Agrarian Degrowth Ecosocialism: A Politics of Planetary Decolonization

This paper develops an integrated analysis of critical agrarian studies and degrowth through the conceptual frame of agrarian degrowth ecosocialism. It adopts a mutually critical engagement in which a world-historical agrarian perspective informs a decentered understanding of ecosocialist degrowth and an ecosocialist degrowth perspective situates the agrarian question in ecopolitics of reproduction and transformation. We ground these interventions in a longue dure e approach of socio-metabolic shifts and rifts, culminating at present into a territorially unfolding planetary double movement, socio-spatially unfolding as a dialectic of planetary urbanization and ruralization. Capital's movement seeks to socio-metabolically dominate the planet and life through an extractive, urbanizing, and deterritorializing reconfiguration of capital-land/nature-labour trinity, leading to what can be conceived as planetary colonization, generating a global socio-ecological reproduction crisis. This, in turn, produces geographically diverse yet interlinked countermovements defending and reclaiming life, land, territory, and people's autonomy/sovereignty, acting as multiscale forces of planetary decolonization striving for a reterritorialized trinity of life.