Capitalism, Crisis and Covid: Agrarian Political Economy in Disrupted Circuits of Capital and Labour
The Journal of Agrarian Change seeks contributions to a symposium on Capitalism, Crisis and Covid: Agrarian Political Economy in Disrupted Circuits of Capital and Labour.
Covid-19 is re-configuring the global capitalist system. It has disrupted the functioning of capitalism in unprecedented ways. The flow of commodities has slowed dramatically, and labour has experienced a mass loss of work.
The symposium is concerned with Covid-19, capitalism and crisis in relation to agrarian and rural settings – while recognising that the urban and rural are not neatly segregated but bound together by the flow of commodities, labour and capital. We invite contributions relating to the unfolding impacts of Covid-19: the disruption of existing global supply chains, the impacts on trade, the re-dividing of reproductive labour, and the loss of livelihoods of rural populations in agriculture and as migrant and commuting labour, to name but a few. We also ask contributors to assess its implications for the future, including the changing role of institutions like the state, the ways in which recovery programmes may re-configure economies, new developments within and of capitalism, and struggles for forms of socialism and democracy that re-cast social and ecological relations.
While the compression of time and space, so characteristic of capitalism in recent decades, may have fostered the rapid global spread of Covid-19, responses to the pandemic are now lengthening time and increasing distance. Supply chains have been strained by quarantining and morbidity in production processes and by a surge in logistics costs. Some countries stock-pile grains while … READ MORE