Imperialism, Crisis, and the Agrarian Question

This article was delivered as a keynote address at the “International Conference on Development, War, and Agriculture in the Arab–Iranian Region: Rethinking the Agrarian Question,” organized by the Observatory of Food Sovereignty and Environment, in Tunis, on 6–8 November 2025. The author argues that the perspective on class contradictions and alliances that prevailed in the early postcolonial period was based on a reading of the agrarian question, which understood imperialism to be in retreat and deemed it necessary to unite poor peasants and agricultural laborers against absentee and large landlords in favors of tenancy and land reforms. This perspective, the author argues, has been overcome by the reascendancy of imperialism under neoliberalism and the evolution of capitalism. The neoliberal regime has subjected whole nations and countrysides to the dictates of international finance capital and agribusiness, to the effect of rolling back the major gains of independence and impoverishing the peasantry and agricultural laborers. At the same time, it has also created conditions for an alliance among classes of peasants, all of which have been affected adversely by imperialism, such that this alliance is now necessary for the anti-imperialist struggle, its advancement and endurance over the long run.