The class dynamics of Agrarian mobilisation in neoliberal India

This chapter, written in two parts, attempts to survey and pose some long-standing problems in the study of agriculture in the “Global South”. After a brief outline of mainstream approaches and the world-historical contexts in which they were developed and circulated, the first section of the chapter selectively surveys major debates in the study of agrarian change, and the second section positions the foregoing survey in the context of agrarian movements in India. We centre the survey around two approaches to contemporary agrarian questions and relate them to some aspects of the 2020–2021 farmers’ struggle in India. One argues that the generalised agrarian crisis brought about by the domination of global agriculture by the world food regime of capital and a generalised agrarian crisis have enabled an undifferentiated “peasantry” to emerge as an unproblematic vanguard force in the movement against neoliberal capitalism. The other centres the question of socio-economic differentiation among the “peasantry” and emphasises the class-specific effects of the agrarian crisis. What is at stake in the two views are two distinct perspectives of agrarian capitalism: one locates the dynamics of agrarian capitalism in the formation of a corporate food regime that is homogenous, top-down and systemic, while the other is an understanding of agrarian capitalism that recognises multiple agencies shaped by class differentiation, complex alliances, and contradictions. We draw on the second framework to suggest that narratives undergirded by the first approach not only obfuscate the circumstances under which “peasants” resist or acquiesce to integration into global commodity chains, but also hide the contradictory sources of solidarity and conflict that any multi-class movement inevitably negotiates.