The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements

By Sandor Katz

Pgs 79-81

Without access to land, people cannot possibly create or otherwise obtain food. Security and survival depend upon access to physical, outdoor space: farmland, grazing meadows, foraging and hunting ranges, and shorelines for fishing. Unfortunately, getting such access is very often a struggle in itself. The histories of patriarchy, capitalism, racism, colonialism, and many other forms of oppression are long sagas in which people have been systematically torn from the specific ecological niches that previously sustained them, the unique places that are the basis of culture and its glorious diversity.

The earth is our mother. We all come from the mother, and to her we shall return. We are of the earth; it is absurd to imagine that we can “own” it, even in small pieces. And yet the earth has been divvied up as private property.

Property is a legal concept, a cultural production, not an intrinsic quality of land. Notions of what can be privatized as “property” seem to be infinitely expansive: land is privatized; seeds and genes are privatized; and even water is privatized (see chapter 10).

My old friend Bill Dobbs used to say, “Real estate determines culture.” He was generally describing urban phenomena and offering a materialist analysis for cultural trends, but I think of his words often in relation to our food system. Real estate determines culture when indigenous peoples, carrying on age-old subsistence lifestyles connected to the land where they live, are supplanted by land ownership. Real estate determines culture when productive small farms are forced to sell their land because their modest agricultural earnings simply cannot keep pace with rising property-tax rates and competing demands for golf courses, malls, and subdivisions. Real estate determines culture when urban community gardens, which brought vitality and activity to their neighborhoods, are doomed by their successes and auctioned off to the highest bidder.

The social construct we revere as “the logic of the market” doesn’t do a very good job of taking care of the land or of meeting most peoples’ needs. When real estate is allowed to determine culture, that culture is an expression of domination. Culture needs to be liberated from real estate, and liberation movements everywhere have the reclamation of land as a central goal. “Revolution is based on land,” wrote MalcolmX in his 1963 “Message to the Grassroots” speech. “Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.”

The “commons” is an ancient tradition of land shared as a community resource, and what few commons remain are shrinking fast. In Britain the commons were privatized beginning in the mid-1600s, in four thousand individual “Acts of Enclosure,” culminating in the Great Enclosure Act of 1845.

The enclosures literally starved many people, peasant farmers who historically had depended on common land for their food. This harsh reality rapidly transformed the formerly landbound peasantry into cheap factory labor and facilitated the Industrial Revolution. The Diggers and the Levellers were two resistance movements that took down the enclosure fences as the landlords erected them. A Leveller tract of 1649 declared:

The Work we are going about is this, To dig up Georges-Hilland the waste Ground thereabouts, and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows. And the First Reason is this, That we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to the Reason that rules in the Creation.2

This process of land privatization has been repeated around the world, as have movements of resistance to it.

“This continual struggle shows that the current inequitable distribution of land and housing, though widely accepted by elected governments and even public opinion worldwide, is strongly disputed on an operational level by people with the short end of the stick,” writes Anders Corr in NoTrespassing: Squatting, Rent Strikes and Land Struggles Worldwide.

This chapter looks at movements struggling to retain and reclaimland for growing food. These activists include small-scale farmerssearching for strategies that will enable them to hold onto their land,urban community gardeners reclaiming abandoned lots in their neighborhoods,and liberation movements taking land redistribution intotheir own hands, such as Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST),settling hundreds of thousands of people on unused large agriculturalholdings. This chapter also looks at some activist movements defined bytheir separation from land, such as landless farm workers organizing forliving wages and safe working conditions.