Agroecology as revolutionary, anti-imperialist, class struggle

What would it mean to reorient the project of agroecology in the global north around the aims of revolutionary, anti-imperialist, class struggle?

Image from a rally by Movimento dos Trabhaladores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MST_06142007.jpg

At a recent gathering organised by Common Ecologies, I was asked what’s my vision for agroecology. I said I want to see agroecology as revolutionary, anti-imperialist class struggle. It’s easy to say but what does it actually mean? I don’t want it to be empty rhetoric. What is being demanded? What is the strategy of re-orienting agroecology towards a revolutionary politics? What forms of organisations are needed? And what tactics must be employed? I’m not going to attempt to answer all those in this post, but I will give a broad outline of some of the key aspects of this, focusing on the British context, but I think translatable elsewhere in the global north.

I believe there’s a necessity to reorient agroecology towards a new objective. The goal isn’t agroecological transition within a capitalist imperialist word system. The purpose of agroecology is to be a means towards a post-capitalist, eco-communist society. That means agroecology has to be about more than just tacking on a few statements of social/racial/climate justice on top of organic-ish farming. The idea that there can be any justice under capitalist imperialism is ludicrous when exploitation is inherent to the system.

In this post I will lay out some thoughts on the above. To some extent this follows on from my previous post about agroecology as class suicide. What I want for this piece is to push past some of what I was struggling to articulate before

Agroecology as (anti-imperialist) class suicide

In the imperial core a large chunk of the politics of agroecology stems from a liberal conception of politics as something somewhat formalised (mainstream parties, NGOs, lobbying etc.) and separate from everyday life. The politics of the everyday often being limited to ethical consumerism and community building. This leaves our movement weak and not even that effective at winning mild reforms. For decades the idea has been that Polanyian ‘re-embedding’¹ of the food/farming system could help to protect pockets of agroecological farming against agribusiness and provide the platform for agroecological transition. This reformist strategy is a failing strategy. Doubling down on it won’t be more effective.

Yet there is an inherent potential with agroecology that it can become a critical tool in the dismantling imperialism. At its core agroecology is about getting more hands on the land in order to reorient human socio-ecological relations away from their current ecocidal form. Capital requires a constant supply of cheap food in order to continue circulating. Agroecology, through its inherent need for more agricultural labour, increases the value of food in a way that capital cannot integrate. Although this does mean the converse is also true. Capitalism cannot facilitate agroecology. Dreams of a “fair price” for farmers is not a realisable demand due to the inherent contradiction that exists between food production and the profit motive.

The food system plays a vital role in transferring value from the global south to north in the form of cheapened (sub)tropical commodities and cheapened animal feed like soya. This occurs through the super-exploitation (ie. far below levels of reproduction) of workers and peasants in the south. When people in the global south build a politics of “de-linking” from this world system, such as seen in Cuba or Venezuela, the north enacts economic warfare on them, along with military coups.

Agroecological farming in the north, as a way to reorient northern diets and farming systems towards what we can sustainably produce ourselves frees that super-exploited labour in the global south to focus on their own (social) re/production needs. This helps to undermine imperialist flows of value. Farmers in the south can focus on feeding their own populations and thus the value is retained within their own economies, which can be utilised for their own development needs².

Rather than supporting a comprador class of large landowners, as found, for example, in Argentina, with its “latifundios” of tens of thousands of acres of land planted to soya. In these systems, the comprador class make a profit, whilst serving global capital and impoverishing local ecosystems, on land that has historically been forcibly taken from indigenous populations and peasants. Land back combined with agroecology undermines this neocolonial system.

Therefore, agroecology as class suicide in the global north is a project of undermining the flow of value through the food system into northern economies. If our conception of class is not bound by the, often racist, limitations of methodological nationalism, then undermining the imperial power of the north becomes central to the class struggle. As these northern economies rely upon cheap food all attempts to disrupt that flow of cheap food, and to increase the north’s own reliance upon its own land for food production, can play a significant role in undermining the rule of capital. To say nothing of how it can also begin to repair ecological systems. As such agroecology becomes degrowth in action³.

Important to this becomes the necessity of ensuring that working classes in the imperial core can have access to agroecologically grown food. It cannot remain the reserve of the middle and upper classes. Farmers’ markets are nice but they’re exclusive. Donatella Gasparro highlights how a strategy of urban food gardens, organic markets, and cooperative consumer groups can actually exacerbate existing inequalities (which I think is as true in the country as the city). What instead can we learn from the likes of MST?

Palestine

The struggle for Palestinian liberation is the struggle for global liberation from capitalist imperialism, and yet agroecology in the global north has offered little but statements of support. I don’t have easy suggestions for this but for example contrast the way that Progressive International was out in Palestine recently supporting the olive harvest. Why hasn’t La Via Campesina done the same? We are long past the point where online petitions have any use.

Who is the revolutionary subject of agroecology?

Migrant Workers

Agroecology as class suicide in the imperial core must also find a way to build material solidarity with migrant workers and undermine the way their labour is super-exploited in northern economies. This means beginning with building networks of material solidarity. Research conducted by McAndrew et al has pointed to some potential weak spots⁴ in the exploitation of migrant workers in the British food system. Research like this is needed all across the global north. Research however is just the first step—it needs translating into material solidarity and actions. The report by McAndrew et al points to some ideas. But importantly acting in solidarity with migrant workers—to help them retain a greater share of the value of their labour—is a small step towards undermining the cheap food regime within the global north. This work must also be placed within the wider struggle for border abolition. The border-citizenship regime is central to how capital is able to (super)exploit landworkers, who provide a huge proportion of the labour power required. The wider left must also engage on this.

Landless workers

As I argued before, given that agroecology requires many more hands on the land there must be a way of massively increasing the numbers of people engaged in food production within the imperial core. Both as a way to repair ecological systems but also just simply to produce more food in the core (eg the UK imports roughly half its food). There is no “just green transition” across the globe without this. In order to skip the super-exploitation that occurs on agroecological farms in places like the UK, there must be ways of providing hands-on training for agroecological workers as part of a non-privatised training college or network. And no this doesn’t mean that these colleges should team up with private farm businesses who can then get away with indirectly employing trainees for just £4/hour⁵. In the UK, SALT are struggling against this exploitation. After that there will need to be access to land, which I’ll touch on below, and ideally again not taking the form of privatised farm businesses but something more democratic.

Landowning farmers

I’m not saying there’s no role for landowning farmers like myself. In the previous post on class suicide I outlined some ideas I had as to how we can take part in class suicide. The point being that if we are genuinely committed to agroecology we have to be ready to renounce and dismantle our class position. If we believe that agroecology is necessary to transform socio-ecological relations, we have to do all that we can to ensure that agroecology becomes the dominant form of food production across the globe. That will never be achieved in a class society.

Radical land reforms

Ideally land reforms would be oriented beyond the regime of private property which is so fundamental to the rule of capital and the liberal state. This section is brief for now and one I will explore in more detail at a later time.

Land redistribution as reparations

The UK has some of the world’s most unequal land ownership and almost everyone who owns that land is white. 99% of farmers are white. That’s despite only 80% of the UK population being white. Even less than the 1% of farm workers who are BPOC will be owning land. And yet the transatlantic slave trade was central to the growth of the large estates of the landed gentry across the UK. Quite simply racial justice in the context of British land ownership requires land redistribution to BPOC people. This can be achieved in different ways, and the BPOC collective LION are one collective working on this, but this must become a prime aim of any agroecology that seeks to undermine the rule of capitalist-imperialism. And everyone in the movement has a duty towards achieving this.

Public-Common Partnerships

This is a way to organise communities in order to work with public bodies towards more democratic ends. I don’t want to expand too much on this yet as there is a book in the works, Radical Abundance, by Heron, Millburn and Russell that will explore this in depth, including in the case of agroecology.

Agroecology as revolutionary, anti-Imperialist, class Struggle

As with my previous post on agroecology as class suicide I still don’t feel like I’ve quite articulated exactly what I want with this piece but I hope have made some ground. My central provocation is that agroecology needs to reorient itself around this goal of revolutionary, anti-imperialist, class struggle. By necessity that must be focused on fundamentally transforming social relations in such a way as to undermine the rule of capital. In my view agroecology should become central to any revolutionary politics on the left. As Max Ajl puts it, ‘National-popular control over food and farming is an entry point into restructuring our world.’

Given our extremely limited resources of energy, time and money, we need to focus it on effective politics. With a planet on track for 3.1 degrees of warming and a genocide in Palestine we have to escalate the urgency and radicalism of our movement. To resign ourselves to mild reformism is to become somewhat complicit in a world system that requires the suffering done in the name of capitalist imperialism. Crisis is deepening, we must deepen our politics.

1. This link explains the concept well in the abstract to the paper. Essentially it’s a call to regulate capitalism in ways that are claimed to be better for society and nature (contra to the idea of “free markets”). It’s a problematic idea in my opinion, not because it’s bad to regulate markets but because it misunderstands (underestimates) capitalism, and it’s very influential in agroecology and food sovereignty in the north. So much so there is an upcoming conference explicitly on how exactly to achieve this. I understand the draw of this but it fundamentally misunderstands the current conjuncture we have entered and I’m not at all persuaded that it’s a route to agroecological transition.

2. This doesn’t mean there would be no exports but instead exports would serve local/domestic populations and would more likely take the form of high value exports (eg processed chocolate rather than cocoa beans).

3. A phrase that Donatella Gasparro used in a conversation with me

4. Thanks Inea for helping me think about “weak spots” !

5. This is an entire post in itself that I will write at a later date, but the way the Apricot Centre model is being shared across the UK is problematic. It normalises the super-exploitation of agroecological labour and in the process ends up undermining the agroecological transition because it’s an inherently unsustainable model. Whilst of course being morally wrong and unjust. These attempts at agroecological transition within the model of a green capitalist localism display the inherent contradiction at the core of agroecology and its theory of change, something I’ll write about at a later date.