FOOD FIGHTS: Hunger Politics and Struggles for Autonomy & Resilience, Part II

Moderator's Note: With this guest essay we post the second in a new series on FOOD FIGHTS: Hunger Politics and Struggles for Autonomy and Resilience. The series was launched in October 2011 and examines hunger as a longstanding neoliberal capitalist political project that intentionally, and sometimes perhaps inadvertently, punishes tens of millions in the USA and a billion-plus bodies in the Two-Thirds World suffering from malnutrition, hunger, famine, and the loss and disruption of native agroecosystems, foodways, and heritage cuisines.

The political project to homogenize and control the global food system dominated by a handful of multinational corporations and powerful nation states is capitalist at its core and manifest source. This reflects the culmination of five decades of American policies that made food into political weaponry, as Harry Cleaver presciently observed way back in 1977.  

However, the series emphasizes the importance of developing a two-sided analysis that poses a dynamic tension between domination and resistance and so proposes to develop analyses of struggles against neoliberal capitalism and for the autonomy of the 99 percent.

The basic idea behind Cleaver’s 1977 article was that food is a type of political weaponry and that this became official US policy during the Nixon Administration when Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz declared that food was indeed part of the toolkit of American “diplomacy.”  Secretary Butz announced this policy in 1974 with the simple statement: “Food is a weapon.”

To continue the series, we are posting a critical analysis by our colleague and fellow blogger, Dr. Pancho McFarland on Harry Cleaver’s article, “Food, famine, and the international crisis,”  that brings the original analysis into contemporary context that also weighs in on the case for autonomy through grassroots urban agriculture.

From Weaponry to Sovereignty

by Pancho McFarland, Ph.D.

With my colleague, Dr. Devon G. Peña, I am interested in the application of the autonomia model to the study of food politics and a better understanding of the new social movements around food justice and food sovereignty. In this essay I discuss sections I and II of Cleaver’s visionary 1977 article.  Throughout, I will add my own analysis of how this might apply to our food sovereignty struggles today.

Part I: Toward a class analysis of food systems

Cleaver’s critique of left (Marxist and non-Marxist) analysis of the world food system helps sharpen our understanding of the place of urban agriculture, especially community gardens  and urban farms, in a working-class revolutionary movement.  He says that non-Marxist critiques of the food system and food crises point to the consolidation of corporate power in agribusiness.  Marxists agree but add imperialism as a central factor. 

            Cleaver forcefully argues that both critiques discount urban and rural working class consciousness, resistance and self-organization.  He writes that in both of the ‘left’ perspectives “capitalism is seen as the only active force.”  Cleaver’s addition is to show that the working-class has shaped global and national food policies through its active resistance to the ruling classes’ use of poverty and hunger as weapons in class warfare.  Working-class self-organization forces capital to reorganize. 

            Here Cleaver’s analysis of working class self-organization around food helps the contemporary food sovereignty movement build upon earlier successes and failures.  The article seeks to accomplish two things: 1) develop a class analysis of food as moments of class struggle and 2) apply this class analysis to postwar development.

Part II: Food and class struggles

Section II uses a dialectical approach to understanding food and the dominant capitalist food system.    He opens the section with the following:

To undertake a class analysis of food, one must begin with the realization that there are always two sides to the issue, two perspectives corresponding to the two basic classes in capitalist society.  Yet at the same time, the two sides are not separate but interact as aspects of interacting classes.  As each side struggles for its own ends, those struggles impinge on and force changes on the other.  For the working class, food is above all our basic consumption good—a fundamental requirement for us to live and enjoy life.  For capital, food is primarily a commodity like others, and the organization of the production and distribution of food has made agriculture a sector of capitalist industry in which people are put to work and exploited.

           

            For the capitalist, food is a commodity and a tool of control.  Through the early and ongoing enclosures the bourgeoisie appropriates common land resulting in the dispossession of people from their primary means of subsistence, culture and autonomy.  Rural people lacking a means of subsistence are urbanized, proletarianized, and controlled.  This is the nature of capital accumulation.  The remaining rural workforce is controlled “through the manipulation of land.”  Capitalists’ “control over distribution…exercised through retail outlets and prices…” provides a strategic advantage over the urban proletariat.

            At this point in Cleaver’s analysis we see how it resonates with a food sovereignty perspective.  From this perspective we believe that issues of food injustice result from capitalist control over the means of agricultural production and distribution.  These include agribusiness consolidation of land and control over the necessary inputs such as seed, pesticides, energy and machinery.   Profit-driven markets are based not on serving people through providing everyone with sufficient amounts of food but on what yields the most profit.  If people starve in the meantime, well, “that’s just the cost of doing business.”

            However, as Professor Cleaver reminds us, “the working class is not passive before capital’s possession of this power.”   Through the working classes’ centrality in the production and distribution networks we can lay claim to much of the ruling class’ power.  Historically, the working class has fought for wages, sought control over production processes and the organization of their labor, demanded lower prices, engaged in direct appropriation and looting among other strategies and tactics. 

            Capitalist relations of production pit the producing sector of the working class (rural workers) against the consumer sector (urban workers).  Consumers want quality food at a cheap price which means that rural bosses squeeze profits out of rural laborers through a less-than-subsistence-wage piece-rate system.  Cleaver points out that “the fundamental power of food for capital is the power to force the working class to work to get it.”  Even though it seems that the power of corporate agribusiness is overwhelming, we should recognize as Cleaver does that the working class has strategically used their division by fighting for wages and recomposing itself through migration.

            Currently, the work of many in the food sovereignty movement has recognized this strategy of capital and begun to develop urban-rural relationships that, in large part, bypass the circuits of capital.  Organizations in the Chicago area such as The Black Oaks Center for Sustainable and Renewable Living and the Healthy Food Hub operate in terms of communities not commodities.  They are theorizing and enacting a new organization of labor which doesn’t divide rural from urban and dissolves the distinctions between producer and consumer.

            Cleaver’s analysis continues by examining another food-based division in the working-class; that between the waged and the unwaged.  The unwaged, namely housewives and small farmers, do a significant amount of work that allows the capitalist food system to function as well as the working classes to survive.  The non-waged female sector of the working class has resisted their exploitation of their labor through entities such as the Wages for Housework movement.   Peasants, too, are vulnerable since the power imbalance between them and the capitalists controlling distribution networks forces peasants into a semi-waged state in which they are forced to sell their labor power to the ruling classes through the production of agricultural commodities sold on a market controlled by capital.  They, too, resist periodically.

            The unwaged, like the waged, sectors of the working class use their marginal power and disadvantage as a strategy against capital.  Cleaver explains that:

The experience of recent years in both urban and rural areas has demonstrated that the unwaged often indeed make themselves not available for work.  In fact, this unavailability (for waged work) became one of the key elements of the crisis of capital in the 1960s as blacks, women, and students in the West turned to rebellion instead of jobs, and peasants in many countries undertook guerrilla warfare rather than present themselves to capital for development.

            I want to posit here that retaking our labor power and our very bodies from capital through the self-edifying, unalienated labor of community and backyard gardening can be undertaken through an ethic of the ‘rejection of waged work.”  Capital would be forced to reorganize or otherwise attempt to regain control of the two most important functions of the proletariat (at least as they see it): 1) its labor power to produce commodities that can then be sold for a profit and 2) its consumer power.  If workers don’t buy commodities at prices above the wages paid for the labor to make the commodity, then capital loses profit.  If workers refuse to work, that is, make commodities for the benefit of owners, then the bosses have nothing to sell. 

            The development of a local food economy that includes all sectors of the working class as common and sovereign owners of the land and agricultural resources takes away capital’s strategic advantage.   We reject its imposed, alienated conditions of labor and its control over commodity distribution, especially prices.  We now gain control over the most important thing: our means of subsistence.  Mass exodus from the labor force for control over a sovereign local food system begins to make capital obsolete. 

            I believe that this worker self-organized activity along with the ecological limits of the planet will likely usher in a post-capitalist era.  The questions are: What will this post-capitalist era look like?  How will the working-classes mold this new era?

            Cleaver’s lessons for an anti-authoritarian food sovereignty movement and a post-capitalist worker-organized society don’t stop here.  He continues his critique of the leftist analysis of “students of imperialism [who] see only capital moving in the world.”  He instructs that “We must see the international character of the working class and the circulation of its struggles for more, better and varied food.”  The food sovereignty movement is international in scope.  International discussions and transnational struggle against capitalism and for a truly democratic future are as important to working class strategies as are the locally organized and focused food economy strategies of community gardens, new rural-urban relations and the dissolution of the producer-consumer distinction within the working class.

            La Vía Campesina has been at the forefront of international cooperation around food sovereignty.  The hard work of member organizations and individuals has caused many of us to look to their lead in theorizing and implementing food sovereignty ideas, strategies and tactics.  They are explicit in their international character.  Their website describes the organization this way:

La Vía Campesina comprises about 150 local and national organizations in 70 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas.  Altogether, it represents about 200 million farmers.  It is an autonomous, pluralist and multicultural movement, independent from any political, economic or other type of affiliation.  (www.viacampesina.org).

            Numerous examples of the transnational character of the working class and international alliance building exist.  Other recent high profile moments of international working class struggle against capital and its food system include The Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil and the Zapatistas of Mexico.  While each of these examples is unique and place-based, they have enjoyed international support from wide sectors of the working class and have taken pains to view their struggle from an international perspective.  They are both locally-focused and internationally engaged.  Careful attention to each of these movements can provide important lessons to our work in food sovereignty especially in the areas of food justice in urban settings.

            Cleaver ends section II of his work by describing three important periods in the struggle over food between capital and workers.  The rest of the work examines in detail each of these important moments.  He ends the study with a summary of lessons a working-class orientation toward food might have to teach us in future struggles around food.  Subsequent blog entries will address these aspects of Cleaver’s analysis.