Moving from anti-globalisation to anti-imperialism and why it matters for food sovereignty
Why the international movement for food sovereignty needs to move away from thinking about globalisation and towards thinking about (and acting against) imperialism.
Imperialism is not just another word for globalism/globalisation. In this article, I want to write about the flattening of the imperialist power structure that occurs when we invoke globalisation and not imperialism. And why the latter cannot be reduced to the former and why in food sovereignty we need to move on from the concept of globalisation and get to grips with imperialism.
Rather than working with a more generalised definition, I want to work with the way that La Vía Campesina has utilised globalisation, as it reflects how most of us in this movement have come to think about it. In Annette Aurélie Desmarais’ incredibly useful monograph about La Vía Campesina, called Globalization and the Power of Peasants, there is a detailed discussion about the process of globalisation and how it’s affected peasants and small farmers across the globe.
In it Desmarais references a long quote from Alberto Gomez Flores (from UNORCA, a Mexican member of La Vía Campesina), from 2000, where Flores talks about the ways that globalisation affects the countryside:
‘it is a global offensive against the small producers and family farms that are not in the logic of an “efficient” countryside. It is a global advancement against peasants’ and small producers’ visions for resource management, conservation of biodiversity and all of these issues…. We are all facing the same enerimes in this globalization[…]we are facing the same global tendency driven by the governments of the richest countries for the benefit of large transnationals.’
This undeniably articulates what farmers across the globe have experienced in the wake of the so-called green revolution. That period has seen the modernisation of agriculture in such a way as to benefit huge transnational corporations and has helped to further dispossess farmers/peasants of their ability to grow for local markets. It has helped to further institute production for export — where transnational corporations rake in most of the profits. This wave of what has been termed globalisation has consolidated control of the food system into just several corporations, playing a key role in the monopolisation of the food system. As Demarais highlights, La Vía Campesina, ‘emerged during a time when a particular model of rural development was altering rural landscapes, threatening to make local knowledge irrelevant and denigrating rural cultures.’
This common sense understanding of globalisation has been useful to galvanising a global food sovereignty movement across borders against a common enemy. This has helped to facilitate the growth of the international peasants and small farmers movement to include hundreds of millions of people. It correctly foresaw that these ‘development’ programmes were violent impositions by northern governments and corporations in pursuit of the further liberalisation of the global capitalist economy as part of neoliberal counter-revolution. At the same time small farmers, peasants and Indigenous people resisted this. Again as Desmarais makes clear, whilst ‘[t]he restructuring of the food economy necessarily involved changes in consumption, production and distribution’, traditional peasant ways persist to this day and so remain a threat to capital.
So what I want to do with this critique is not leave behind this important understanding, which large swathes of the Euro-American left could learn a lot from, but at the same time push at it to develop a new political position that takes aim at imperialism more specifically. Can we take the understanding of the process of globalisation from La Vía Campesina and push it further?
This understanding of globalisation has a more clearly anti-imperialist register when wielded by movements in the south. The reason for this is that the world economy, capitalism at a global scale, is structured in such a way that value moves from the peripheries to the imperial core. That’s not to say that farmers in Europe are not affected by the liberalisation of markets and the monopolisation of the food system. But the position of farmers in the imperial core is not the same as those in the periphery. This is why I think imperialism sharpens our understandings and globalisation tends to hinder and blunten them.
Value extraction, uneven ecological exchange, and violence
I’m still studying theories and examples of imperialism and grappling with the concept myself, but I think we can say there are three core components of how imperialism functions.
Firstly, it can be thought of as capitalism on the world scale, or as ‘the highest stage of capitalism’. Climate Vanguard describe it well as:
‘The arrangement that enables the systematic transfer of value from the Global South to the Global North, or, in other words, from the periphery to the imperial core of the capitalist world system.’
A study by Hickel et al found that in 2015 alone the global north drained $10.8 trillion USD of value from the global south. Or we could look historically. Utsa Patnaik found that Britain drained more than $45 trillion USD from India, in the period between 1765 to 1938. This wealth was crucial to funding the many genocides of the British Empire, which facilitated Britain’s rise as an imperialist superpower. Value extraction and violence are intertwined.
From these two examples we can see that wealth extraction on a global scale was fundamental to the rise of imperial empires. The modern food system is an inheritor and progenitor of imperialist dominance. For this reason, the theory of globalisation runs aground because it does not account for global power imbalances. A small farmer in Europe benefits from this system of imperialism where a small farmer in the global south is robbed.
Another way of looking at is how the title of Walter Rodney’s classic historical study puts it: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. White supremacist ideologies of civilisation and progress have been ways of explaining away and justifying the horrendous violence Europeans continue to wage against those from the African continent. In the past it was Transatlantic slavery and today it is the EU’s border externalization policy.
Neocolonialism is another way of conceptualising how value is extracted from the periphery to the imperial core. Kwame Nkrumah called this the ‘last stage of imperialism’. He explains neocolonialism as:
The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.
The methods and form of this direction can take various shapes. For example, in an extreme case the troops of the imperial power may garrison the territory of the neo-colonial State and control the government of it. More often, however, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. The neo-colonial State may be obliged to take the manufactured products of the imperialist power to the exclusion of competing products from elsewhere. Control over government policy in the neo-colonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power.
Until a country’s people are able to fully take control of their political economic processes they are still subservient to the international imperialist order. Think of how coffee producing countries are forced to export coffee beans at incredibly low prices, meaning that a coffee farmer, in Kenya, for example, may only earn $1.40 a day, whereas a cup of coffee in London may cost you three times that. The value in coffee is retained in the metropole where the processing of the beans is usually carried out. Neocolonial value extraction today is held in place through all sorts of measures such as IMF loans/debts, structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), trade blocs, free trade agreements and so on. As Ray Bush1 clearly articulated in a recent ROAPE webinar on imperialism in Africa, ‘centuries of value extraction has generated impoverishment.’
Value is also extracted into Europe through the push/pull effects of imperialism, that forces people in the global south, to come to Europe to work. The food system is again indicative of this. Cheapened superexploited workers provides the backbone of European horticulture (eg. soft fruits). There are 2.4 million migrant farm workers in European agriculture. The impoverishment of their local economies and food systems, what the La Vía Campesina critique discusses, is a big part of why they must go in pursuit of work in Europe. As are above the points re. the “underdevelopment” of Africa for European gain. A big part of imperialist capitalism is about securing cheap food that helps to keep wages lower in the imperial core, which helps to keep profits higher for all businesses. Be that the result of cheapened superexploited labour that provides the backbone of European horticulture or the cheapened tropical foods that facilitates neocolonialism. This is why the food sovereignty movement can form such a central part of anti-imperialist struggle.
Secondly, imperialism is based on and institutes uneven ecological exchange (also known as ecologically unequal exchange). This is exemplified in agriculture. Europe imports vast quantities of soya from Latin America in return for impoverishing their soils, ruining their ecosystems, and playing a role in the genocide of indigenous people. These lands becomes sacrificial waste lands. In return Europe gets cheapened soya to feed cheapened chickens and pigs2, which keeps many people fed in Europe but leads to the degradation of ecosystems here as well (think of the nitrogen crisis in the Netherlands). It is not just ecosystems that are degraded: the workers in those primary producer countries suffer the damaging health effects of agri-chemicals.
The technological development/modernisation of the global north depends upon the degradation of ecosystems across the global south in all sorts of ways, especially now under the guise of ‘green transitions’. A globally just transition would turn this on its head and focus on the demands of those who continue to be violently oppressed and exploited, as Max Ajl highlights in this interview.
Thirdly, and finally, this system is held in place with violence. Some of which has been mentioned above. This includes the border regimes, the CIA coups, anti-communist massacres, the foreign military bases, the endless wars and invasions and genocides, the militarised police forces, the economic sanctions, and so on. It is a global web of violence that ensures the extraction of value moves from south to north, or periphery to core. Capital doesn’t really circulate according to some metaphysical “compulsion”—the domination is very much personal and very much violent. The laws of the system are held in place through militarism. The US has 29 military bases in Africa. The UK uses its base in Cyprus to support the genocide in Gaza. And where there is imperialism there is always resistance. Epitomised at this time by those in Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen, who are resisting the genocidal settler colonialism of Israel and the US and its allies. This is why the global north murders anti-colonial revolutionaries.
Sivanandan, in Imperialism and Disorganic Development, talks about the effects of imperialism on peasants in the global south:
‘What it has done is to wrench them from their social relations and their relationship with the land. Within a single life-time, they have had to exchange sons (sic) for tractors and tractors for petrochemicals.’
A huge proportion of that underpaid or unpaid labour that underpins global value is carried out by racialised women (and children for that matter). And still too many so-called socialists ignore these workers because they don’t conform to the racist, masculinist imaginary of Western socialism. What Lenin called social-chauvinism: ‘socialistmin words, chauvinism in deeds’. The imaginary provided by the likes of La Vía Campesina moves us beyond the racist limitations of Western socialism. During the same ROAPE webinar mentioned above, Lyn Ossome explained why the political subject at the heart of anti-imperialism includes those racialised women in Africa, and beyond. She referenced Samir Amin’s point that imperialism is undermining its own basis of reproduction, echoing Marx and Engels’ line about capitalism’s gravediggers. Socialists have to move beyond white workerist fantasies and integrate the internationalist struggle over social reproduction.
Moving from anti-Globalisation to anti-Imperialism
I’ve tried to outline some of the specific ways that imperialism functions, in order to give some detail to the concept. Globalisation as a concept used within food sovereignty focuses our attention on the actions of transnational corporations in restructuring the global food system as part of what McMichael and Friedmann call the ‘corporate food regime.’ For decades this has been an influential and important analysis, and continues to be useful in understanding how the food and farming system works. The problem with this theorisation is that it hasn’t integrated a theory of imperialism. As such it tends to flatten our global conceptions of power. This means that the small farmer in Europe can be seen as occupying a similar position to the small farmer in say Guatemala. But they don’t. The small farmer in Europe gets to feed their animals cheapened soya and benefits from post-war welfare capitalism. We are not subject to the same push/pull dynamics of imperialism. Our European citizenship gives us a structurally superior position.
The task is still building international solidarity. The success of the food sovereignty movement, was to forge some international solidarity of small farmers and peasants. But today I think we can clearly see how this is insufficient and anti-imperialism can provide the reorientation to radicalise our idea of international solidarity beyond statements of solidarity towards actions of solidarity. Transnational corporations are but one manifestation of imperialism, of capitalism at a world scale. As it stands, they continue to grow in size and our attempts to build alternative, localised food systems doesn’t contest their power directly.
For those of us in the imperial core that will mean acts of sabotage against imperialism, like those carried out by Palestine Action in undermining Israeli arms companies. It will mean organising in solidarity with migrant farm workers and against broder imperialism and the farms that benefit from this. It does not mean acting with the likes of Ursula von der Leyen, but against her fascistic European project. “Pragmatism” and reformism will not do that.
Acting against the Mercosur free trade deal doesn’t require strengthening the position of European farmers, but weakening the position of the EU as an imperialist entity. Our strategy and tactics needs to reflect this shift. Right now, building alternative localised food systems is not really having any detrimental effect on imperialism. Even if we must still construct more rational, more humane, more ecological, more localised food and farming systems. That cannot be the extent of our work. Shopping local doesn’t defeat imperialism unfortunately.
La Vía Campesina has always understood that capitalism is the enemy. That capitalism is what oppresses small farmers and peasants across the globe. Imperialism is highest stage of capitalism. Therefore we must become anti-imperialists to truly be anti-capitalists. It will also mean breaking beyond our straight delineation of industrial vs alternative agriculture and building solidarity with workers all across the agricultural system, if we want to achieve an agroecological transition of agriculture.
The critique of globalisation from those within La Vía Campesina was an important intervention against a particular arm of imperialism. Now we must shift our focus and take aim at the core of imperialism. For those of us in the imperial core that requires a rethinking of our theory, strategy and tactics. We must find those weak links in the violent, racist, patriarchal system of imperialism. Food sovereignty requires weakening, not strengthening, Europe.
To do this we must learn from those leading the anti-imperialist struggle across the global south. Globalisation as a theory has run its useful course, the shift to an understanding of imperialism can take the movement for food sovereignty forward at a time of utmost urgency.
We cannot “alternative” our way out of imperialism. Yes we have to build something new in its place, but crucially it has to be resisted, deconstructed, and abolished. That is no small feat but as Frantz Fanon calls on us: ‘Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.’
I hope this is the correct quote, I wrote it live whilst watching so it may not be verbatim.
To be clear, this is not a critique of those farmers who do this, the constraints of capitalist economics kick in here as well. I’ve fed many pigs myself. The regime of cheap food makes it hard to feed alternative sources of protein that we could grow in our own countries. But to undermine that needs an understanding of the international system. And whilst economics are tight for farmers in the global north, this doesn’t mean we’re structurally in the same position as those in the south. And even here we must obviously bring in class — there isn’t a class undifferentiated small farmer or peasant in “the south”. These are generalisations to help have a more coherent conversation. In Latin America you get the ‘latifundios’ that dominate local workers and populations. Internal class dynamics are also important for understanding imperialism.