Introduction: Some Questions Concerning the Productive Forces

This introduction suggests an inherited weakness of ‘orthodox’ materialist conceptions of the development of the productive forces in capitalist agriculture, and the intellectual deficit of an uncritical and ahistorical stance that embraces such development as forever ‘progressive’. The best recent work in political ecology presents agrarian political economy with a challenge to address that intellectual deficit by interrogating and problematizing its inherited conceptions of the productive forces, both theoretically and historically. This is illustrated with reference to notions of the ‘biophysical contradictions of industrial capitalist agriculture’, a global agricultural or food ‘crisis’, and suggested alternatives, drawing on the analyses and arguments of the six papers that follow.