Agrarian Question Research Articles

From Lenin To Leninism

In “From Lenin to Leninism,” Osvaldo Coggiola examines the evolution of Lenin's influence on the 20th century, as recognized by Eric Hobsbawm. Lenin's leadership during the October Revolution and the subsequent establishment of the Soviet state left an indelible mark on global history. This paper traces the transformation of Lenin's ideas into “Leninism,” a doctrine formalized posthumously, which became a foundation for the international communist movement. Coggiola highlights the contrast between Lenin's practical approach to revolutionary strategy and the rigid, bureaucratic interpretation that Stalin later imposed. The analysis delves into Lenin's theoretical contributions, particularly his views on the agrarian question and the proletarian revolution, while critiquing the subsequent misappropriation and mythologization of his legacy. This historical re-examination underscores Lenin's complex legacy and its implications for contemporary socialist thought and practice

The agrarian question of climate change

The agrarian question of the twenty-first century is the agrarian question of climate change. The classical agrarian question asked how capitalist development was reshaping fin de siècle agriculture and with what consequences. The answers often contradicted predictions, and thereby teleological notions of development. Today, we must ask how climate change adaptation and mitigation, alongside and through other ongoing processes of capitalist development, are reshaping agrarian lives, livelihoods, landscapes, and politics, and with what consequences. We argue that attention to the agrarian question is essential to understanding social, political, and economic transformation broadly in the time of climate change.

The Early Socio-ecological Dimensions of Tricontinental (1967–1971): A Sovereign Social Metabolism for the Third World

This article delves into the socio-ecological dimensions of OSPAAAL, the Cuban Third World solidarity institution, focusing particularly on the early years of its official organ: the magazine Tricontinental (1967–1971). Tricontinental’s articles and graphic works, even if not always in an explicit manner, addressed environmental concerns in a revolutionary way, anticipating debates that would later unfold on international institutional platforms. These concerns were primarily discussed in the context of the Third World’s quest for autonomous production, closely intertwined with the agrarian question and sovereign industrialization. Key aspects such as land access, distribution, and resource management were pivotal. The publication’s central emphasis on struggles for national liberation, especially within the guerrilla arena, played a crucial role in disseminating the anti-imperialist pursuit of a sovereign social metabolism across the Third World. Combining Cuban, Latin Americanist, and internationalist accents, Tricontinental also condemned the ecological impact of transnational corporations’ predatory resource extraction in the Third World, while exploring alternative and cooperative models. This article unveils the latent socio-environmental dimensions of its critique, illustrating how ecological concerns subtly underpinned its anti-imperialist and internationalist discourse.

Land sovereignty in depressed and contested agro-territories: The cases of Portugal and Brazil

This article offers an exploratory operationalisation of the concept of land sovereignty applied to land politics in 2 agro-territories from different countries and continents sharing a common language and deeply linked histories: Portugal and Brazil. These display a similar model of agricultural development, representing a contradiction between the promise of profit based on aggressive exploitation of the territory and the marginalised condition of its population. How this agricultural model took hold in each country and manifested the agrarian question differs according to key socio-historical factors, such as the role of each in the colonial history that links them. Today, however, these agro-territories face similar challenges: human rights abuses, environmental destruction, lack of sound territorial management and fair policies, coupled with the dilapidation of socio-economic infrastructures. This makes them especially vulnerable to climate change, unemployment and poverty, while also caught in a clash between development models: a hegemonic hyper-intensive production model and the peasant-based model that has been resisting the advances of the former. This double jeopardy has prompted us to speak of ‘depressed and contested agro-territories’. Our study shows how, in the case of Brazil, despite physical violence and threats to life, social movements are propelling land reform, linking it to the concept of the social function of land. In Portugal, in contrast, the country’s alignment with neoliberal development has civil society divided about how to contest land use. Our analysis indicates that in both cases: (i) today’s land politics are heavily biased towards a neoliberal, export-based, hyper-intensive agriculture controlled by large corporations, with weak legislation in place to defend both social and environmental rights; (ii) land reform based on land sovereignty and the social function of land is deemed crucial to assist agro-territories in regaining socio-ecological balance and to attain democratisation of land politics by regaining control over land, natural resources and local markets.

The struggle for water as a source for territorial re-existence in Chile: Rethinking the agrarian question in Latin America

The struggle for water as a source for territorial re-existence in Chile: Rethinking the agrarian question in Latin America

The social reproduction of agrarian change: Feminist political economy and rural transformations in the global south. An introduction

AbstractThe last decade has seen a renaissance of feminist political economy studies centred on the concept of ‘social reproduction’. These aim at studying global capitalism from the vantage‐point of what produces and sustains life, expanding the social boundaries of processes and subjects analysed in political economy. Contributing to this research agenda, the special issue we present in this Introduction explores the Social Reproduction of Agrarian Change. Building on the contributions comprising this collection, we argue that the study of agrarian change through social reproduction enables us to de‐invisibilise processes of life‐making behind agrarian transformations in three distinct ways. First, the lens of social reproduction enables us to better grasp the regeneration of ‘classes of labour’ in rural areas; gender processes of de‐agrarianisation and their implications for livelihoods; and centre reproductive labour within and beyond the household ‐ across spaces and temporalities ‐ as central to life in the countryside. Secondly, this lens also allows us to complicate the land question beyond productivist readings, explore its significance for life in rural settings, and multiply the agrarian questions of our times, whose histories and trajectories must grapple with debates on economic justice. Finally, the study of the social reproduction of agrarian change also provides us with a novel vantage point to read the formation and reorganisation of complex global geographies of the rural, their relation to crises of social reproduction and the ability to redraw the urban–rural divide. All contributions in this issue insightfully advance debates on methods in social reproduction analysis. The study of the agrarian lifeworlds analysed here also contributes significantly to social reproduction debates. It challenges rigid dichotomies between the ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’. It problematises the households as a unit of analysis and sets land as central to planetary debates on crises of social reproduction and their resolution.

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

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.

A return of dominant paradigm in China: making Alibaba a development solution for rural China and the globe

ABSTRACT In 2011, Alibaba launched the Taobao Villages initiative, which enables rural e-commerce and connects rural sellers with urban buyers, highlighting the role of e-commerce platforms in reducing rural poverty. This approach was later integrated into national rural development policies. As the Digital Silk Road initiative progresses and Alibaba expands globally, Taobao Villages’ development experience is being promoted worldwide. Using Taobao Villages as a case study, this paper integrates the agrarian question in Marxian political economy with critical development communication studies. It explores why rural areas’ underdevelopment is perceived as a problem solvable by digital platforms, why this development approach emerged in post-socialist China, and its potential impacts. This paper argues that the Taobao Village exemplifies a dominant paradigm of development communication, produced by Alibaba, development experts, and government officials through shared knowledge practices. It examines the texts, intellectual frameworks, and diffusion processes involved in this knowledge production by employing critical discourse analysis. The study highlights how Taobao Villages reinforce the notion that informatization facilitates marketization, thus perpetuating and adapting three mainstream rural development ideas in post-socialist China. The underlying issue of rural China’s underdevelopment, the privatization and capitalization of rural social reproduction driven by China’s neoliberal globalization, sets the stage for another wave of digital labor exploitation. Furthermore, the widespread neoliberal ideology that advocates using e-commerce to foster social development creates internal challenges and generates external pressures within China.

The Agrarian Question as an Ecological Question: An Introduction

The Agrarian Question as an Ecological Question: An Introduction

What, How, Why? An Outline of the State’s Attitude Towards Agriculture and Farmers in Early Yugoslav Socialism, 1945–1953 (With an Emphasis on Slovenia)

In this review article, the author presents the crucial factors regarding the legal provisions that shaped agricultural policy in early socialism in Yugoslavia (1945–1953). In doing so, he focuses on the developments in agriculture in Slovenia. The article presents the agrarian question (the issue of land and its ownership) and the agricultural question (the attitude of the authorities towards peasants as a social and professional group). It outlines the agrarian reform in Slovenia (1945–1948), its impact (consequences), and the intervention of the authorities in agriculture to provide for the population. These interventions included the collectivisation of agriculture based on the model of the Soviet Union’s kolkhozes. The authorities’ attitude towards agriculture included pragmatic reasons (supplying the population) as well as political and ideological motives.

Rightless rurality: the illegalization of Myanmar migrant laborers in Thailand’s agro-industry

ABSTRACT This paper explores relations of production in contemporary agrarian capitalism through the case of rural-rural migration from Myanmar to Thailand. It focuses on the often-overlooked rural proletariat, in this case, illegalized migrant laborers. It shows how migrants live and work in precarity, and argues that their social position is a result of practices of illegalization deployed by state authorities, local police, and farmers, which control and immobilize migrants socio-economically, spatially and politically. The paper adds to debates on the agrarian question of labor, stressing capital and (il)licit law enforcement as co-constitutive in shaping exploitation in the agro-industry.

Reproductive binds: The gendered economy of debt in a Syrian refugee farmworker camp

AbstractBased on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Lebanese‐Syrian border, this article analyses the gendered economy of debt among Syrian farmworkers in shawish camps, which have for decades supplied the largest and lowest paid seasonal labour force within Lebanon's food system. In turn, it traces how debt relations in these camps expanded as hundreds of thousands of Syrians sought long‐term refuge in Lebanon throughout the war in Syria (2011 to present). Revisiting classic and contemporary agrarian questions of debt from a feminist social reproduction perspective, the article charts how this debt system ultimately deepened the burdens of feminized work in the fields and in the home. Emblematic of debt's ‘reproductive binds’, these camps offer broader insights into how debt reconfigures gendered and generational divisions of labour within displaced agricultural families—and how these conditions are negotiated, contested and reproduced in daily life.

The experience of the camp Tiago Campin dos Santos in Rondônia in the light of critical criminology

The present work intends to briefly tell the history of repression and resistance of the Tiago Campin dos Santos Camp, located in the rural area of ​​Porto Velho/RO. The Camp, organized by the LCP (Liga dos Camponeses Pobres de Rondônia e Amazônia Occidental) has more than 700 families, who occupy the area, which in turn is public land illegally occupied by the biggest land grabber in the region, known as ''Old Rooster''. After systematically suffering several attacks from the State police forces, in fulfillment of illegal Repossessions, violations of rights were reported by local peasants, committed by police with gunslinger hired by the land grabber, which culminated in physical violence, psychological violence, destruction property, humiliations, evictions and murders. Since its formation, in 2020, 11 murders have already been recorded as a result of these reported attacks. Secondly, it is intended to use the example of the Camp to reflect on the system of control and penal selectivity that place an impoverished peasant mass under the ‘’sight’’ of the State, who struggles for democratic access to land. The repressive and classist character of the State and consequently of the Judiciary leads it to face a social problem, which is the poor distribution of land in Brazil, as a public security problem, individualizing the agents of this conflict, criminalizing them, intentionally suppressing the dimension social conflict. In the essence of the Maximum Penal State model, the management of poverty through the penal control system, especially through the selective and neutralizing use of prison, makes it unnecessary to discuss structural problems, such as the social ills generated by the capitalist system on the use of the land, heightened in the latifundist production model. The agrarian question starts to be colonized by the performance of penal control over “invaders” and, with very little frequency, over landowners, land grabbers, and gunslinger.

Book Review: The Agrarian Question in Contemporary Latin America and the Pink Tide’s Limits: A Critical Approach

Book Review: The Agrarian Question in Contemporary Latin America and the Pink Tide’s Limits: A Critical Approach

Mining Extractivism, Commodification of Nature and Indigenous Peasantry in the Atacama Desert: The Political Economy of Yareta (Azorella Compacta) in Historical Perspective (1915-1960)

Studies on the agrarian question in Latin America have dealt with the role of capital in the area of agriculture and forestry while paying scant attention to its role in other areas, such as mining. Research on mining extractivism, for its part, has privileged recent socio-environmental conflicts without delving into the configurations of social classes and labor relations as it relates to agriculture. This article integrates these topics, analyzing the connections between copper extractivism, the commodification of the yareta plant, and indigenous peasant labor. We studied the medium-upper basin of the Loa River, in northern Chile, where one of the most important copper mines in the world (Chuquicamata) has been operating since 1915. Using ethnography and bibliographic analysis, we provide an account of how the expansion of extractivism requires a mixture of properly capitalist labor relations mixed with customary Andean practices. The latter are subsumed by capital and have played a key structural role during certain periods.

Imperialism and crises of social reproduction in Africa

Gender inequalities feature in the prevailing model of financialised capitalist development, which in the peripheries is increasingly dependent on enclosures of land and nature, unbridled debt that is being shifted onto households, and deepening exploitation of gendered labour for service and industry. These conditions of accumulation generate reproductive crises in the core and peripheries that have serious implications for the survival and sustenance of working people and surplus populations of the global South. This article uses two main arguments to elaborate the nature of these reproductive crises from the vantage point of working people in the peripheries. First, by elaborating the link between land, nature and the commons and social reproduction in the agrarian South, foregrounding an agrarian question of gendered labour which agrarian reforms must address as a condition of national liberation. Second, the ways in which social reproduction is structured by centre–periphery relations of capitalist accumulation are elaborated in relation to the structures of gendered labour under late capitalism, asking how these dynamics shape the conditions of survival and reproduction of working people in Africa. The article highlights the imperative for a social reproduction lens in the analysis of imperialism within the possibility of liberation as well as sovereignty of Third World nations.

The Beginning of the Solution of the Agrarian Question “from below” in the Spring of 1917 on the Example of Krasnoslobodsky Uyezd of Penza Province

Introduction. The article is devoted to the beginning of the peasants’ struggle for land in the conditions after the February revolution of 1917. Materials and Methods. The research uses materials from the Central State Archive of the Republic of Mordovia. In the work on this study, a problem-chronological method was used, as well as a micro-historical approach to consider all-Russian events at the county level. Results. The main content of the study is the beginning of the unfolding of the struggle of peasants with landlords for land. The peasantry, constrained by small land, by appealing to the authorities through writing sentences, seeks to pay attention to this and resolve the land issue in their favor. No less important problems of Krasnoslobodsk peasants were the lack of meadows for feeding and walking livestock, as well as numerous penalties imposed on them by landlords. These legal forms of struggle for the possession of land go in parallel with the pogroms of landlords’ estates and the removal of property and fodder from them. It is also worth noting the growing tension between local peasants and tenants from other settlements, to whom landlords leased their arable land and meadows. Discussion and Conclusion. The study confirmed that the local peasantry is an active participant in solving the agrarian issue “from below”, and its opponents in the form of various kinds of landowners are beginning to give up their positions. At the same time, the parties are trying to appeal to the local authorities, who, basically, are trying to take the position of an outside observer, without seriously interfering in the unfolding agrarian struggle.

The agrarian question in dairy farms: An analysis of dairy farms in the European Union countries

In this article, we review the Agrarian Question focusing on dairy farms. We have the dual aim of adding to the debate surrounding the economic profitability of small and large dairy farms and increasing what is known about the decline of dairy farms. The agrarian question at the heart of our research centres on the paradoxical endurance of family farms, despite predictions from both liberal and Marxist perspectives that they would diminish in number over time. By addressing these complex issues, we hope to shed light on the challenges and opportunities facing the dairy industry today. We focus on analysing dairy farms in the European Union countries, using panel regressions from 2008 to 2018 to define the relationship between the average number of cows per farm, profit margins and Farm Net Income. The most important results show that (i) paradoxically, profits were higher on smaller farms; (ii) however, empirical data show that small dairy farms are disappearing; (iii) this is because when including subsidies, farms with a higher number of cows are more profitable than smaller farms.

The Ruins of the Enclave: Simultaneity and Agrarian Change in Palmar Sur, Costa Rica

ABSTRACT This article proposes the use of ruins and rubble as entry points to the study of agrarian change. Drawing from peasants’ collective memories of the so-called “abandonment of the banana company” in Palmar Sur, Costa Rica and the observation of ruined spaces and objects, this article argues that ruins and rubble allow us to see the spatial simultaneity of different temporalities in processes of agrarian change, aspects often obscured in linear transition narratives. This approach uses ruins and ruination as a lens for asking a different type of agrarian question: What does agrarian change look like after capitalist destruction has already taken place? In ruined spaces and objects we find both the materiality of crisis and oblivion as well as places of reappropriation and autonomy that guide the political possibilities for making ruined spaces livable.

Towards abolitionist agrarian geographies of Kentucky

This agrarian geography of Kentucky begins on the streets of the state's largest city, in the throes of antiracist struggle. It tracks the state's lingering colonial settler power dynamics through the racism of plantation, extraction, and carceral geographies. It then traces how resistance to these exploitations take root in place-based agri-food initiatives unfolding through urban-rural solidarity against white supremacist policing, prison systems, labor exploitation, and extractivism. It begins with a brief overview of the scale of reference of Kentucky itself. Situating the state entails addressing the trauma and topophilia (love of landscape) of its agrarian past and present. It draws upon bell hooks’ literary invocations of Kentucky-based agrarian visions, as well as place-based political ecology scholarship (seven years of Kentucky Agrarian Questions practitioner panels at the Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference at University of Kentucky). Following Black and abolitionist geographies, this agrarian geography traces rural and urban shared struggles for food sovereignty, environmental justice, and liberation from racism of carceral systems. It introduces Kentucky grassroots projects connecting and uniting rural and urban struggles against carceral violence and the racism therein, such as Hood to the Holler (a political initiative emerging from Black Lives Matter mobilizations for Breonna Taylor). The essay ends with reflections on the political-ecological contradictions and imperative of working through and beyond a settler-colonial-state scale of reference like Kentucky. To extricate from and dismantle plantation modes and carceral legacies, abolitionist agrarian geographies recover the reality of Black and Indigenous agrarian history, presence, and futures. As such, rooted in place-based reckoning, resistance, and responsibility, they offer hope.