Three Agricultural Revolutions

Abstract

Attempts to imagine a shift beyond capitalism often tend to fixate on the terms of the old socialist calculation debate: plan versus market. At its deepest level, though, capitalism is not fundamentally a matter of the distribution of goods, for underlying this is the possession of land. In thinking about the end of capitalism it is thus useful to return to the question of its origin as the second agricultural revolution in human history. If capitalism finds its roots in an agrarian transition, we might also locate its supersession at this level—in a third agricultural revolution.