Towards a Gramscian food regime analysis of India's agrarian crisis: Counter-movements, petrofarming and Cheap Nature

Abstract

This article develops an initial framework for a Gramscian and political ecological food regime analysis of India’s ongoing agrarian crisis. Criticizing readings of Polanyi in food regime analysis in light of Gramscian perspectives, I seek to contest food regime analysis’s approach to counter-movements. I suggest, further, that close attention to the Indian case of ‘actually existing crises’ helps us avoid some of the capital-centric limitations in food regime literature. Working towards an incipient understanding of the absence of a sustained smallholder counter-movement at the current conjuncture in India, I argue for locating our investigation at the intersection of crises of accumulation and of legitimation. I analyze India’s decentralized form of petrofarming as a socioecological cycle of accumulation that is presently facing a condition of exhaustion of Cheap Nature. Drawing on Gramscian perespectives, I argue that an analytics that foregrounds the dynamics of class forces in the integral state can help us rethinking the possibilities for resistance to the contemporary food regime more broadly.