“Gramsci at the Delhi Border: Indian Farmers and the Revolution against Inevitability”
  https://antipodeonline.org/2021/06/14/gramsci-at-the-delhi-border/  14th June 2021

Extracts: The ongoing farmer and worker protest in India presents a confounding moment in global history. .. For six months they have remained at a tense deadlock with the government. During that time, the protest has grown to encompass diverse strands of Indian society...cutting across caste, religious, gender and class lines.....this protest is not led by a single, secretive party, nor is it driven by the objective of seizing political power. Even in the face of severe repression, the protest has eschewed the use of violence. 

Indian farmers ..fear these laws will lead to their gradual impoverishment and eventual eviction from agriculture altogether. .. the government and its supporters repeatedly claim that cultivation has become stagnant, and that a greater proportion of people need to be moved into other occupations. Yet instead of addressing the technical problems in agricultural policy, or developing greater local industrial capacity, it is content to allow private corporations to leverage their immense purchasing power to manipulate prices and control the food supply-chain. Market imperatives will then completely dictate cultivation practices, setting off waves of uncertainty, indebtedness and consolidation in the countryside. Far from “reforms”, these laws are little more than a license for corporate monopolizing that will result in rural displacement.

In this sense, the Indian government is pursuing a derivative strategy of accumulation.. a warped attempt to follow the trajectory of 16th–18th century England, where peasants were forcibly expelled from the countryside to end up in cities as workers in factories, or as soldiers and settlers in various imperial ventures. 

..21st century India scarcely offers the same chimeric possibilities: remunerative manufacturing jobs are pitifully few; there is no scope for colonizing entire continents. A more likely prospect for ex-farmers will be to join the swelling ranks of the urban poor to find whatever haphazard work is available, while a fraction desperately seeks migration abroad.

The farmer’s protest is therefore a revolt against capitalist inevitability. It embodies a critique of the stale logics of deregulation, privatization and dispossession. 

Small-scale independent cultivation can be made viable.Public investment and localized regulation can become efficient. In Panjab several initiatives are underway for joint cultivation and resource-pooling which involve large numbers of farmers and even landless laborers. These techniques would be both equitable and sustainable, and scalable, if given the right support.

Private enterprise, will lead to  mono-cropping, chemical-dependence and factory-farming. The primary aim of a corporation is to endlessly pursue increasing profit every quarter and year, regardless of the rise in inequality or damage to ecology. ..

The fortunes of the struggle at the borders of Delhi thus have implications for the rest of the world. .. Indian farmers are battling to articulate new kinds of economic rights, to subvert current neoliberal orthodoxy in order to place collective wellbeing at the center of democratic politics.