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.