sevilla Guzmán, 2011; Toledo, 1992; Martínez Alier, 1992), while others delve into a more scientific dimension in terms of productive technical designs. They do so from an ecological approach, using alternative practices with a minimal dependence on energy inputs and external factors such as agrochemicals or synthetic fertilizers (Altieri, 2001).

The third, which constitutes this article’s frame of reference, is presented as a critical and reflexive view, not only of the current productive model but also of the global agrifood system and the ideology of the market with its neoliberal logic (Leff, 2002). Altieri et al. (2021) defines this current as political agroecology to differentiate it from the other two, practical agroecology and scientific agroecology. Within this line of thinking, political agroecology encompasses not only agronomic production on farms, but also the processes of circulation and exchange, all of which are traversed by the cultural identity of rural communities, the matrix of the landscape, and the social, economic, and political processes carried out for the transformation of the global agrifood system. This implies an alternative view and critical reflection on the role played by capital, both in production and circulation processes and in the vision, it imposes on the world and nature. (Rosset and Martínez-Torres, 2016; Escobar, 2014). An agroecological model thus conceived is still under construction, often with conflicting pronouncements, regarding how to produce as well as the role and vision held about territory and nature ¹

The article at the outset will seek to describe the agribusiness model and the peasant model, from a theoretical approach more closely related to political economy. Considering agroecology from the political economy standpoint renders as central the discussion of the social relations of production and calls into question the economic laws that govern the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of the goods produced under capitalism. It also seeks to open an interdisciplinary line of approach between economy and ecology, which can help to better understand capital and its timings as processes in addition to its relationship with nature.

In this vein, some references regarding markets are used, many of which elude the logic of the imperatives of capital, allowing for consideration of a different scenario in which peasant agriculture can deploy its innate potentialities that are synthesized in what is called practical peasant rationality (Paz, 2017; Paz and Jara, 2020). It also draws on other concepts such as the dual nature of peasant family labor, which explains both the internal dynamics of family labor in production processes and their relationship to markets, (Marx, 1984; Holloway, 2011) and in the non-identity between work time and production time (Marx, 1984; Mann and Dickinson, 1978; 1990), which seeks to explain the existence of some obstacles in nature to the development of a full capitalist agriculture.

The article will endeavor to go a little further, as it will attempt to show how agroecological production is incompatible with the requirements demanded by capital, expressed in the agribusiness form of production. To this end, the logic of capital is presented in both capitalist production and peasant agriculture, and its relationship to nature and the land. Based on the concept of the thing-process duality of capital put forward by Harvey (2014), an attempt will be made to relate the logic of capital to the economic and ecological rationality present in capitalist and peasant agriculture (Toledo, 1992), with an illustrative example of a peasant producer located in the Quebrada de Humahuaca (Tilcara, Argentina). Finally, the article aims to provide conceptual elements in relation to the logic of capital rather than to the functioning of the capitalist system per se. For this reason, it is possible to find a “capitalcentric” perspective (Harvey, 2014) in relation to nature and its processes, seeking to understand the agroecological model based on Marxist concepts complemented by Chayanovian perspectives (van der Ploeg, 2013).

The Agribusiness Model And The Peasant Model: A Conceptual Approach From The Perspectives Of Political Economy And Agroecology

Agribusiness is a logic of production that transcends the strictly productive to instate itself as a view of the world, with the centrality of capital implicit in all its orders. To do so it has been necessary to establish the idea over time that food production be considered not as production geared to the needs of the population (food as subsistence) but rather mainly as an economic motivation aimed at obtaining profit (Polanyi, 2011; McMichael, 2013; Paz, 2017). Agribusiness is one of the ultimate expressions of capitalism installed in the sector of food production and circulation (Burbach y Flynn, 1980) and therefore, operates under certain economic rationales and categories. Competition, maximization of profits, increased labor force productivity, rotation of capital and its infinite need to accumulate, constitute some of the imperatives of the market, as expressed by Wood (2009).

One aspect that links all these economic categories that are omnipresent in the logic of agribusiness, is the reification of nature. This involves considering nature as merely a commodity, separate from human life (Escobar, 2014). In this case, the biological processes of animals, such as natural mating, are replaced by artificial insemination or by embryo transfer. In sum, biological times become shortened through artificial processes for the purpose of extracting nature’s best qualities to the greater benefit of capital.

Agriculture presents a specific particularity that is given by the cycles of nature as expressed in the previous examples. The biological times required by productive processes in certain spheres of agricultural production are not always the most attractive for capitalist production, whose dynamic is based on the permanent need of capital to generate a given income in the shortest possible time.

Mann and Dickinson (1978) argue that there are obstacles to the development of a full capitalist agriculture, which can be explained by the non-identity between production time and labor time. Production processes require a biological time necessary to complete production, where capital does not create value or surplus and is forced to suspend all or part of the labor process. Thus, there is a non-identity between the time of production and the time of labor, which has its effects on the rate of profit, the use of constant and variable capital, the processes of circulation, and the realization of value.

The duration of the act of production will necessarily determine the rhythm of the turnover of capital (Marx, 1987). Thus, the time of production is the time during which capital remains in the labor process, plus another in which the action of natural processes outside the orbit of the labor process is entrusted to achieve the finished product. In agricultural production, unlike industrial production where there is an identity, there is an almost inexorable biological law that imposes the times of nature on the times of capital.

One of the imperatives of the market is precisely the turnover of capital, and that it generates capital again when it rotates. This is the very essence of capitalistic logic and consequently the period of turnover of capital must be shortened, artificially shortening the time of production. Therefore, capitalist production seeks not only to reduce labor time to a minimum by increasing its productivity, but also to shorten the “biological excess” of production time and the time of the circulation of the commodity.

This form of extracting from nature, where everything becomes an extractable resource to be converted into merchandise, seeking the greatest profit in the least possible time, is associated with the large scale of the enterprises with high levels of capital investment, productive specialization and heavy economic concentration accompanied by significant social, economic and environmental impacts. This form of extraction can be considered as an extractivist process (Gudynas, 2009), or of dispossession (Harvey, 2005) or of inexpensive nature (Moore, 2020), which is inherent to capitalism and compatible with the logic of capital. In the dialectical relationship between market imperatives and the reason for capital, capitalist corporations, and in particular agribusiness, have gradually added a logic of territorialization of capital, forming their own geographic spaces, by controlling complete circuits of production, circulation, distribution and marketing (Harvey, 2005). In responding to the market imperatives these actors impose a capitalist logic on the world of agriculture which is ever further removed from nature.

Food production as a commodity and accordingly, the dialectical relation between the market imperatives and the logic of capital, establish a productive model that translates into a new version of both agricultural development and the rural sphere. Scale-ups, substantial volumes of production and ultimate circulation with large investments, along with an increase in labor productivity stemming from technological innovations, constitute the basis upon which the agribusiness model is sustained.

As Mançano Fernandes (2014) indicates, while agribusiness organizes its territory to produce commodities, the peasantry organizes its territory for its own existence, with a need to develop all aspects of life. As a result, the peasant model displays other rationales and ways of relating to nature and capital. In his work, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776) built an imaginary primitive and traditional society, in which he could prove that the only source of wealth was labor congealed in commodities. In Smith’s own words: “In that early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land. . . (Smith, 1997: 47), the individuals, being all basically hunters (also gatherers; this addition is mine), know the labor time spent in all productions.” This remark is helpful in raising the issue of the relationship between peasant agriculture and agroecology.

In a peasant society in its purest state, there is neither private ownership of the means of production, nor private ownership of land, which allows the entire product of labor to belong undeniably to the worker and to collective action. These societies can easily be compared to extractive societies where an immediate labor process exists, along with a preexisting logic of community possession of the land, and by extension, the use of the resources. In such a process of extraction, there is a balance between the human being and nature (co-production). One can assume that a certain ecological rationality exists as Toledo (1992: 203) demonstrates, where “the natural resources are obtained and transformed without causing substantial changes in the structure, dynamics and architecture of the natural ecosystems.” Communal possession of the land by such a society shapes a type of social production of the material assets with a technical-organizational content specific to the labor process (García Linera, 2010; Paz, et al., 2018) where ecological exchange in circumstances of subsistence is paramount.

Activities such as gathering, hunting, fishing, and grazing are the oldest forms of obtaining the material goods necessary for life, which remain today as productive forms of a distinctive technical-organizational nature. This logic of production based on ecological exchange is present in many parts of the planet. The Andean world, the vast territories of the rich Amazon rainforest, the great expanses of scrub-brush in Argentina’s semi-arid area, among others, are some of the many examples. If in its biological timings, nature delivers a final product (carob pods, berries from the woods or the Amazon forest, animal species, grasslands, honey, trees, timber, dyes, wildlife, etc.), the working time that translates into a productive activity consists of separating the finished product from nature, with a prior investment of human energy and knowledge (Meillassoux, 1997). Here then, the work process is equal to the work product. Moreover, attaining the product’s utility (through direct consumption) is immediate, as it has not been adapted for a long shelf life.

The immediacy of the work process, work product and achieving its use value based on direct consumption, constitutes one of the characteristics of a form of production in which time presents conditions that are different from capital’s time (Paz, 2017). The other dimension concerning this extractive model is related to the processes of non-commercialization. Specifically, there is no real need to be tied to formal markets to obtain basic resources for one’s own subsistence or to sell the products generated. Thus, the immediacy of the work process, the work product and achieving use value, as well as the presence of non-commercialization processes, are assimilated through its communality: key points for understanding agroecology from the perspective of capital. These aspects constitute key settings, so that labor, both family and communal, does not become denatured and lose its potential capacity as one of the central elements in reproduction and in the possible processes of accumulation (Suárez and Paz, 2017).

From this productive framework, nature, and more specifically the land, comes to be conceived of as a means of work or production and not as a factor of income. Here the labor process takes on a different significance as well as another intentionality. It is precisely that of obtaining a finished product, through the application of direct labor in a productive process, harnessing its creativity, local knowledge and specific know-how. What needs to be underlined, however, regardless of the quality of the work, whether in the process of immediate labor to directly obtain the consumer goods or in the productive process geared towards obtaining a product for exchange and the market, is that both respect the vital times of nature itself. In addition, working time does not exist as a measure of either the activity or the social content of the product but as a natural social good administered by the individuals.

Taking the view of Moore (2020), agroecology assimilates the unpaid labor/energy of nature (through extra-economic and non-commercial processes), to bring it into production in areas that are unrelated to the system of commodities in the circuit of capital.

A brief mention of circulation processes is required here. Braudel (1984) states that peasant life is left out or half outside the formal market, retreating into self-consumption and self-sufficiency, and choosing other channels such as fairs. They are living institutions that adapt to diverse circumstances, seeking to break the too small circles typical of formal exchanges. In certain circumstances, peasants find cracks in the formal market or structural holes (Burt, 1992; Holloway, 2011) where material flows and capitalist relations are not created or are blocked by some specific circumstance, and it is there that they deploy processes more favorable for exchanges (Hebinck et al., 2014).

Any type of production generated based on these principles, carries with it the rationality of the production of life and pursues the predominance of an ecological exchange, consequently imposing an ecological rationality guided by nature’s own times rather than an economic rationality imposed by capital. This is what could be called practical peasant rationality and is composed of three concepts: rationality, peasant and practice. In terms of rationality, reference is made to the set of underlying principles that explain or give meaning to the actions, options or decisions of a social actor. When the peasant social actor is connected to this concept of rationality, then that rationality is framed in a reality or cosmovision through which the peasants understand their world. Lastly, practice refers to a set of principles, abilities, expertise, knowledge, and skills that allow for creating their own, unique project with a balance between available reality (availability of local and external resources, markets, social networks, technology, personal knowledge, political contexts, etc.) and the opportunity to unleash the potential of family or peasant agriculture. Practical campesino rationality, ² this interplay between what is available and what is possible, can be more easily understood through the example of the camellones (raised ridges) developed in one of the sections below.

Regarding The Dual Nature Of Labor In Peasant Agriculture And Commercial Labor In Agribusiness

In the peasant family economic unit, as a domestic-productive unit, economic life has a two-fold and complementary nature. On the one hand, production is geared towards covering the family’s consumption needs. The satisfaction of such needs cannot be quantified through classic economic categories, but rather from a qualitative perspective of sufficiency and insufficiency (Hinkelammert and Mora Jiménez, 2005). On the other hand, the family economy, with both salary and commodification being partially inserted, begins to take on more importance.

In this two-fold nature of economic life in family farming, a duality between those two productive logics exists. There, production aimed at subsistence must be seen as the in-kind economy (in natura), while production aimed at the market becomes an exchange value, and the production process has a second form of existence which is in value (in valore) (Chayanov, 1987). However, production in peasant farming is indivisible and it is difficult to establish its course towards consumption or the market.

The tension between in natura and in valore production can only be explained by family labor which is also two-fold, given that the labor applied leading to production is usually indivisible. Another aspect that lends greater complexity to the activity of the family economic unit is that its workforce is geared towards developing the work objects and work tools, many of which participate in both the in natura as well as in valore systems, tending to increase the yield and productivity designated for the production of utility and exchange values (Marx, 1984; van der Ploeg, 2018).

The land is the main work object for family farming, since it often supplies provisions with little human intervention, as well as providing other objects and working mediums that improve based on the skills and abilities derived from the family labor. In animal husbandry, for example, an animal that is a work object can produce milk but can also provide other work objects such as offspring aimed at expanding the herd (more work objects), or manure as operating material aimed at improving crop production from an organic fertilizer. In this process the product can serve as a work object and raw material for other productive processes, as a result of previous jobs and in relation to family needs. Economic function is only one of many vital functions of both the land and work objects.

Contributing to this process is what Marx calls useful labor demonstrated by the usefulness or utility value of its product. “To resume, then: In the use value of each commodity there is contained useful labor, i.e., productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim.” (Marx, 1995: 10). Here it is important to know how the work is carried out that not only is designed for production itself, but also to improve the objects and working mediums. In agriculture, work objects are part of nature. Animals, for example, constitute a work object, and having an animal that can be adapted to local agroecological conditions with the highest level of productive efficiency is the result of years of dedication by the family farmer. This type of work, by doing, as Holloway (2011) calls it, creates a different kind of capital. Through the family’s labor a peasant capital is built, and this capital differs from classic capital in that it is not governed by capitalist logic. Once again, useful labor becomes a generator of use-values which in the productive cycle can be transformed into exchange values as well as equity capital. The generation of capital without capital is one of the characteristics in the context of the imperatives of peasant farming. Therefore, for example, recovering marginal lands geared towards the productive process is a form of building capital without capital, by intensifying family labor.

In this framework, family labor constitutes the principal broker of material circulation between nature and human beings. In so doing, craftsmanship, know-how and practical knowledge of nature, common features in peasant farming, constitute forms of enhancing family labor aimed at creating a good product (Paz, et al., 2011). This product is not defined by the quantity of work necessary to produce it but rather by its qualitative value geared towards a particular goal of the family. For example, in the production of kids or calves in a pastoral system, it is hard to assess the working time invested in the activity. The child who spends his time caring for the herd, also uses part of his time casually exploring the territory, detecting other aspects of nature that fulfill more playful needs, or placing a trap to catch wild animals that could cover the family’s food needs, or identifying some plants that have medicinal effects for a specific ailment he or his family may have. This activity, this “doing,” inherent to human existence, goes beyond the differentiation between work and non-work; consequently, the amount of work necessary to achieve that production, measured by the clock, is an aspect that cannot be quantified and therefore is non-existent. In the world of family farming, there is no division between working and non-working efforts, rather a time for “doing” focused on various activities (productive, social, communal, recreational, physical, sexual, etc.) and generally, as Thompson (1967) says, where there is no great sense of conflict between working and “whiling the day away.”

Clock time is closely related to capitalist production and with the working time required by production geared towards the market. The absence of clock time, as well as the non-existence of the category “salary” —as a form of commercial payment for work— and “doing” in productive processes, are some of the intrinsic imperatives in peasant farming.

Methodology And Selection Of The Case Study

The peasant world tends to deploy knowledge and practices that are found on the edges of the frontier of Western rationality and consequently its logic, both of social and productive/economic reproduction, presents a certain particularity as it develops on the frontiers of the logic of capital. To be precise, the idea was to take a case study that is not fully integrated into the capitalist system, one that is “playing” in the two worlds: peasant and capitalist. This makes it possible to identify, recognize and analyze productive strategies in relation to nature that are not disciplined by capital. Careful attention will be paid to the way in which this peasant values marginal land through the use of ancestral techniques called camellones. This makes it possible to understand and incorporate the times of nature in its techno-productive processes where capital, understood from the perspective of modern economic rationality, loses its presence and power to direct such processes.

Thus, one of the objectives of the field visit was to investigate the processes of non-commodification that take place in peasant exploitation (Chayanov, 1974; Mançano Fernandes, 2014; Paz, 2017). This agrarian social type is understood as a way of living and producing, whose social relations installed in the organization of work and production do not correspond to the classic categories of capitalism such as rent, salary, profit, and amortization, among others. On the other hand, in this type of peasant exploitation, complex productive and reproductive activities converge with a diversity of elements (human and non-human) that can become non-commodified (van der Ploeg, 2013).

From this perspective, several theoretical concerns arose in relation to such processes of non-commodification and their relationship with capital itself: Can the form of production of such exploitations escape the logic of capital or is it necessarily subordinated to it? How does capital circulate in such processes, especially when linked to nature? And what form does it take (capital as a thing or capital as a process) when it relates to nature, and which and at what time do they become more relevant? How is capital built in the peasant world? Is it possible to do so?

Such concerns on the part of the author had to be restructured based on simpler questions addressed to the producer such as: Why do you make these natural barriers with trees and stones? Where do you get the tree stakes? Are they native or exotic? Do you buy them or get them from someone else? Do you apply a lot of labor in these activities? Does it impact your production to have to wait so long to recover this land that is not producing today and transform it into a productive one? Where and when did you learn the practices of the camellones? Does Nature speak to you, tell you something. . .?

In this interplay between theoretical concerns and answering them based on concrete questions addressed to the producer, it was necessary to delve into superficial appearances to enter an underlying reality, within a framework of certain levels of abstraction where capital comes to life. Thus, for example, being able to observe what lies behind the management of the times of peasant production with respect to nature and that dual or simultaneous processes on the thing-process capital are at work, requires an understanding of the tension between appearance and reality in the peasant world.

In other words, this methodological construction requires shifting one’s gaze to the aspects that at first glance would seem to come from every day and ordinary behaviors. Here, the case study responds to a qualitative research method based on interviews and direct observations that were carried out over the course of three visits. The interviews, which take the form of exchanges of ideas with the interviewee and casual conversations, attempt to capture accounts of certain situations, feelings, concepts and perceptions verbalized with respect to the peasant world in broader terms, putting them in close relation with the problem of knowledge that is being investigated. Attempts were constantly made to articulate and complement the fieldwork itself with theoretical interpretations, seeking abstraction and thinking of capital as a “living and moving thing” (in Marx’s words it would be the metamorphosis of capital in the peasant world), to find singularities and their meanings (Quirós, 2014).

Presentation Of The Case Study

Based on the above, the case that is taken as an example responds to a producer named Santos Quispes, one of many agricultural producers descended from native Aymara peoples who are located in the town of Tilarca (2,500 meters above sea level), in the center of the Quebrada de Humahuaca in the province of Jujuy, Argentina. The type of soil and climate in the area provide certain conditions for the development of horticultural production. Santos Quispes has an agricultural operation made up of about 8 hectares, approximately 6 of which are prepared for the planting of crops. In general, this producer has specialized in the production of green leafy horticulture, especially lettuce (Lactuca sativa) with its different varieties. He uses family labor in the production process (the producer and his family consisting of two older sons and his wife who takes care of the housework).

His farm borders on the banks of the Huasamayo River, a mountain river, which gives it distinctive characteristics (a stony riverbed with a large quantity of sediment carried during high flood peaks with considerable overflows). Parts of these lands were obtained from the river and incorporated into the production process using ancestral practices called camellones (ridges), used by the original peoples (Erickson, 2006). The use of native and exotic tree cuttings is the basis for the construction of these natural barriers, using species such as poplars and their variants (Populos, sp), tamarinds (Tamarindus indica), and willow (Salix, sp). The camellones are physically rooted in the Andean agrarian landscape as cultural capital. Capitalist companies have made this technology their own, using prefabricated concrete blocks (industrial manufacture), with cement, stones, and steel meshes along with heavy machinery for their installation.

Precisely, the analysis will focus on the logic of the construction of the camellones, which, although they have been exhaustively studied from the technical-operational point of view, serve as a good example to reflect on the logic of capital and its relationship with nature and agroecology, from both a peasant exploitation and its counterpoint, the capitalist enterprise.

The Case Of The Camellones And Their Relationship With Capital, Nature, And Agroecology

The example of the construction of the camellones provides a better idea of how the previously presented concepts work, articulate and complement each other in a specific peasant reality. Construction of the peasant camellones requires intensive labor and lies in the creation of containment barriers to prevent and channel the river’s overflow. The traditional process consists of the use of wooden barriers or fencing trees, requiring the manual construction of a small canal, to get water to those shoots that in the future will become trees. Later, and as the trees grow, this part of the soil will be packed with rocks and stones that also serve to protect the trees when the river crests and floods.

These processes take a long time, nature’s time (approximately six years), in which local resources are utilized with labor from the family or community. In other words, labor that does not enter the formal market of supplies and work, respectively. Combining those resources has led to the valuation of marginal lands that become suitable for production based on non-commodification processes. It is a clear example of building family capital without capital, which establishes a rationale of production very different from a capitalist one that seeks to recoup the investment and some profitability. This work, which has no remuneration in the strict sense of capitalist terms, and which is closely linked to the times of nature, prioritizing exchange with it, allows the generation of family capital (van der Ploeg, 2013) or peasant capital, very different from how it is understood by the capitalist mode of production.

The years needed to build the camellones have respected nature’s times with resources provided by nature, assimilating and letting nature’s own work times act (Leff, 2019). It has also shaped a cultural and social landscape, the result of generations of farmers who have put their knowledge and local technology into practice in what are often considered marginal lands. Once again, in the peasant model, we can see the prevalence of the times of nature’s processes over and above the times of capital. Therefore, capital is not present as a thing, rather, it flows and exists as a process in which ecological rationality is stronger than economic rationality.

Out of this last reflection, where ecological rationality focuses and orders the productive processes, two issues are raised for consideration regarding the logic of capital and the legal ownership of the land. The first is related to the correlation between the fixed and variable capital necessary in large scale and global circulation processes. Agribusiness has long-term investments in fixed capital that exacerbate the tension between immobility and movement in the circulation of capital (physical infrastructure, built environments that become fixed in space (silos, corrals, drainage ditches, etc.). In contrast, the volumes and rationales of peasant family farming do not necessarily require such immobilizations. This allows for the resolution of one of the contradictions between fixed and circulating capital, where capitalist production itself is conducted in an ecological vacuum (Toledo, 1992).

Added to this tension is the inexorable need for unlimited economic growth. As Harvey (2014) demonstrates, in the processes of upscaling and global circulation, fixed capital tends to surpass variable capital, in mutual contradiction, but knowing that neither one can exist without the other. Fixed capital constitutes a world of things that sustain the process of capital circulation, while the circulation process provides the means by which the value invested in fixed capital is recovered. Capital seeks to compress the time in productive processes and to do so requires fixed capital.

In the peasant world, capital, and especially peasant or proprietary capital, does not usually take the form of a thing but rather a process, which is closely linked to nature’s processes in both its growth and development. The cycles of accumulation of peasant capital respect the times of nature insofar as they allow rates of renewal and ecological reproduction according to the needs of nature.

To consider and address the peasant world from this perspective requires an economic-ecological interdisciplinary approach, which enables us to grasp the thing-process duality of capital. Thus, the peasant productive model, based on a minimal scale of production with heavy use of family or communal work based largely on the production of goods included in the productive process itself, promotes the appropriation of nature through ecological exchange rather than economic exchange. The restraints on economic growth are applied by the biological process of nature itself, and this is one of the main contradictions of capital (Moore, 2015).

From this tension between fixed and variable capital arises the second point of difficulty for agroecological production in the agribusiness model. Land understood as a commodity and productive factor, as immobilized capital, raises questions related to rent and leads one to think that land grabbing processes are a way to obtain cheaper productive factors and therefore less capital immobilization. At this point, the issue of concentration of private property is debated as a path to resolving the tension between immobility and movement of capital.

The production of commodities as exchange value, and their attainment through exchange, presupposes the private ownership of the means of production over the work product. Capitalism has a natural propensity towards the exchange of commodities and that is not possible without the existence of private property. An exaggerated pursuit of profits and benefits will create not only a commodification but also the need for an excessive appropriation and concentration of the means of production such as the land and nature itself (Polanyi, 2011).

On the other hand, and with respect to private property, growth constitutes one of the principal drivers of capital; capital needs sustained and continuous growth, and for that it inexorably requires an exaggerated and continual expansion (in terms of extension or concentration of the means of production) of private property. Unlimited growth and accumulation in a world with limited resources is one of the main contradictions of capital and is satisfied, at least in current times, through the colossal private appropriation of the land and of nature itself (Borras and Franco, 2012; Paz, et al., 2019; Moore, 2020).

Consequently, the logic of capital requires extracting the greatest amount of profit (economic benefits with perpetuity) from the means of production such as the land and nature, especially when there has been a significant prior investment. The private property necessary to consume with those ends must fulfill the principle of perpetuity and must be unrestricted in terms of its use. The system of individual property rights is found at the very foundation of the dynamic core of capital. It is a necessary condition and construction in the sense that neither the exchange value nor money can function as they do without that legal infrastructure. Private appropriation and the disproportionate concentration of the means of production constitute one of the principal pillars undergirding the logic of capital to sustain unlimited exponential growth, giving rise to a sharp tension between food sovereignty and agroecology on the one hand, and access to food and the degradation of nature on the other, in other words, a tension between private interests and those of society as a whole.

The land, like nature, is not merchandise produced by social labor and is therefore difficult to frame as private property. This notion has been assimilated by the community of Colonia Jaime in Argentina (Suárez and Paz, 2017) and also by agrarian social movements such as Vía Campesina, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement of Brazil-MST), Movimiento Campesino de Santiago del Estero (Santiago del Estero Peasant Movement) or Movimiento Zapatista de México (Zapatista Movement of Mexico), which encompass a diversity of conceptions and practices on property rights.

Many experiences in Latin America illustrate the alternative uses of established law carried out by the peasantry (Sousa Santos, 2012; Patzi, 2010; García Linera, 2010) and cause one to consider reinterpreting the law. Incorporating private property rights into a comprehensive project for the collective management of common goods could be an interesting pathway, since it showcases processes where the centrality of capital loses its validity and paves the way for thinking about agroecological production and alternative forms of resource management (Paz, Jara and Rodríguez, 2018).

Conclusions

The example of a family producer from the Quebrada de Tilcara utilizing the camellones illustrates the web of concepts present in the two-fold and complimentary condition of labor, in the non-identity between work time and production time, and in the thing-process duality of capital. These concepts, along with the recognition of a formal market that is not omnipresent and that also exhibits structural gaps, opens up a line of reflection that allows for thinking about the existence of imperatives in family farming, which invite speculation that there is another way of producing that is not necessarily obliged to respond to the imperatives of the market. This logic of producing food by family farming eludes the structuring assigned by capitalist logic in that capital, especially the thing capital, begins to lose its own centrality and to dissolve as a disciplining mechanism in the productive process. Interpreted in another way, the agroecological processes flow through nature, while agribusiness acts on it.

From this notion, a perspective of peasant imperatives, agroecology and the logic of capital is constructed. However, in this perspective, it does not mean that peasant farming should be considered a return to pastoral romanticism or as a ghetto protected from all evils arising from capitalism. Despite everything, capital is neither hegemonic nor totally omnipresent. For some reason in history, it has had to allow spaces where peasant farming, as with other subaltern groups, continues to carry out practices that maintain a certain independence from the reproduction of the capitalist system itself.

Agroecology understood from this perspective is not only a construction of the autonomous political conscience in the subaltern sectors but also innate to Nature itself, which opposes the logic of capital. It can only be built by acknowledging the imperatives of peasant agriculture. Organic exchange, as referenced by Marx, contains the fact that nature is humanized, and human beings are naturalized. To think about agroecology without Nature signifies falling into dichotomy or binary opposition between market-state as a guard-rail to order life. It also involves making the state a space of dispute, a political arena, as the sole path that must necessarily be coopted to generate alternative processes.

There is a beautiful metaphor by Arturo Osorio for understanding such processes, as local processes within the current of capitalism:

The river flows. Crashing its current against an aged tree, a trunk or stone, a whirlpool, a spiral, forms: the image of Life (. . .) The river’s flow and streambed accidents create a whirlpool. But the whirlpool forms its own internal dynamic, different from that of the larger river. It has its own existence, an order “within,” relatively stable, though cast by the “outside” current. Yet, we cannot separate the whirlpool from the river (Osorio, 2013: 42).

Agroecology occurs as daily and isolated processes, as daily strategies developed by peasant agriculture, as in the example of the camellones and many others seen in the rural world. Throughout history, peasant farming has demonstrated alternative paths to those formulated by the structural and determinist tendency imposed by the capitalist world of agriculture. It has shown experiences that are hidden, not yet discovered, and no matter how small, do not prevent the hope of bright prospects that could become realistic and possible economic alternatives. However, to grasp such processes, conceptual frameworks and perspectives are needed to break away from lazy reasoning (Sousa Santos, 2012), because without them, it is easy to fall into a pragmatic activism or alternative strategies that are quickly subsumed by capital.

At least three issues are presented here that trigger areas of reflection, although there may be many more. The first is related to the viability of coexistence, cooperation and possible synergy between two forms of spatialization of established power, due to market imperatives on the one hand and peasant imperatives on the other. The second question, associated with the first, is whether these systems of production can meet the needs of the world population, casting doubt on their relation to food sovereignty and the theory of value. The work of Paz et al. (2018) with reference to the productive power of communal systems in northwestern Argentina and that of van der Ploeg (2021) for the case of Northern Frisian Woodlands, to name but two examples, show the construction of territories based on a range of agroecological practices that involve not only the production process but also the circulation of the production. In the same vein, van der Ploeg, et al. (2019) provide empirical evidence through several European cases on the economic potential of agriculture in family farming plots.

The theory of value and how it is understood is the third concern, with perhaps the greatest ideological weight in terms of thinking of agroecology as a transformative tool. If food security is concerned with the reproduction of capital itself, and food sovereignty with the social reproduction of peoples, then it is important to underscore and call into question the theory of value as it is conceived of by capital, and how it should be thought of by social movements. The theory of value should seek to be as close as possible to nature’s processes and what nature provides, respecting its times and ways. The theory of value (food sovereignty and its relation to agroecology) should include concepts and practices that are related to economic agriculture, combining social, economic, cultural and ecological dimensions, internalizing the productive factors, seeking to reduce the commodification processes, maximizing the available resources and the coproduction associated with craftsmanship, local skills and knowledge, among others. From this epistemological perspective, agroecology emerges as a tool for putting into practice new dimensions that challenge the theory of value as conceived by agribusiness.

The obligation of academia is to systematize experiences that enable the construction of concepts and categories to design an alternative approach model in a context in which capital exhibits its own contradictions. However, while the commitment to construct it belongs to academia itself, in conjunction with agricultural social movements, the peasants will remain committed to their ever-present struggle for survival.