Rethinking globalization: the agrarian question revisited

Abstract

The agrarian question, like most questions about the trajectory of (capitalist) development, was framed as a national question about a national process. This article critiques the latter assumption, arguing, as Karl Polanyi did, that the classical agrarian question was a national interpretation of a global process. It also argues that the current processes of globalization crystallize the agrarian question in new and challenging ways. The key to these arguments is that the capitalist organization of agriculture is a political process, and is central to the dynamics of an evolving state system (including supra-statal institutions). The discussion contextualizes agricultural developments within the contradictory dynamics of the two main periods of world capitalism over the last century: the national (developmentalist) and the global movements. The crisis of developmentalism coincides with the crisis of the post-Second World War food regime. It is currently generating new social movements that combine original and tenure questions with food and green questions, reversing the anti-agrarianism of the development, or productivist, paradigm.