Tag: decolonization

Marxism, the Land, and the Global Working Class / by Matt Huber

Harvesting apricots in the village of al-Amar in Qalyubia Governorate, Egypt, on May 21, 2024. (Doaa Adel / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Solving our global ecological crises today requires understanding how capitalism has transformed humanity’s relationship to the land. Karl Marx’s thought gives us the tools to do just that

Reposted from Jacobin

When it comes to contemporary ecological and anti-colonial politics, there is perhaps no more central factor than land. The world’s most oppressed people continue to be pushed off the land, and likewise social movements have long attempted to expropriate land controlled by powerful capitalists and states. The history of twentieth-century revolution and anti-colonial movements largely hinged on land and land reform.

It is therefore vital for socialists to understand the specific relationship between capitalism and the land. For starters, capitalism emerged historically by violently tearing the vast majority of humanity from a direct reliance upon the land for survival. Like no other economic system in history, this is what capitalism does. And for most of humanity, this is a relatively recent development. Since World War II, the exodus of masses of people from rural agricultural livelihoods — what scholars call “depeasantization” — has been nothing short of astonishing. As Eric Hobsbawm described:

The most dramatic and far-reaching change of the second half of [the twentieth] century, and the one which cuts us off forever from the world of the past, is the death of the peasantry. For since the Neolithic era most human beings had lived off the land and its livestock or harvested the sea as fishers. With the exception of Britain, peasants and farmers remained a massive part of the occupied population even in industrialized countries well into the twentieth century.

In industrialized countries like the United States, this process is nearly complete: at the ratification of the US Constitution, roughly 90 percent of the population worked in agriculture; by 1910 it was 35 percent; today it is a mere 1 percent. But globally, the process has accelerated over the neoliberal period as farmers worldwide were subject to international competition due to “free-trade” regimes and structural adjustment policies. According to World Bank data, as recently as 1991, 43 percent of the global workforce still worked in agriculture, but in 2022 that number had fallen to 26 percent.

Basically every country on earth has seen a plummeting percentage of labor involved in agriculture. Only 9 percent of Brazilians worked on farms in 2022. In the most stunning transformation — the site of what some call the largest mass human migration in world history — China went from 60 percent working in agriculture in 1991 to 23 percent in 2022. Bolivia has gone from 43 to 27 percent. The only place on the planet where the record of depeasantization is uneven is sub-Saharan Africa: Angola has seen its agricultural workforce increase from 40 to 56 percent. In other countries like Burkina Faso, the peasantry has declined but still remains the large majority of the workforce, having fallen from 89 to 74 percent. Kenya has seen a modest decline from 48 to 33 percent.

What should we make of this global transformation? And what does it tell us about the prospects for ecological politics today?

Proletarians Are Landless

Marxists have a concept to describe this process: proletarianization. This is a process of expropriating the direct producers from the land and any other “means of production” so that they have to sell their labor power on the market for a wage to survive. As I argue in Climate Change as Class War, this is a profoundly “ecological” process of trading a mode of life where people depend directly on land for survival to one in which they must rely on the uncertain whims of the market. It is no surprise that peasants the world over have resisted this process as a threat to their material security rooted in the land.

For capital, proletarianization creates a massive working class to exploit — wage labor was the key source of profits, according to Karl Marx. Beyond the working class and capitalist class, this process also entrenches a “third class” of private landlords who control land and extract “rent” from workers and capitalists alike who need access to it. Many left-wing movements for secure housing come up against the landlord class as the main barrier to achieving their political goals, and environmental struggles have seen landlords on both sides of the fight.

As violent and traumatizing as land dispossession is, Marxists have historically believed it had the liberatory upshot of creating “capitalism’s gravediggers” in the working class. Friedrich Engels, in particular, argued that severing workers from the land transformed their local or parochial outlook into that of a universal class poised to achieve human emancipation: “In order to create the modern revolutionary class of the proletariat it was absolutely necessary to cut the umbilical cord which still bound the worker of the past to the land.” By bringing huge numbers of workers together in cities and factories, capitalism was creating a large mass of people with a sense of shared interests and an ability to organize to take collective action against employers and the system as a whole.

Traditionally Marxism did not advocate for the mere preservation of small-scale peasant land regimes, nor for the creation of agrarian socialist communes (Marx and Engels famously called such experiments “utopian”). Despite some efforts to claim that Marx’s late-in-life study of Russian peasant communes meant he had become a “degrowth communist,” in the first draft of his letter to the Russian populist Vera Zasulich, Marx was clear: “The commune may gradually replace fragmented agriculture with large-scale, machine assisted agriculture particularly suited to the physical configuration of Russia.”

Marxists instead proposed the proletarianized majority would seize the “means of production” in total, including the land. Vladimir Lenin, for example, criticized the Russian populist “Narodniks” who argued socialism would be founded on small-scale peasant control over land. In contrast, he argued the land must be nationalized — or, better, socialized, so workers themselves control the land rather than only the state — in a way that rationalizes agriculture, employing the modern efficient methods developed under capitalism.

The problem, of course, is that the Russian Revolution took place in a heavily rural peasant country where depeasantization had hardly commenced, and the assistance with economic development that Lenin and the Bolsheviks originally hoped would come from revolutions in the rich capitalist world never came. The question of how to industrialize and what to do with the peasantry haunted the Bolshevik leadership throughout the 1920s until Joseph Stalin chose a particularly coercive path of forced collectivization. We can hope, but only speculate, that a less violent and destructive path to industrialization might have been pursued (call it a “just transition” for the peasantry).

Marx and Engels famously predicted the gradual proletarianization of the entire global peasantry as well as small artisanal producers. For a long time, commentators could plausibly argue they were wrong as the peasantry persisted deep into the twentieth century, but no longer: we live on a nearly fully proletarianized planet. This also means that the vast majority of humanity — the working class — is profoundly alienated from the ecological conditions of our collective existence.

Land Politics and Global Ecological Crisis

This alienation often leads to eco-left political projects of reunification with the land in the form of localist experiments with alternative agriculture or community energy cooperatives. The Left has also been attached to a “livelihood environmentalism,” where ecological politics means aligning with peasant or indigenous movements defending existing land regimes from dispossession. Such movements call for food or energy “sovereignty” on different terms from capital, where local communities control their own land and resources for more localized provisioning.

These efforts to defend people’s traditional lands and livelihoods are righteous and must be supported. Yet this orientation is not particularly Marxist (if anything, contemporary ecosocialism has much more in common with the program of the Narodniks). It has never been clear how such localist or land sovereignty movements can speak to the interests of the proletarianized majority, whose survival now hinges on access to money and commodities rather than land. Under capitalism, commodity dependence means the working class relies on global networks of socialized labor: every commodity we consume is the product of thousands of workers around the world cooperating to make it possible. What socialism has meant to Marxists is abolishing private ownership and fully socializing control over an already socialized production system.

As Lenin maintained (except when delivering land to the peasants became a political necessity amid the emergency conditions after the Russian Revolution), the point of land politics was not simply to maintain localist or unalienated relations with the land, but rather to socialize the land in a way that collectively plans what society as a whole needs. This kind of socialist planning of land use would not focus only on the interests of the local communities living on the land, but also take account of the needs of the larger society for food, energy, minerals, forest products, and more. Therefore, the labor productivity or efficiency of agriculture is of crucial significance, because labor-intensive, smallholder agriculture is no basis for societal emancipation.

Of course, unlike capitalism, which subjects land to destructive capitalist profit-maximizing imperatives and the anarchy of the market, socialist planning of land use would have to remain carefully attuned to ecological constraints and the requirements of sustainability. And those living on or near lands designated for social use should have more democratic weight in collective decisions. Indigenous and peasant communities could retain control over their own land and resources and set the terms of engagement and trade with larger-scale global production systems.

The implications of this perspective for the ecological crisis are profound. What Marxism posits is a global class — the global proletariat — that has the power to wrestle an already global and socialized production system from capital and repurpose it toward the needs of all of humanity. Isn’t this actually what the ecological crisis requires? We need a species or planetary scale of social control over production so that we can both serve human needs and maintain a habitable planet.

The typical localist leftist politics of land has little capacity to solve these species-scale problems. It is easy to see how small local militant groups could seize the land and local means of subsistence around the world in little pockets, while the capitalist organization of global production remains largely intact. (Small bubbles of food sovereignty, for example, while the planet burns.) We need a planetary theory of power — and Marxism gives us one.

“Not Owners of the Earth”

Deep in Volume 3 of Capital, Marx made one of his rare remarks on what a “higher” society (i.e. socialism) would look like:

From the standpoint of a higher socioeconomic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man over other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as [good heads of household].

Socialism requires overcoming private property in land — either in capitalist form or that of the smallholder family — to build a truly socialized relationship with land. Capitalism creates a class — the working class — with the capacity not only to liberate humanity from exploitation and needless deprivation, but also to manage our collective earthbound relationship with nature on a planetary scale. The ecological left today is in dire need of this kind of internationalist vision based in global ecological stewardship.

Matt Huber is a professor of geography at Syracuse University. His latest book is Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022).

The False Equivalence of the Colonized and Colonizer / by Hamza Hamouchene

Still from The Battle of Algiers, 1965 © British Film Institute/Rialto Pictures.

Reposted from the Black Agenda Report

“By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?” – Walter Rodney

Choosing to focus on denouncing Palestinian violence is akin to asking them to passively accept their fate—to die quietly and not resist. 

Following Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel that caused more than 1,200 fatalities, there was a barrage of injunctions from Western mainstream media, politicians, and pundits insisting that anybody wishing to express an opinion on the events and the ensuing Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza, first denounce Hamas before expressing any other view. The failure to explicitly do so or any attempt to put events in their historical context or emphasize the root causes of the conflict were interpreted as condoning Hamas’s actions (that the speaker was a Hamas sympathizer) and conflated with antisemitism. 

It was as if the history of what is called the Palestinian-Israeli conflict started on October 7 and not with the 1917 Balfour Declaration that saw the colonial British government announce its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. That announcement culminated in what Palestinians and Arabs call the Nakba (the Catastrophe) in 1948, concomitant with the founding of the state of Israel through the widespread ethnic cleansing, massacres, and the displacements of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. More wars followed, more violence, more killings, and more occupation of new territories. This led to still more displacements, more illegal settlements, and more bombings, which cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and forced millions more to live as refugees. I will not dwell on this history as numerous wonderful resources have done so brilliantly. Rather, my purpose here is to draw some parallels from the history of the Algerian anticolonial struggle to show the vacuity, shortsightedness, and injustice of denouncing the violence of the oppressed/colonized and oppressor/colonizer in equal terms. The moral dilemmas, debates on violence, and disagreements around how oppressed or colonized people should resist, and what they may or may not do, are not new. 

When I think about Palestine, I cannot help but draw parallels with the case of my home country Algeria during the colonial era (1830-1962). It is no coincidence that the Algerian popular and working classes strongly support the Palestinian cause as both countries experienced/experience violent, racist settler-colonialism. To understand why, it is worth visiting Frantz Fanon’s writings and analyses about what he called “revolutionary violence” in his masterpiece The Wretched of the Earth, which he wrote based on his experiences in Algeria and West Africa in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Wretched of the Earth is a canonical text about the anticolonial struggle and served as a kind of bible for liberation struggles from Algeria to Guinea-Bissau, South Africa, Palestine, and the Black liberation movement in the US.

Fanon thoroughly described the mechanisms of violence put in place by colonialism to subjugate oppressed people. “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence,” he wrote. According to Fanon, the colonial world is a Manichean world, which, taken to its logical conclusion, “dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly it turns him into an animal.” For him, “National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”

The Algerian independence struggle against the French colonialists was among the most inspiring anti-imperialist revolutions in the 20th century. Part of the decolonization wave that began after World War II (in India, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and many African countries), the Bandung Conference declared these movements to be part of the “awakening of the South”—a South that has been subjected for decades (in some cases more than a century) to imperialist domination.

Following the November 1, 1954 declaration of war in Algeria, merciless atrocities were committed by both sides (1.5 million deaths with millions more displaced on the Algerian side, and tens of thousands dead on the French side). The National Liberation Front (FLN) leadership had a realistic appraisal of the military balance of power, which tilted heavily in favor of France, which then had the fourth-largest army in the world. The FLN strategy was inspired by the Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh’s dictum “For every nine of us killed we will kill one—in the end you will leave.” The FLN wanted to create a climate of violence and insecurity that would ultimately prove intolerable for the French, internationalize the conflict, and bring Algeria’s struggle to the attention of the world. 

Following this logic, Abane Ramdane and Larbi Ben M’hidi decided to take the guerilla warfare to urban areas and launch the Battle of Algiers in September 1956. There is perhaps no better way to appreciate this key and dramatic moment of sacrifice than the classic 1966 realist film of Gillo Pontecorvo: The Battle of Algiers. In the film, there is a dramatic moment when Colonel Mathieu, a thin disguise for the real-life General Massu, leads the captured FLN leader Larbi Ben M’Hidi into a press conference at which a journalist questions the morality of hiding bombs in women’s shopping baskets. “Don’t you think it is a bit cowardly to use women’s baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many people?” The reporter asks. Ben M’hidi replies: “And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.”

Through widespread favorable coverage of the Algerian revolution in the African-American press, many local screenings of The Battle of Algiers, as well as Fanon’s writings, Algeria came to hold a seminal place in the iconography, rhetoric, and ideology of key branches of the African-American civil rights movement, which came to see its struggle as connected to the struggles of African nations for independence.

After visiting Algeria in 1964 and the Casbah, the site of the Battle of Algiers against the French in 1956-1957, Malcom X declared: 

“The same conditions that prevailed in Algeria that forced the people, the noble people of Algeria, to resort eventually to the terrorist-type tactics that were necessary to get the monkey off their backs, those same conditions prevail today in America in every Negro community.”

A few months later, in 1965, he went on to say: 

“I don’t favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I’m also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people.”

And upon hearing of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, the Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver proclaimed:

“The war has begun. The violent phase of the black liberation struggle is here, and it will spread. From that shot, from that blood. America will be painted red. Dead bodies will litter the streets and the scenes will be reminiscent of the disgusting, terrifying, and nightmarish news reports coming out of Algeria during the height of the general violence right before the final breakdown of the French colonial regime.”

We too must challenge the victim-blaming narrative that fixates on Palestinians as imperfect victims, which in the words of the American-Palestinian scholar Noura Erakat, amounts to an “absolution of, and complicity with, Israel’s colonial domination.” In choosing to highlight Palestinian violence, our message to them “is not that they must resist more peacefully but that they cannot resist Israeli occupation and aggression at all.” 

Denouncing and singling out the violence of the oppressed and colonized is not just immoral, but racist. Colonized people have the right to resist with any means necessary, especially when all political and peaceful avenues have been stymied or obstructed. Over the past 75 years, every Palestinian attempt to negotiate a peace deal has been rebuffed and undermined. Every non-violent means has been blocked, including the “March of Return” endorsed by Hamas in 2018 (savagely repressed, with more than 200 people killed and tens of thousands wounded and maimed) as well as the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which has been made illegal in several Western countries under pressure from the Zionist lobby.

Amid a barbaric, colonial occupation, and Apartheid conditions, it would be fitting for any talk about justice and accountability for violence against civilians to start with the oppressor. As Fanon’s rationality of revolt and rebellion puts it, the oppressed revolt because they simply can’t breathe. 

Choosing to focus on denouncing Palestinian violence is akin to asking them to passively accept their fate—to die quietly and not resist. Instead, let us focus on an immediate ceasefire, halting the unfolding second Nakba, and ending the siege and the Occupation, while showing our solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for freedom, justice, and self-determination. 

Palestinian lives matter!

Originally published in Africa is A Country

Hamza Hamouchene is a London-based Algerian researcher and activist. He is currently the North Africa program coordinator at the Transnational Institute (TNI).