Agricultural markets

Abstract

Despite the importance of agricultural markets for the process of agrarian transformation, their diversity and actual workings remain woefully understudied in orthodox Marxist accounts. Critical Marxist scholarship has done much to redress this but still suffers from an inability to view markets as complex, adaptive systems with great organizational and institutional diversity, in which capitalist and non-capitalist forms co-exist. Agricultural markets contain struggles not simply between capital and labour but between a wider array of class and non-class actors. This chapter makes a plea for a complex systems approach to agricultural markets within critical agrarian studies and introduces the literature which can act as a guide.