Winning justice in agriculture will require us to continue the multi-generational struggle for real freedom.

The present injustices of American agriculture have deep roots that reach back to the founding violence of colonization and nation-building. Paying attention to these roots not only helps to clarify what it will take to win justice on the land; it also anchors our movements’ current fights in the longer arc of struggles over land and labor. These movement traditions have long held that winning real freedom will require remaking US society on a radically more egalitarian and life-affirming basis.¹

Agriculture has always been a front line in the US nation-building project, and its story must be told through overlapping histories that gave birth to different forms of racism and racial violence. One history is that of European settlement, making genocidal war on Native peoples and stealing their land.² A second is that of chattel slavery, white supremacy, and the Southern plantation economy.³ A third is that of immigration policy, borders, and industrial farm employers’ continuing quest for control over their workers after the end of slavery.⁴ Through all of these histories run parallel threads of patriarchy, misogyny, and gender oppression. 

In each of these cases, Euro-Americans used violence and exploitation to secure others’ land and labor on the cheap, using ideas about race and difference to justify their actions. While most of the people who participated in this bonanza did not keep hold of the profits and were themselves exploited in turn, white men had citizenship, status, and—at least sometimes—property that offered them certain advantages and a modicum of economic security.⁵ The collective efforts of these unequal groups of workers produced super-profits for capitalists that were reinvested over and over again in new enterprises—agriculture, industry, trade, and finance—building a global superpower in the process.⁶ The various twists and turns that history took along the way were often guided by entrepreneurs’ endless search for more exploitable labor, cheaper resources, and bigger returns, with little regard for the human or environmental costs.⁷

The flip side of that wealth is a country wracked by “racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.”⁸ Compared with other industrialized nations, the wealthiest country in the world has some of the worst health outcomes and life expectancy, highest rates of poverty, and highest rates of violence; these harms fall heaviest on Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, as well as women and queer folks.⁹ These conditions are not just legacies of the past—they are actively maintained in the present by a multitude of laws and institutions put in place to enable profits for a few at the expense of the many.¹⁰ This includes a system of minority rule that allows white supremacist regimes in the Southern states to block or weaken popular reforms. It includes some of the weakest labor laws among industrial nations, laws that exclude farm and domestic workers from basic rights and—through the giant loophole of ‘at will’ employment—make all workers subject to the whims and retaliations of employers.¹¹ It includes a massive police and prison state that cages more people than almost any other nation, predominantly poor people and people of color.¹² It includes a vast, militarized border policing complex that terrorizes communities across the country—a massive subsidy to employers who want their workers as powerless as possible.¹³ It includes the overriding power of corporations across many domains: in labor markets that offer poverty wages and precarious work; in commodity markets that wring every drop of value out of small producers and households; and in markets for housing and health care that mine basic human needs for profit.

All these institutions combine to immiserate regular people across our society—especially people of color and low-income folks—and the effects on farm people are severe. Industrial agriculture has depopulated, polluted, and impoverished farm communities.¹⁴ It has driven farmers from the land—especially farmers of color—and forced immigrant workers into hiding and constant movement.¹⁵ More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, industrial agriculture has effectively spread the Old South’s racialized hierarchy of farm labor across the nation, so that today the vast majority of farm owners, managers, and supervisors are white, while manual laborers are overwhelmingly people of color—in large part immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.¹⁶ In a sense, our present situation represents a victory for Southern defenders of slavery, who in the nineteenth century claimed that “agricultural labor is the most arduous, least respectable, and worst paid of all labor” and predicted that “free society” would always be “dependent for its food and clothing on slave society.”¹⁷ From the cotton plantations of Mississippi to the vegetable farms of California, Florida, and Mexico, industrial agriculture has made this prophecy come true, as farm work today remains one of the most dangerous, most precarious, and worst paid of occupations. Our food system relies on various forms of compulsion to ensure that vulnerable people do this essential work.¹⁸ Yet this industrialization has not only degraded the lives of farm workers and farmers of color: it has rendered all farm owners subject to ruthless competition, hollowing out the middle class of farmers whose circumstances had once been relatively stable, forcing many farmers to exploit themselves and their families just to hold onto their land.¹⁹ Our society has devalued farming and the people who do it, with terrible results.

Despite these dire conditions, we also inherit traditions of unceasing struggle. For sustained periods, organized labor and populist farmer movements have waged courageous battles against domination by corporate capital. At their best moments, led by their left flank, they acted in solidarity across lines of race, ethnicity, and gender; but far too often white supremacy and patriarchy hobbled these groups’ vision and power.²⁰ Against such failures of solidarity, movements have put forward visions of a radical freedom not premised on the subjugation of others.²¹ The Black freedom struggle especially has “harbored a deep vision, a dream of a democratic social order with unfettered access to political, economic and social rights, regardless of race, gender and class.”²² When oppressive institutions and reactionary backlash have repeatedly blocked African Americans’ demands for basic human dignity, the freedom movement’s diagnosis has been clear: our society’s flaws are “systemic rather than superficial,” and “radical reconstruction” of our laws and institutions is necessary.²³ In Manning Marable’s words, “Racism and capitalist exploitation have been, and remain, the logical and consistent byproducts of the American political economy,” and if we want different results, we need to transfer “power to those members of society who generate all wealth.” ²⁴

This perspective is crucial for farm movement strategy today. To borrow a metaphor, it is not enough to play within the rules of the racial capitalist ‘game’: winning durable justice will require us to change the game itself.²⁵ That is exactly what movements did in the Reconstruction, New Deal, and Civil Rights (or “Second Reconstruction”) periods.²⁶ We owe many of the rights and public goods we have today to their efforts, hard won in the face of fierce opposition. Yet the same reactionary backlash that cut short their victories in earlier periods has now captured much of the federal government and many state-level governments, and they are working to roll back basic rights to pre-Civil War levels.²⁷ 

Today our movements must carry forward our ancestors’ “unfinished revolutions,” articulating our own demands for freedom tailored to present conditions.²⁸ We need a Third Reconstruction that reinforces past wins and also goes further, undoing oppressive laws and institutions that have arisen in our own time. The path to a Third Reconstruction is daunting yet within reach. Past movements overcame the slow pace of reform not just because they were visionary or brave but also because they were big, organized, and strategic in their actions, taking advantage of the opportunities that history provided them. Our movements today are not there yet, but this moment of many crises presents an opportunity for growing in each of those ways.

We believe that farm people have an essential role to play in this work. The next phase of our long struggle for freedom and dignity raises issues that most people—including many farm folks—have barely considered yet. Farm people need to flesh out a vision for reconstruction in agriculture and bridge our fights to those of our movement allies more widely. At this moment, as communities across the country witness the brutality of immigration enforcement, many people will be newly open to abolishing the border policing complex which is the keystone of farmworkers’ oppression.²⁹ But to abolish it in any meaningful, lasting way we need a broad effort to address both the racism and the economic precarity that makes scapegoating of immigrants such effective political theater, propelling the rise of figures like Donald Trump. We need to address the fact that corporations (especially industrial agriculture) are literally invested in the border as a tool for worker repression and imperialist exploitation. And in addition to labor justice, we need to bring people into a vision for food sovereignty: we need a program to replace industrial agriculture with agroecology and remake our relationship to the land.³⁰ This work will require centering not just the Black freedom struggle but also Indigenous and peasant movements; it will require solidarity with immigrants in the US and people across the Global South. 

These goals may feel formidable compared with the weak state of farm movements in the US, but that’s why we need to expand our framework and grow our coalitions. Politicians and bureaucrats will not save us; there is no reform proposal to match the scale of the problems we face. It’s our responsibility, arm in arm with our peasant farmer allies around the globe, to bring people into a vision for justice on the land—and work towards it with all we’ve got.