‘Changing Before Our Very Eyes’: Agrarian Questions and the Politics of Land in Capitalism Today

Abstract

This paper endorses the criticisms of neo‐classical populism and its advocacy of redistributive land reform provided by other contributions to this special issue of the Journal, to which it adds several further points. If GKI propose a version of an agrarian question of ‘small’ or ‘family’ farming, and its resolution through a familiar (Chayanovian) path of development, much of the critique rests, in one way or another, on the ‘classic’ agrarian question in capitalist transition, in effect the agrarian question of capital in which the agrarian question of labour was once subsumed. Here the question is posed whether, in the conditions of contemporary ‘globalization’ and its tendency to the ‘fragmentation’ of labour, there might be a new agrarian question of labour, now detached from that of capital, and which generates a new politics of struggles over land (and its distribution). Even to conceive of this question is beyond the analytical and political field of vision of neo‐classical populism. Some of the dimensions of an agrarian question of labour are illustrated in a brief consideration of recent, and highly contradictory, events in Zimbabwe: a unique case of comprehensive, regime‐sanctioned, confiscatory land redistribution in the world today.