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When Planetary Urbanization Meets the Agrarian Question

Ghosh & Meer 城读 2022-07-13


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When Planetary Urbanization Meets the Agrarian Question


The urban question itself is inextricable from the agrarian question.

Ghosh, S., & Meer, A. (2020). Extended urbanisation and the agrarian question: Convergences, divergences and openings. Urban Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098020943758

Picture source:
Building in the city of Hefei next to surrounding fields – as China’s urbanization continues at breakneck speed, will its agrarian resources be hit? 
Photograph:AFP/GettyImages, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/16/china-mega-airport-symbol-flight-agriculture-urbanisation#img-1


In his classic work The Urban Revolution, Henri Lefebvre laid the foundations for the theory of planetary urbanization by formulating the hypothesis that ‘society has been completely urbanized‘. Building on Lefebvre’s insights, Neil Brenner proposes a study of planetary urbanization, attempting to facilitate a paradigm shift in urban studies, from methodological cityism to urban theory without outside (see CityReads│When Lefebvre’s Hypothesis Becomes Reality).
 
The concept of planetary urbanization has transformed the field of urban studies by subjecting its most basic epistemological categories – ‘the urban’ and ‘urbanization’ – to meta-theoretical scrutiny. It has recast ‘the urban’ and ‘urbanization’  as theoretical categories instead of empirical objects and, in so doing, offered a powerful alternative to the inherited epistemologies and to the entrenched ‘city-centrism’ of contemporary urban scholarship and discourse.
 
However, Swarnabh Ghosh at Harvard and Ayan Meer at MIT argue that planetary urbanization, while calling attention to the urbanization beyond the city, remains grounded in a variety of different urban theories and lacks a reference to critical agrarian studies, arguing that extended urbanization and urban studies more generally have much to gain from a closer engagement with the critical agrarian research, in their paper  “Extended urbanisation and the agrarian question: Convergences, divergences and openings" published in Urban Studies.  They offer a brief overview of the agrarian question, introduce key concepts and perspectives in the agrarian studies, and propose further research issues at the intersection of planetary urbanization and the agrarian question.
 
Insofar as the concept of planetary urbanization is motivated by its ambition to reframe and rescale the urban question, the urban question itself is inextricable from the so-called agrarian question. Processes of ‘urban’ and ‘agrarian’ change have always already been co-constitutive.
 
Although reflections on ‘the urban’ and its relationship to ‘the rural’ have long animated the field of urban studies, the ‘agrarian question’ and indeed the vast and heterogeneous field of agrarian studies have largely escaped critical engagement and consideration. Relatedly, agrarian studies scholars – including those whose work we review in later sections – are rarely encountered in urban studies and urban geography scholarship despite their essential insights into the interrelationships between agrarian/ urban sociospatial and socioeconomic change, particularly in the context of the postcolonial South.
 
The aim of this paper is  to  move two vast and multidisciplinary fields of scholarship towards one another through a reading of key complementary concepts that enable fuller understandings of the relations between city and non-city sociospatial restructuring under capitalism. This incipient interest in socio-spatial transformations beyond the city  has much to gain from a closer engagement with the field of critical agrarian studies.
 
The ‘classic’ agrarian question: Then and now
 
The massive intellectual and political labor expended on the ‘agrarian question’ since its original late-19th-century formulation evidence its multifarious, historically conditioned meanings, implications and political visions. Despite the fact that the agrarian question – by the late-20th century – had acquired multiple ‘layers of meaning’ in Marxist discourse, the common core shared by its diverse formulations was an interest in ‘urban/industrial as well as rural/agricultural transformation’.
 
For Marx and Engels, capitalism was a dynamic historical force that would spur the development of cities and concomitantly transform the countryside by ‘[rescuing] a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life’. In this classic formulation, the development of the capitalist mode of production was predicated on the dispossession and displacement of peasants who would then go on to join the ranks of the proletariat and eventually ‘dig the grave’ of capitalism.
 
Building on the foundation established by Marx and Engels, Karl Kautsky formalized the ‘classic’ agrarian question at the end of the 19th century in the The Agrarian Question: a work principally concerned with ‘whether, and how, capital is seizing hold of agriculture, revolutionizing it, making old forms of production and property untenable and creating the necessity for new ones’.
 
For Kaustky, the emergence of agrarian capital was structurally bound to the expansion and deepening use of industrially produced commodities – and the simultaneous curtailment of commodity production under ‘pre-capitalist’      conditions      –      in   the countryside. This intensifying market dependence created a ‘need for money’, resulting in the increased commoditization of agriculture and the development of agrarian capital. What resulted was differentiation and specialization within the peasantry as certain sections would become competitive producers for markets and mobilize strategies of capitalize accumulation while those unable to compete would continue to produce for subsistence even as their land-holdings fragmented and diminished, rendering them ‘increasingly unable to meet all the needs of the household’ and forcing them to sell their assets and eventually their labor power in order to survive. At the same time, Kautsky crucially recognized that smaller peasants and ‘dwarf-holding’ farmers could become functionally integral to capitalist agriculture – as sellers of labor power to large-scale agricultural enterprises and as buyers of the products of large-scale farms for subsistence needs.
 
The processes described by Kautsky presaged contemporary global agrarian transformations, in particular the diverse ways in which agro-industrial capital subsumes – without fully transforming – petty commodity production to its demands. Kautsky nevertheless held that the inexorable expansion of industry into the countryside would eventually transform relations of production in agriculture, for ‘any agricultural activity linked with and dependent on industry passes into a phase of uninterrupted transformation, constantly creating and recreating new forms – just like industry itself’. Kautsky’s contribution set the terms for future debates on class formation and the agrarian question, between romantic representations of a unified peasantry as a progressive anti-capitalist force on one side and an emphasis on the ‘death of peasantry’ and the obsolete or reactionary nature of this category on the other.
 
While these ‘classic’ approaches and concerns seem far removed from contemporary issues of agrarian development, they form the theoretical bedrock upon which subsequent iterations of the agrarian question have been constructed.
 
Scholar has argued that the classic agrarian question of capital– including the ‘transition to’ or the ‘emergence of’ agrarian capitalism – has been rendered irrelevant. The internationalization of capitalist social relations in the organization of economic activity’ including the thoroughgoing transformation of the agricultural sector under late-capitalism as it is increasingly albeit unevenly integrated through global, national and subnational divisions  of  labor, circuits of capital,  commodity chains, industrial processing, and infrastructure and logistics networks.
 
If the agrarian question of capital has indeed been made irrelevant by globalization and geo-economic integration, the agrarian question of labor remains central to it. Masses of peasants and rural workers, ‘bypassed’ by global capital, increasingly struggle for access to livelihoods and face a ‘crisis of reproduction’. The agrarian question is only relevant insofar as it ‘shapes political struggles by subordinate classes of labor over resources, production and accumulation’.
 
Global depeasantization and the new division of labor
 
Farshad Araghi has attended to the agrarian question from a world-historical perspective by situating it within the dynamics of global capitalist development. Agrarian relations are co-constituted by spatial and social relations that transcend the binary, fixed and ‘given’ distinctions of ‘rural or urban localities’ as well as the ‘quantitative and flat space of rural–urban continuum’. Araghi adopts a radically relational view of agrarian social relations by privileging its ‘profound interconnectedness’ with environmental  degradation,  urbanization and informalization.
 
The key concept that drives Araghi’s work is ‘global depeasantization’ which refers to the ‘experience of the Third World peasantries’ from around 1945 to 1990 when a massive number of people involved in agriculture with ‘direct access to the production of their means of subsistence were expropriated and displaced, creating huge urban masses of superfluous people’. The concept of ‘global depeasantization’ is disaggregated into two broad phases:
 
  • the period of ‘long national developmentalism’ originating in the early 20th century and intensifying in the period between 1945 up to the 1970s; and


  • the period of ‘postcolonial neoliberal globalism’ beginning in the 1970s.


The post-2008 conjuncture has seen the intensification of large-scale enclosure and depeasantization through ‘global land grabs’ in response to the ‘converging multiple crises of food, energy, climate and finance, as well as the rising demands for commodities from newer hubs (e.g. Global South transnational corporations and state-domestic capital alliances) of global capital.
 
This complex process of spatial restructuring that results in rural dispossession by displacement is characterized by Araghi as the ‘great global enclosure of our times’ whose spatial expression takes the form of ‘global deruralization’ and ‘global hyperurbanization’.Global deruralization refers to the ‘constriction of global rural space’ through outmigration, suburbanization and the ‘increasing encroachment of industrial, agro-commercial, information and service economies into what was formerly rural space’. Its corollary, global hyperurbanization refers to the expansion of global urban space through the amassment of deproletarianized and homeless surplus labor populations. The twin-processes of ‘global deruralization’ and ‘global hyperurbanization’ refer to the spatial effects of the enclosure food regime as vast numbers of the peasantry are expropriated and ‘pushed’ into urban agglomerations as surplus migratory labor subjected to forced under-reproduction through the market mechanism.
 
Extended urbanization and agrarian questions: New openings
 
  • Global depeasantization and deruralization as the labor dimensions of extended urbanization: The concept of extended urbanization emphasizes the transformation of spaces beyond the limits of cities because of their ‘operationalization’ to meet the ‘socio-metabolic imperatives’ of urban growth: food, water, energy and so on. At the same time, planetary urbanization specifies two other elements including the extension and intensification of infrastructure development as well as the enclosure of land via privatization, commodification and other forms of accumulation by dispossession. The concept of deruralization refers to the same set of processes but from an obverse standpoint. Even as Araghi frames his analysis in terms of the spatial discontents of a historically specific form of capitalist development, his guiding focus is the manifestation of ‘historical value relations and class formation’ in ‘rural space’ or landscapes of agricultural production. Araghi pays close attention to the global class differentiation engendered by processes of depeasantization and the constitution of an ‘enclosure food regime’. ‘Deruralization’,  in this context, refers not only to the transformation of erstwhile agricultural land into non-agricultural land but also to the urbanization of labor both in terms of unprecedented ‘rural to urban’ migration and the ‘urbanization of agricultural employment’intheGlobalSouth.

  • Operational landscapes beyond the ‘colossal’: This banal operationalization of landscapes does not necessarily entail a departure from agriculture in term of land use, nor an irruptive descent of global capital upon previously ‘untouched’ landscapes but rather incremental and uneven transformations in social relations effected by supply chain reorganization and vertical integration. This often results in social fragmentation within agrarian communities, as relations of production and social reproduction – including ethnic, caste, religious, gender and household relations – are reconfigured by generalized market imperatives.

  • Towards relational periodization: Such an approach to the historical analysis of urbanization processes could be developed in relation to the world historical periodization of global agrofood arrangements developed by proponents of the food regime perspective. The food regime perspective thus offers a concrete critical-historical basis for periodizing, historicizing and comparing the socio-spatial (and socio-ecological) transformations that have enabled and resulted from food regimes transitions and consolidations in the long 20th century, and for analyzing the relations between specific operational landscapes and sites of agglomeration. Conversely, historicizing the dialectic of urbanization with regard to historically and geographically specific commodity frontiers – from the production of the grain frontier in the American Midwest in the mid-19th century to the construction of the Punjab ‘canal colonies’ in the late-19th century – might not only unearth other geohistories of capitalist urbanization but also help illuminate the rescaling processes and sociospatial interdependencies attendant to successive world-historical food regimes.


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