Contemporary agrarian, rural and rural–urban movements and alliances

Abstract

Henry Bernstein has criticized the research agenda of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), and the publications linked to it, for, among other things, not having specified which classes are supposed to comprise the proposed emancipatory rural politics. The Journal of Agrarian Change organized a special issue (published in January 2023) that takes Bernstein's critique as its point of departure. It emphasized the importance of movements of the working class that straddle the rural–urban corridor. I agree, but this should not be done by de‐valuing the agrarian and the rural. The key challenge is in building agrarian, rural and rural–urban anti‐capitalist movements and alliances within and between these spheres. This calls for more—not less—attention to agrarian movements seen from the inseparable domains of the agrarian, rural and rural–urban continuum in terms of academic research and political action. A starting point, and implication, of this broader unit of analysis and political intervention is an argument against a ‘too agrarian‐centric’, or ‘merely agrarian’, mass movement‐building and political mobilization to counter regressive populism and struggle against capitalism.

Disrupting Political Polarization: The Role of Politics in Explanations of Farm Loss in Southern Wisconsin☆

“…Similarly, common perceptions of rural communities as more “tight‐knit” have ignored the role of community networks in urban places (Gans 1962), as well as of isolation and ruptured social connections in rural places (Besser 2009; Williams, Lakhani, and Spelten 2022). Finally, the various places along the rural–urban continuum are connected by the people, products, and ideas that move continuously among them (Borras 2023; Brown and Shucksmith 2017; Shellabarger et al 2019), creating an interdependency, for example, between rural farmers and their urban markets.…”