The Agrarian Question and the City: The Food Question and the Food Revolutions of Our Times

• In Event: 604 - Section on Marxist Sociology Paper Session. Crises and the Future of Capitalism

Abstract

By linking the agrarian question and the city I mean to bring out a fundamental aspect of the agrarian question of our times: The unity of labor power and the valorization process occurs predominantly in the urban centers of the world. The agrarian question today is increasingly an urban question.
In essence, the agrarian question has always been about the historical particularities of class formation processes in (global context). The most important aspect of the agrarian question today is not “dispossession and rural differentiation” but “dispossession and displacement” (or what we may refer to as “accumulation by displacement.”
“Accumulation by displacement” (as distinguished from “accumulation by dispossession”) best captures the triple aspect of the agrarian question of our times, that is (1) the ongoing massive dispossession and spatial expulsion of the world’s peasantries with partial nonmarket access to their means of subsistence, (2) the appropriation of the migratory and under-reproduced surplus labor power in the city, and (3) the accumulation of the spaces of “surplus nature” (or the ecological side of agrarian dispossession via displacement).

Author

• Farshad A. Araghi, Florida Atlantic University