Capitalist development, globalization, and the agrarian question in the 21st century

Abstract

The issue of capitalist development in agriculture and its various forms has been central in the social sciences. Traditionally, the theoretical focus was on the ways in which capital penetrated agriculture and the roles played by the peasantry and large landowners. Since the mid-1970s, the deepening of capitalist development, globalization, and economic liberalization have profoundly transformed agricultural production on a global scale. This article is organized around two questions: How should we think about the agrarian question today? To what extent can it still be confined to the “peasant problem” and/or the question of the survival of small-scale production? The aim is to characterize the agricultural sector and the labor force employed in it in order to contribute to the conceptualization of the agrarian question in the 21st century. The hypothesis
is that the creation of a surplus population for capital (relative surplus population) offers a more fruitful path for rethinking the so-called agrarian question than the question of whether or not the peasantry persists. The research is quantitative in nature and uses secondary data mainly from international organizations such as the FAO and the ILO, to characterize both countries worldwide in terms of capitalist development and the workers employed in the agricultural sector.