Land and the US Agrarian South

Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. UNC Press, 2018, 208 pp., US$27.95 (Hardback). ISBN: 9781469643700.

Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover (Eds.), Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health. University of Oklahoma Press, 2019, 465 pp., US$29.95 (Paperback). ISBN: 9780806165462.

Edward Onaci, Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a BlackNation-State. UNC Press, 2020, XX + 296 pp., US$90 (Hardback). ISBN: 9781469656168.

In a fundraising call for the Freedom Farm Cooperative—the great achievement of the organic intellectual Fannie Lou Hamer and countless comrades—the Black radical actor Harry Belafonte beseeched readers to support ‘Americans whose living standard is as low as that of the peasants of the underdeveloped world’ (cited in White, 2018, p. 83). He was referring to the punishing conditions in the Mississippi Black Belt. Similarly, Indigenous scholar George Manuel (2019) coined the term, ‘the Fourth World’ to describe Indigenous populations in the USA, Canada and elsewhere who had not consummated their right to self-determination during the worldwide wave of decolonization. Throughout the twentieth century, settler-capitalism and racism spurred such comparisons amongst their victims. In the USA, within Black and Indigenous populations, theories of internal colonialism and national repression have emerged to describe the practice of the US state (Pinderhughes, 2009). ¹ And struggles, in turn, took on the timbre of national liberation, freeing the development of the domestic forces of production from the imperialist grip. Most particularly, this meant control of the land: as the foundation for safe and secure political entities, as the primary resource for social reproduction, as a home, or as something with which to be in relationship as the basis of life. For portions of the Black movement, this meant freeing the land. For the Indigenous movement, this meant self-determination.

Such movements arose in a moment illuminated by the worldwide high noon of national liberation movements. Their heat seemed to be melting shackles the world over. Now, although there is much talk of decolonization and an international push for food sovereignty within nationalist, neo-colonial and settler-colonial states alike, there has been little digging into the rich seam of thought and practice around Black sustainable agriculture, self-reliant economic development through farming and national liberation, nor much attention to food sovereignty as resistance amongst Indigenous communities. ²

With the publication of Edward Onaci’s Free the Land, on the history of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa, the major Black nationalist organization of the 1960s–1980s, Monica White’s Freedom Farmers—each published by the quietly dedicated University of North Carolina Press, which has documented some of the Western hemisphere’s most important anti-racist struggles—and Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover’s Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States, the remediation of this lack has advanced. US-based struggles for food, land and liberation, social reproduction, their history and future and their epistemological and political challenges to liberal or Eurocentric notions of food justice or assimilationist political struggle have re-emerged in force in the scholarly field.

White first shows how central agriculture and rural well-being were to black intellectuals at the turn of the century Black intellectuals. For example, it is severely under-known, in part due to the racist process of disciplinary formation called ‘canonization’, that W. E. B. Du Bois was a pioneer in US sociology, studying alongside and influencing Max Weber while the two were colleagues in Berlin. As White shows, Du Bois turned his eye to Black rural poverty in the USA. He also studied the history of Black economic cooperation, establishing how Black rural people were not merely victims of the slave trade and sharecropping extraction, but subjects interlaced as consumers and producers in resistance economies. These exchanges were tightly stitched together with threads of social meaning and accountability, far tighter than the jaggedly stitched monopoly capitalist market society. Another figure in White’s epistemic foundation-building for Black agrarian scholarship was George Washington Carver, who produced studies on how to forage for food crops, enrich soil denuded by monocrops and appropriately rotate crops. He was interested in the modern agrarian question of food: how to ensure that hungry and malnourished people could have enough, and more importantly, good enough food. Both were also popular educators, ensuring knowledge did not remain cloistered but went out to the people.

On this base, having done the intellectual spadework to unearth an in-part deliberately buried genealogy of Black agronomy and rural sociology—although at least some comment on Du Bois’s internationalist anti-colonialism would have been welcome—White details efforts towards economic institution-building in the US South, especially those that occurred during the Civil Rights Movement. Struggles for material self-determination are inseparable from struggles for political equality. Southern farmsteads were crucial sanctuaries for voting rights activists and organizers across the enemy territory of the South, where white supremacist terror was a frequent spectre. People needed to hold space to organize for their de jure inclusion in US political institutions.

White focusses much more, however, on the effort by Hamer to build up the Freedom Farm Cooperative, which at its peak enfolded hundreds of acres and hundreds of farmers. These farms had multiple goals. They were, first, a way for poor and overwhelmingly Black people to reclaim control over their lives. They were a means to pool resources. Hamer saw that White power used economic leverage, such as the owner–renter or employer–domestic help relationship, to disrupt political organizing. If people were to vote, they would starve. Thus, they needed food. So they created integrated farms: access to pigs meant access to meat, which was crucial for families suffering from protein deficiencies.

The project went beyond farming, and helped its denizens improve their housing conditions and their educational levels, as well as increase access to medical and dental care. Through Head Start, they accessed government funds, funneling them to community-controlled economic development. They also sutured country and city, sending surplus to needy families in Chicago—reminiscent of contemporary efforts to weave together country and city in Brazil through the Landless Worker’s Movement’s ties with the Fome Zero programme within Brazil’s poorest cities (Chappell, 2018). Finally, Freedom Farms moved up the value chain. Sewing cooperatives were part of its overall economic empowerment mission. White also charts efforts by other cooperatives in Mississippi to incorporate secondary processing and bulk purchasing of inputs and sales. They resisted monopoly control of the value chain, expanding the amount of surplus value locked in locally. As with the Freedom Farms, other such cooperatives faced boycotts and, in effect, economic sanctions through the withdrawal of funding lines. In each case, we see the politicization of economics, the narrowness of purely economic measures of imperialism and the white supremacist monopoly capitalism to which it is welded and the role of racial ideology and the colour line in demarcating which sectors of the population might be included within a world system that, even in its domestic core, has been based on exclusion, unevenness and polarization.

White also brings forward the activity and thinking of women organizers, showing how they paid attention to gender contradictions in ways that did not appear in the pioneering rural sociology and popular agronomy of Carver and Du Bois. In focusing on the specific organizational and productive roles of women in Black economic power-building, White’s Freedom Farms traces a through-line of Black self-determination through economic empowerment—not through a narrowly meritocratic or exclusivist notion of progress and advancement but through democratic access to, and control over, land and life, and the central role of women therein.

Onaci’s Free the Land offers, in turn, an account of an important period in US Black history when the scope of possibilities was as wide as the sky. He reconstructs the history of this movement and shows how the golden age of Black revolutionary nationalism combined demands that are now often conceived in isolation or with their radical edge blunted: the link between territory, self-determination and national liberation; the history of Black people as a captive nation in the USA, illegally and against their will brought over to the US landmass; the economic value accrued by the slave trade and plantation capitalism, and questions concerning to whom was due that historical surplus value; the violent origins of the US state, sitting itself on stolen native land; and reparations to return to the Black community its contribution to US primary capital accumulation.

The Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika was born in Detroit, Michigan. In that state, a Black working class was displaced from farming in the South, in part by the mechanization of agriculture and in part because they had been renters or labourers and not owners of the land. They were a central element in working-class rebellion and revolutionary organizing in the city, and the core of a movement for national control over land—a long-lasting through-line in Black anti-systemic struggle, traceable at least to the Communist Party’s Black Belt theory and in the thinking of former leader Chokwe Lumumba, back to the maroon communities of runaway slaves in the 1700s. Detroit concentrated a Black population dislocated from the southern countryside through the ‘advance’ of the productive forces in the White capitalist rural sector, combined with highly unequal access to land—a process reminiscent of what Araghi (1995) calls ‘global depeasantization’, through which Third World cities and urban populations swelled throughout the post-WWII developmentalist and post-development neoliberal periods of global accumulation.

In 1968, a roster of Black radicals and organizations lent their names and credibility to the formation of the Provisional Government (PG) of the Republic of New Afrika. The PG saw national liberation as part of a global struggle to destroy imperialism and capitalism. By lopping off a large chunk of the US landmass, they would weaken US imperialism, giving their struggle a revolutionary and anti-imperialist edge.

Their tacking to and fro in the choppy legal waters of being captive and subject nations was part of their uneven political course. Legally, they leaned on UN resolutions and US lawmaking that had anointed as post facto legal the violent primitive accumulations the USA had committed as it faced and marched south and west from its original 13 settler-colonies. Politically, they conceived of themselves as captive nations, engaged in a liberation war, and demanded recognition as prisoners of war. Economically, they built up embryonic infrastructure, understanding that political claims to sovereignty needed power that did not merely flow from the barrel of a gun but from the point of a plough or the gears of a factory.

The rise and fall of the PG-RNA paralleled the rise and fall of the global revolution within which this struggle seemed possible. Onaci chronicles state disruption, imprisonment and economic sanctions as hammering and tearing at the social and political fabric of the organization, as the counterintelligence programme (COINTELPRO) sought domestically what the Jakarta Method of global anti-communist insurgency and bloodbath sought abroad, dousing anti-systemic experiments in blood (Bevins, 2020).

The book also offers insight into contemporary questions of debt and repair through its research on reparations. Onaci shows how national liberation, whose human agents were the Black working-class and lumpen-proletariat, was inseparable from an economic base. Such resources were to be repayment for centuries of enslavement, war damage and economic exploitation—the labour that had been a central source of primary capital accumulation and contributed significantly to US wealth. Their call for US$300 billion was roughly equivalent to the white–Black wealth gap. Such a redistribution would have undermined the uneven accumulation of wealth along racialized lines, which is the calling card of capitalism. Indeed, calls for reparations continue today, and are a possible convergence point with kindred calls from the broader agrarian south for ecological and climate debt payments (People’s Agreement of Cochabamba, 2010).

Furthermore, another parallel with Third World agrarian struggles was the place of land: as the basis for liberation and the object and relationship through which liberation was to be achieved. Agriculture was central to the PG’s thinking about economic development. They found the Tanzanian notion of Ujamaa striking—it informed their doctrines as they oriented away from the capitalistic accumulation of wealth. That borrowing was part of a broader internationalism. Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana was an important ideological influence and progenitor. And at least in the early stages of the PG, Cuban solidarity was important in building up a wide front of national liberation struggles. Along similar lines, as a Black captive nation which did not regard the US government as legitimate, they accepted the prior territorial claims of the Indigenous people of North America, a particularly thorny subject given that, as captive nations, they needed land to be a free nation.

If land was the essential basis for liberated life for the Black captive nation, Mihesuah and Hoover’s edited book offers a way of re-thinking land in a way bound to an anti-colonial and often, but not always, anti-capitalist cosmology that antedates, endures amidst and is a logical basis for transcending US settler-capitalism. As they write, the issue is not merely rights to land and food, but one of ‘culturally, ecologically and spiritually’ appropriate relationships to territory and food (p. 11). Reminiscent of Amilcar Cabral’s insistence that national liberation is an act of culture, the authors in this collection return again and again to the touchstone that ‘cultural restoration is imperative’ (p. 12). Similarly, Latin American food sovereignty, often rooted in South American and Meso-American Indigenous movements, has had its own cosmology and a complicated but productive relationship between material demands for land and loans, political scaling-up based on parties and movements and ideological consolidation based on a dialogo de saberes (Martínez-Torres & Rosset, 2014).

In place after place, cosmology is central, not merely as embryonic resistance, as in Fanon’s notion of culture as the repository of freedom dreams, but as something much more material. Cosmology, as with any ideology, is a cognitive map of a social terrain. The Hopi origin story, as told in Dennis Wall and Virgin Masayesva’s ‘People of the Corn’ (Chapter 9), is about a Guardian Spirit placing an ear of blue corn in their hands, and then a story about sowing the corn. The idea is inextricably linked to, and serves as an instruction for, agricultural-material practice.

A second aspect of Indigenous food sovereignty emerges from seeing food as a multi-scaled vector for settler-colonial attack. Landless or land-limited and colonized communities were not merely displaced from land but from holistic ways of being in the world. Replacing the enormous nutritional diversity, from bison to acorns to fish to elderberry, with a variety of settler foods which went alongside deracination and later processed foods—much like the PL-480 Food for Peace replacement of barley and durum and olive oils with soft wheat and soy oil across North Africa (Ajl, 2019, pp. 286–359)—induced two harms. One, Indigenous communities have the worst health outcomes in the entire USA. In places, one-third of the population is saddled with diabetes or obesity. As Melanie Lindholm writes in ‘Alaska Native Perceptions of Food, Health, and Community Well-being’ (Chapter 5), this is a form of ‘cultural genocide’ and ‘nutritional colonialism’. When food ceases to exist, so does the people as a corporate group, states another interviewee in Wall and Masayesva’s chapter. On the other, this creates dependence: ‘food can be, and is, used as a weapon,’ states Milo Yellowhair, one of Hoover’s interviewees (Chapter 2), placing people under external control, a recurring theme.

It follows that that a turning inwards, towards self-reliance (Ajl, 2021b), through what Samir Amin (1990) called delinking, is a component of the struggle for sovereignty, rooted in the ability to feed one’s self, and keeping dollars, or value, circulating within tribal communities rather than letting them seep out. Seeds are central to this cosmology and material practice of resistance, not merely as ecologically appropriate landrace seed-stock, but to reclaim the alienated relationship of seed purchase from a conglomerate and restoring the relationship with and through seed to intergenerational community preservation.

Finally, technological and epistemological aspects of Indigenous food sovereignty merit highlighting. One appears in Gerald Clarke’s ‘Bringing the Past to the Present’ (Chapter 11): a re-definition of what counts as farming. Pre-colonial California was a manicured landscape, blanketed with acorn trees, pastures and coppices and other materials for weaving. It was ‘one big farm’, upsetting notions of pristine or virgin wilderness, ideologies of terra nulius and economistic perspectives on development. Such notions overlook how pre-colonial patterns of farming and land management were potentially highly productive and had the even greater merit of not having required genocide and later a second round of genocide and ecocide through fossil capitalism as the basis for accumulating use-values.

Devon G. Pena’s ‘On Intimacy with Soils’ (Chapter 12) likewise lifts up a dazzling set of agro-ecological and infinitely sustainable techniques that prefigured what Euro-American liberal regenerative agriculture calls ‘biodynamic’. From the incredibly fruitful chinampas, or floating gardens, of Mexico City—some statistics on their production per hectare and person hour would have been helpful in this chapter—to Meso and North American milpas, or polycultures that overproduce due to synergies between various crops, and to the charcoal-enriched Amazonian terra preta, pre-contact and enduring agricultural techniques offer an epistemological counter-punch to the ‘settler colonial sustainable agriculture’ movement. Furthermore, emergent disciplines of ethnoedaphology (or Indigenous models of ecosystem processes in soil); ethnopedology (or Indigenous classifications of soils); and ethnobotany (the Indigenous knowledge of the soil biodynamic, nutritional and medicinal properties of plants) highlight other modes of knowledge production, which went hand-in-hand with Indigenous farming. Kevin K. J. Chang and others’ ‘Kua’A’Ina Ulu ‘Auamo’ (Chapter 4) shows how the Hawaiian archipelago used to have a form of pond-based fish farming riding coastal and tidal cycles, nested into a food network strong and flexible enough to feed a population nearly as large as modern-day Hawaii’s, using biocultural community resource management. At that time, upland and lowland zones interacted. Forests captured fog and rainwater, and seabirds brought phosphorus in the form of excrement to the uplands. Their chronicle of the near loss of this form of life also tallies the cost of converting the island chain, first, into a pineapple monoculture plantation, and then into a site for the military and tourism, imperialist and neo-colonial economic sectors par excellence. Thus, the fight for de-colonization is in equal measure a fight to regain control over the islands’ productive forces, to restore the health of the native population, and to return to—not to create ex nihilo—an ‘abundant, productive ecological system’ (p. 127).

Finally, Kyle Powys Whyte’s ‘Indigenous Climate Justice and Food Sovereignty’ (Chapter 14) puts food front and centre when discussing how Indigenous movements for climate justice focus on food as a ‘vector’ for the ties between justice and environmental change (p. 321). He makes clear that climate change is registered if not first, certainly with devastating ferocity, in the erasure of the physical, biological and ecological relationships which are the basis for Indigenous foodways: decreased moose movements in the Great Lakes area, for example. Preserving foodways, ecological and economic systems are three glosses on the same process. Furthermore, the chapter notes, quoting Inuit activists Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s comment that ‘Climate change is yet another rapid assault on our way of life. It cannot be separated from the first waves of changes and assaults at the very core of the human spirit that has come our way’ (p. 323). This is a reminder that economic or productivist plans, focussed on technological advancement or the chimerical ‘prosperity’ of Western capitalism which overlook the genocidal primitive accumulation at capital’s heart and pulse, cannot be part of the diagnosis or remedy for climate change (Ajl, 2021a).

In equal measure, they bring our attention to the need to take stock of alternate knowledge systems, to not reduce struggles for liberation to economic measures of well-being or production, or to reduce or sidestep political struggle, especially over land, through recourse to chimerical incantations of ‘progress’ or ‘inclusion’. Indeed, each puts the question of politics at the forefront of these national-agrarian questions—showing how self-determination, liberation, reparations and decolonization take shape as a challenge to the settler-colonial and racist US empire.

Although this is not their framing, I would further suggest that the three books combined make the case for putting the US’s captive, colonized, and dependent nations, its Black population and its Fourth World, side-by-side with fights for freedom and land in Zimbabwe, Cuba and India. This is not a deduction from homologous insertion into accumulation on a world scale, as implied by the internal colonialism thesis (Harris, 1972). This has far more to do with the specific centrality of the agrarian question in Black (Rickford, 2017) and Indigenous anti-systemic politics, although not necessarily framed exactly as such. Black and Indigenous struggles have often situated themselves within a national liberation framework shared with the classical agrarian South, one often explicitly invoked. The radical wing of the US Indigenous movement, for example, looked to Maoist China and Tanzania’s Arusha Declaration as parallel struggles for self-determination and sovereignty (Coulthard & Manuel, 2019). And the Black movement, although it developed a national edge well before the influence of Communist thought (Pinderhughes, 2009, pp. 16–19), also drew on Lenin and Stalin’s work on the national and colonial questions (Iborra-Mallent & Montañez-Pico, 2020). Indeed, Lenin himself had explicitly called for exposing how democratic capitalist countries committed the ‘constant violation of the…guaranteed rights of national minorities’, and, furthermore, called on Communist parties to give direct aid to ‘revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations’, amongst which he included Black people in the USA (Lenin, 1920). And the Black Panthers drew on Fanon and Mao (Carmichael, 2007), while Malcolm X’s internationalist experiences helped him see the centrality of land and nation to liberation. Of equal significance, it has often been the work of Black and Indigenous individuals and movements that has forced the question of internationalism on the US left (The Red Nation, 2021; Von Eschen, 1997). ³

The precise texture of their demands and what would have happened had they succeeded is also critical. The agrarian question of national liberation (Cabral, 1979) meant reducing the physical land mass, which is a source of wealth and the physical foundation of imperialism. Through conscious economic planning, resources, including land and labour, would be put to the use of the oppressed rather than alchemized into value for the ruling class. Had such struggles been victorious, it would have cut into the size and strength of the settler capitalist republic, directly undermining imperialism and directly serving the cause of global working people.

In following the trajectories of some of the Black and Indigenous movements, past and present, their ways of conceptualizing their own national and agrarian questions, and furthermore their emphasis on the agrarian question of gender as central to provisioning and reproduction of life (Ossome & Naidu, 2021), a contribution particularly brought out in White and Onaci’s books, we see other analogies as well. In the apex periods of domestic counterinsurgency in the USA, they faced the sharpest edge of domestic counterinsurgency (Burden-Stelly, 2019). The scale of repression was distinct from that faced by imperial core white middle classes with full access to citizenship in the US republic. Of course, an analogy is not quite an analogue. It is critical to acknowledge difference. Methods of repression were less intense compared to Third World genocidal counterinsurgency (Kolko, 1986). Still, precisely when such ‘domestic’ political-social forces sought not inclusion but national liberation, often informed by Marxism, which would inevitably weaken the settler empire by reducing its land base and by demanding reparations for the primary accumulation upon which US imperialism lived and grew, they faced severe COINTELPRO disruption, rising to outright murder. And the Black liberation movement’s prisoners are still locked up in the US prison archipelago.

Through these books, the social agents, past and present, who pose the contemporary North Atlantic agrarian question come into view: a need for widespread agrarian reform and ecological reconstruction, and ceasing of labour and land imports from the South via food imports (Patnaik, 2015). These fuse with a ‘domestic’ national liberation aspect. Such struggles have, furthermore, often stitched together the North and South in an international front, chipping away at Eurocentrism within the working classes of the core. In this way, the three books dispel the epistemological and methodological bases of liberal or Western Marxist approaches to the agrarian question, or food sovereignty, or food justice in the imperial core (Jha et al., 2020; Moyo et al., 2013). These books, then, provide invaluable insight into the history and present of food, land and agrarian struggles within, if also against, the USA itself.