Gabriel Noah Brahm: In early 2009, when The Left at War had just come out, Barack Obama was inaugurated and George W. Bush was finally out of office.  Those were heady days.  The right seemed to be on the run, as you put it in the “Introduction” to your book, which you subtitled “On Time.”  Was the feeling that things were looking up for the left, after eight long years, part of why you there called your book “untimely”?  And if so, have times changed again already, so soon and so quickly?  The book seems very timely, with war still raging and the left still in disarray.[1]

Michael Berube: I will confess to a bit of optimism in early 2009 (more on this below, when I get to the question about disappointment), but first, I want to point out that the heady days of early 2009 take up all of two paragraphs of the introduction.  I wasn’t basing any of my book’s argument on the election of Obama.  OK, granted, those two paragraphs are the first two in the book.  But the larger premise was this:  if things are now looking up for the left, however temporarily, then who wants to bother with a book of political analysis that consists almost entirely of left self-criticism?  Isn’t it better, or at least more “timely,” to celebrate the end of the Bush-Cheney era?  That’s what a “timely” book on American politics would do:  it would tell the story of Bush’s post-Katrina plunge in public opinion, growing public disillusionment with the war in Iraq, the Democrats’ victories in Congress in 2006 and in the historic election of 2008.  It would sell a bunch of copies in 2009-10, and it would be out of print by 2011.  But this book is not about Obama, not about Democrats, not about elections.  That’s the sense in which it is “untimely.”

There’s a more obscure meaning there, as well.  All through 2002-03, I was told that “now is not the time” for my criticisms of the Manichean left.  I usually replied, “no, the time to complain that an antiwar movement is being led by a neo-Stalinoid fringe group is right now, when the antiwar movement is being led by a neo-Stalinoid fringe group.”  But I took the point nonetheless, in another sense: if one is opposing the war in Iraq, one should make clear that one opposes the war in Iraq more strongly and emphatically than one opposes the “leading” opponents of the war in Iraq.  Fine.  So, I decided, I will wait, do more research, fine-tune my arguments, and publish my critique of the Manichean left at a time when they cannot say, “but the real enemy is Bush/ Cheney/ Rove/ Rumsfeld!  Focus on them!”

I am glad to hear that you find the book very timely.  I would prefer to say that it might be valuable even though it does not speak immediately to recent developments.  About those recent developments:  have times changed again, so soon and so quickly?  Yes and no.

Gregory J. Lobo: After the gathering in Washington, D.C., orchestrated recently by Comedy Central, one of the participants was quoted as saying that in the U.S. politics is being contested by the talk-show hosts and comedians. Is there something important happening there in terms of what you call (following Gramsci and Stuart Hall) “hegemony,” in terms of the struggle over consent? Or is it merely the banalization and trivialization of politics?

MB: Let’s put it this way.  If not for Jon Stewart, the Zadroga Bill—the health care bill for 9/11 first responders—would have died in the Senate, yet another victim of the all-purpose Republican filibuster of everything.  In the words of Bill Ramoka of the Uniformed Firefighter’s Association of Greater New York:  “it’s a shame that it had to come from someone on a comedy channel to make this an issue.”  Yes, yes it is.

It’s not surprising that American politics would be contested by talk-show hosts and comedians.  Better them than a half-term governor from Alaska with a Twitter feed!  But for the left (by which I mean everyone to the left of Ben Nelson of Nebraska), it is a giddy and unfamiliar feeling.  We are used to having standard-bearers from the ranks of documentarians, journalists, activists, and scholars—Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, Cesar Chavez, Noam Chomsky.  The fact that the most audible voices of “left” opinion in the US in the 2000s were Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is very unsettling, not least for serious left journalists/activists who found Stewart’s “Restore Sanity” speech an exercise in false equivalence.  Then again, the most prominent person criticizing Stewart’s speech on those grounds was libertarian/centrist comic Bill Maher, so go figure.

I’m not sure yet whether the presence of “the left” on Comedy Central/ MSNBC constitutes an important move in the war of position.  One is tempted to point out that The Onion, for all its snarky, satiric brilliance, has not changed the practices of mainstream journalism in the US.  On the other hand, victories like Stewart’s with the Zadroga Bill are real victories, legislative and public-advocacy initiatives that improve the lives of people who desperately need help.  So I’m not willing to call that banal or trivial.

GNB/GJL: How do you see the results of the mid-term elections and the subsequent work of the lame-duck Congress? Is the Tea Party an example, formally speaking, of the kind of hegemony-work you advocate (despite differences in terms of ideology/content, of course)?  Is the right just better at hegemony in this country, and if so why?

MB: The last of these questions is matter for a good dissertation or two.  For most of my adult life, I’ve been inclined to say yes:  the right’s slogan, since the ascendancy of the New Right in 1980, might as well be “hegemony—we just do it better.”  Liberal and Democratic strategists have been waiting for three decades now for the Reagan Coalition to fracture:  surely the white rural poor will realize they have no common interests with the Club for Growth, and the evangelical Christians will realize they have no common interests with the media moguls who befoul their airwaves, their Internets, and their children’s minds (the latter hope was one of the more poignant delusions of Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?)  But Godot never shows up!  Amazing!  And then, when he fails to show up, liberals and Democrats resort to cynicism:  sure, they say, the Right manages to keep its ducks in order by throwing a little red meat to the base on cultural issues while keeping the tax cuts and wealth transfers flowing upwards.  We liberals and Democrats won’t play that shell game because we’re just too honest, too dedicated to the real common good.

I think this is an elaborate form of self-deception on the part of liberals and Democrats—the idea that they could conduct a war of position with cunning and savoir-faire, but are just too principled to do so.  The truth is that they don’t have the faintest idea of how to motivate people, and when the right does motivate people by way of lies and demagoguery—as they did to remarkable effect in 2009, taking a relatively tepid universal health-insurance bill and getting its would-be beneficiaries to denounce it for “socialism” and “death panels”—then liberals are confirmed (unfortunately) in their belief that motivating people is the job of knaves and mountebanks.  So yes, the Tea Party is an example of hegemony in action, and a powerful reminder that liberals and Democrats simply do not know how to play the game.

As for the left:  as I argue in the book, the mainstream U.S. left never took on Stuart Hall’s arguments about Thatcherism, and never took seriously the Gramscian project.  It is now a stale, too-often-reheated version of the New Left, devoted to precisely the kind of “countercultural” politics I criticize in The Left at War.

And as for the midterm elections:  the news is not good.  Obama attempted a very weak, multiply-watered-down expansion of the public sector.  He was met with charges of socialism and a 63-seat loss in the House of Representatives.  There will be no second attempt at a Keynesian solution to the financial crisis, and the budget shortfalls in the states will be severe.  The GOP has no answer at all—just more tax cuts.  And tax cuts there will be.

GNB: Some thoughtful critics, such as David Bromwich for example, have eloquently expressed a poignant sense of disappointment with President Obama.  Do you share that feeling?

MB: Yes and no.  On the one hand, I want to say that I was so prepared to be disappointed in Obama—not only because of long experience with elected Democrats but also because of my wariness about his record in the Senate—that the first two years of the Obama Administration have thrown the very idea of “disappointment” into epistemic crisis.  What does it mean, after all, to say, “aha, I am disappointed in precisely the way I expected to be?”   Or to say, as Tariq Ali’s most recent book seems to say, “I am so pleased with myself that I predicted precisely this degree of disappointment”?  And then there are the leftists who are actively looking for reasons to be disappointed—the ones who believed that Obama would withdraw from Afghanistan even though he campaigned on intensifying US military operations in Afghanistan, and who now feel betrayed that Obama has broken secret campaign promises that only they could hear.

So let me be more specific.  I never expected much from Obama on the economic front.  I expected neoliberalism, more or less, and I got more:  a bailout of the financial industry, but no jobs program, no WPA, no restoration of the tax code status quo ante Bush, no “cramdown” on personal bankruptcies following from the home-mortgage meltdown.  But I am genuinely surprised, and therefore genuinely disappointed, by Obama’s record on civil liberties.  I knew he would escalate in Afghanistan, but I believed him when he said he would close Guantanamo.

That said, I should add that when UN special rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak said, this past October, that “there is a major difference between the Bush and the Obama administration,” and that Obama had stopped the Bush-era practices of torture, the response on the keen-to-be-disappointed left was underwhelming.  The U.S. is still nowhere near the ideals of international law—witness our punitive detention of accused Wikileaker (a.k.a. patriotic whistleblower) Bradley Manning—but I cannot let severe disappointment devolve into despair.

And speaking of matters of hope and despair:  who, on the left, did not feel some small measure of optimism, however guarded, in early 2009?   Who did not entertain the thought, “perhaps now things might get a bit better for ordinary people?” Two groups, so far as I can tell:  one consisted of people who were patiently waiting to enjoy their own faux-disappointment when things went sour, and the other consisted of the remnants of the heighten-the-contradictions crew, who sincerely did not want things to get better for the average person.  Perhaps some people in both groups now congratulate themselves for their “realism”:  they were not fooled, by gum!  But I am not talking about expectations, I am talking about hope.  It was reasonable to expect that Obama would not combine the Presidential cojones of FDR and LBJ with the vision of Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman.  But what did it mean not to wish for better?  What does it mean now, should someone say, “as for me, I never gave in to hope—I never wanted things to be better than they are?”

GNB: Ted McAllister argues, in his response to your book, that the left in the U.S. can’t rule because it hasn’t got a narrative palatable to citizens: “Because the left cannot tell a story of America, they cannot govern,” he asserts.  “Howard Zinn,” for example, “has nothing to offer Americans,” he claims.  Does he have a point?  Richard Rorty used to also complain about what he called “the unpatriotic left,” insisting in his own way that a left without a good story wasn’t going anywhere—but then he also tried himself to offer one.  Is there one?

MB: The funny thing is that in a way, Howard Zinn has much to offer:  that’s why A People’s History, for all its faults, has sold almost two million copies.  The dissemination of Zinn’s work has helped, I hope, to make some Americans less self-congratulatory, more aware of the intellectual careers of Frederick Douglass and Helen Keller, and more willing to look at the unpleasant features of the historical record.  The problem, as Michael Kazin pointed out some years ago (and McAllister would probably agree with Kazin on this), is that Zinn’s narrative is a story of defeat after defeat; and even on the rare occasions when The People, United, Manage Not To Be Defeated, Zinn insists that their apparent victories are ultimately Pyrrhic insofar as they allow the system to perpetuate itself—the system that prevents 99 percent of Americans from realizing that they have common interests and a common enemy. A People’s History thus becomes, as Kazin puts it, “a painful narrative about ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow are always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed.”

That narrative is clearly very attractive to people who need a good strong dose of demystification; that’s why Zinn’s readers, like Chomsky’s, speak as if the scales have fallen from their eyes.  My guess is that those readers tend not to focus on the defeat-upon-defeat, and are moved instead by the accounts of ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society; it’s a version of what Gregory Lobo meant when he credited Chomsky with having a vague kind of “people-based hope.”  But it’s not a guide to good governance, to be sure.  Rorty, by contrast, asked us—by way of Whitman and Dewey—to see the United States as an unfinished project, a great poem that we are still writing.  I take Achieving Our Country to task in my book, but I have no doubt that Rorty had the big picture well in view:  an American left that trades primarily in cynicism and demystification will be precisely the kind of left I critique in my book, a left that appeals to two or three percent of the public.  Zinn has only one way to explain why ordinary Americans kept trying to achieve their country:  they were duped by the elites.  Rorty, by contrast, had something like Ralph Ellison’s agenda:  affirm the ideals while exposing the traducers.  Or, as Alan Ryan put it in his review of Achieving Our Country, “the point of invoking James Baldwin … is that he was entirely unforgiving of his country’s sins and still looked forward with hope to a better future. A left that fights for the political and economic changes that will ‘achieve our country’ is the left that the United States once possessed and needs as much as ever, but is hardly to be seen.”

The story to be told, then, is probably something like the story Thurgood Marshall told in his speech commemorating the bicentennial of the Constitution—a story of how an idealistic but flawed nation and its idealistic but flawed founding principles were transformed over the centuries by “momentous events” and the creation of “new constitutional principles.”  “The progress has been dramatic,” Marshall insisted, “and it will continue.”  Imagine that—faith in progress.

Part II/Islamophobia, Neoliberalism, & the Hitch

GNB: In your essay, “The Left at Bay,” you express a frightening sense of urgency about the ostensibly growing threat of Islamophobia. You write that, unlike Europe, “We don’t have many outspoken supporters of Islamism in the U.S. . . . [but] we are beginning to cultivate a culture of Islamophobic demagoguery that may yet match that of the European far right.”  You worry about “absurd degrees of Islamophobia” in the world today and marvel at “Islamophobic nuttiness.”  But is there such a thing as Islamophobia, or are we talking about people—human beings, after all, who find themselves under threat of attack and may even be prone to feeling a little nutty as such—coping with what British author Martin Amis once called “Islamismophobia,” or wariness of Islamism, as distinct from Islam the religion, a violent totalitarian political movement associated with it?  What do you say to those who assert that there is no deep-seated animus toward the Islamic faith in the U.S. that would warrant a reifying label comparable to terms designating well-documented maladies of longstanding, such as homophobia, anti-Semitism of the European/Muslim variety, or anti-Black racism?  Granted that we as a nation must protect everyone’s safety, civil rights, and freedom of religion, and given that ethnic or religious prejudice is always a bad thing (an evil the U.S. among other places has long had to cope with), what do you say to those who regard the effect of the neologism “Islamophobe” as that of a propagandistic brickbat deployed to intimidate and censor critics of Islamist reactionary politics?  By which—just to be clear—we mean of course a politics that is avowedly theocratic, not only avails itself of terrorism but celebrates it, and includes virulent anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia in its discourse; a bid for “hegemony” that is generally illiberal/fascistic in form, content, means, and ends.  There were more hate-crimes reported against Jews last year than Muslims in America, but there’s no widespread discourse about an efflorescence of anti-Semitism in this country.  Nothing on the cover of Time.  Maybe they call it “terrorism” for a reason—because it terrifies.

MB: A most complicated question!  Every term in this lexicon, of course, is a potentially propagandistic brickbat.  But to take your last suggestion first, the fact that Time has not devoted a cover to anti-Semitism in the U.S. does not seem to me to be compelling evidence that Islamist terrorism has terrorized the American media.

Let me be clear about what I consider “nuttiness,” because I realize that this is a technical term.  Banning minarets, in a country with precisely four minarets, is (to put it mildly) silly.  The construction of minarets does not impinge on anyone’s human rights or anyone’s quality of life.  Likewise, demonstrating against the Park51 project—a project once praised by conservative culture warrior Laura Ingraham, of all people—does nothing whatsoever about Islamist reactionary politics.  The people organizing those demonstrations are not protesting against radical Islamism.  They are provoking needless and potentially dangerous public outrage about an Islamic cultural center, the political equivalent of an Islamic YMCA.

To repeat my original point:  on the left, there is no one in American political life who is the equivalent of George Galloway, and there is no American political party that has adopted the “we are all Hezbollah now” slogans of the SWP.  We simply do not have the level of Islamist apologism to which people like Nick Cohen and Martin Amis are responding, partly because we do not have (and for obvious reasons will not have) the British far left’s level of resentment and bile directed at the U.S.  Instead, we have widespread outrage (and a suspicious fire) at an Islamic center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee; we have Debbie Almontaser being forced to resign as the principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn; we have Martin Peretz, the former editor-in-chief of a major newsweekly, writing that he wonders whether he needs to “pretend” that American Muslims “are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment.” (Though the fact that Peretz has faced such a firestorm of criticism over his “Muslim lives are cheap” blog post indicates that they will not, after all, be tolerated in public discourse, any more than would the remarks of someone who said, “gay lives are cheap, most notably to gays.”) So no, it is not “Islamophobic” to oppose murderous groups like the Hofstad Network (to take but one example).  But it does make sense to use the term, I believe, when dealing with people whose fear and loathing of Muslims is based not on anything certain Muslims have done or said but on the very fact that they are Muslim.

GNB: I agree with you that bigoted remarks ought not be tolerated in public discourse.  And that they are not, in fact, in America, seems well attested, as you suggest, by the sorts of brief but intense “firestorms” of righteous indignation that routinely ignite to engulf anyone in the media who makes an untoward comment, whether out of awkwardness and insensitivity or genuinely racist sentiments—from beloved actors/comedians like Michael Richards, to talk-show hosts, sportscasters, candidates for office…and now gruff liberal magazine editors.  But is the “gay” analogy really fair/accurate in Peretz’s case?  After all, there is no gay-on-gay factional violence, no “Queerist” terrorism, no blowing up each others’ holy places, and no predominantly gay countries that poll anti-Semitism upwards of 90% spewing the most hateful and disgusting anti-Jewish propaganda every day.  That most victims of Islamist violence/terrorism are Muslims is a fact, and one that should concern all of those who do not think Muslim life is any less precious than anyone else’s.  So, without at all defending the way he said it–for which he deserved criticism—wasn’t something like that the real import of his statement?  And isn’t that something that should concern us at least as much as labeling a longstanding supporter of liberal causes a “racist rat” (as a protester at Harvard had it on a sign)?  If this is an example of “Islamophobia,” in other words, then it’s the kind of bigotry that does not prevent somebody from marching regularly, at the age of 70-something, in protests in East Jerusalem on the side of the Palestinians, in solidarity with Muslims seeking to block Jewish expansion there (as Peretz does).  Forgive me if this seems like a lengthy quibble over one unpleasant recent incident (leading to Peretz’s stepping aside after decades as editor-in-chief of The New Republic), but it seems to me there’s more at stake here.  It’s true we don’t have George Galloway or the SWP.  But we have ANSWER.  We have the likes of Imam Abdul Malik, giving talks on college campuses all the time, and an accompanying atmosphere of intimidation (at some of the UCs in particular) that has led to serious investigation of a growing problem of anti-Semitism in higher education in this country.  In another league, granted, we have the shocking phenomenon of ongoing suicide attacks–the Shoe Bomber, the Underpants Bomber, the Times Square Bomber, and who knows what–by Islamists.  Islamism is not Islam, but it overlaps with it, and people who ought to be concerned about the former might not always know where the line is drawn.

MB: You’re right, the gay analogy isn’t a good one.  I should have said “black lives are cheap, most notably to blacks“—because racists say this all the time about black-on-black crime.  They have to use code words these days, of course, but still.  The point remains that if Peretz had been a bit more careful, or a bit more thoughtful, he would never have written the line about Muslims not being worthy of the First Amendment, and he would have said “Muslim lives are cheap to Islamists, who hold all life cheap.”  The fact that he conflated violent Islamist extremists with Muslims in general—that was precisely the problem.  Nor was it an isolated instance of intolerance and imprudence; it was part of a pattern that marked Peretz’s blog.  That said, I was stunned (pleasantly) to read in that New York profile that Peretz participates in the vigils and protests in Sheikh Jarrah.  Good on him for that!

As for ANSWER and the campuses:  about the former, I really do think we’re talking about the fringe of the fringe, a small handful of people who ordinarily couldn’t fill a seminar room’s worth of followers even if they offered free food and an open bar.  How in the world they got to be the organizer of the antiwar demonstrations remains a mystery.  Was every other left organization in the US asleep at the switch?  And yes, we have people like Ramsey Clark and Lynne Stewart.  My point is that they’re nowhere near the levers of state power or public influence.  About the latter, it is a matter of real concern to me that the supporters of boycotts against Israel appear to be drawn chiefly from the ranks of the academic left.  This is yet another argument the left needs to have out in the open, with plenty of light and air—because otherwise, I think you’ll find some degree (minimal, I hope, but I fear worse) of eliminationism masquerading as humanitarian concern for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.  I take some comfort, though, in the fact that even as the British AUT and UCU have passed resolutions in favor of various boycotts of Israeli academics and universities, the AAUP has firmly opposed all academic boycotts.  As do I.

GNB/GJL: At the end of “The Left at Bay,” you bring up the fact that among the responses to the book we gathered there was no representative of what, in The Left at War, you call the “Manichean Left,” and that you would have liked to reply to one.  But is not your whole book a response to that position?  Though this might be a bit of deck stacking, perhaps you could respond briefly here to what you, who have spent so much time immersed in Manichean Left thought, would imagine to be an ML critique of you.  What would be an interesting challenge by an ML reader, and how would you respond?  You write, for instance, that it would have been nice had we included, “Someone who could properly take me to task for not having an adequate response to neoliberalism or a compelling account of how a Walzerian defense of the social welfare state can avoid the pitfalls of nationalism.”

MB: You’re right, the Manichean Left is well represented in my book, sometimes in long block quotes.  So in some sense it has already spoken.  But I would like to hear a further response from the Manichean Left precisely because it is the object of my criticism.  I want to hear their best critique, as opposed to the effusions of people like Louis Proyect.  I would like to hear something that’s not boilerplate about U.S. imperialism in Kosovo and silent genocide in Afghanistan—something that takes seriously the question of how to think about failed states, mass murders, and terrorist networks.  I hesitate to ventriloquize a Manichean Left reader here, for fear of getting the hypothetical argument wrong and being accused of dealing in strawmen.  I mean, I can churn out the usual Ed Herman-quality stuff about my being a dupe of American empire, an apologist for U.S./NATO militarism, and (worst of all) a “liberal,” but I’d rather see someone get down to cases.  For instance, I can imagine someone to my left suggesting that my faith in internationalism is misplaced, and that the International Criminal Court will be worthy of the name on the day someone of Kissinger’s stature is hauled before it.  All I could say in return is that it makes more sense to build structures that might eventually bring people like Kissinger to some form of justice than to tear them down at the outset on the grounds that they have not yet done so.

As for neoliberalism and the Walzerian welfare state, these are much more complicated questions.  Someone suggested to me, in the course of an email exchange, that I gave the Eustonians a pass on the question of neoliberalism; it may not have seemed pressing at the time, but now that deregulation and austerity policies have done so much catastrophic damage to the world economy—and to ordinary working people—it should be much higher on the agenda.  The question of how to imagine a social welfare state without nationalism is probably above my pay grade.  There was a time when I hoped that the European Union would point the way; now I do not know where to turn.  But I have to say how sharply I was struck, upon rereading The Hard Road to Renewal, by the way Stuart Hall acknowledged and tried to grapple with the contradictions of the welfare state.  At the risk of repeating myself again and again and again, I don’t think he has received anything like the recognition he deserves in the U.S., on this count and on many others.

GNB: Your book is very much a carefully reasoned, patiently, painstakingly, admirably balanced, well-informed and even good-natured examination of the often fractious arguments for and against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and of the problem of how progressives in particular should think about terrorism post-9/11.  So where’s Christopher Hitchens?  As you acknowledge in the book, he was responsible for an amazing barrage of “searing critiques of the Manichean left.” Yet he receives no sustained attention.  Why is that—given his prominence as the most visible and controversial pubic intellectual engaged with “the left at war” while you were conceiving and writing the book?  Can you say anything more about how you regard his significance?  As you know, he makes some comrades on the left apoplectic. . . .  Do you share their feelings of betrayal?

MB: Last question first, no.  I was surprised by his support of the Iraq War, even more surprised by his support of Bush, but I did not feel betrayed.  I did not take it personally.  I mentioned Hitchens favorably in my first post-9/11 essay, because I thought his initial responses to the Manichean left were smart and necessary—though, as I remarked even then, I could not share his sense of “exhilaration” at the conflict.  Likewise, when I covered his debate with Tariq Ali in April 2002, I remained sympathetic to many of his arguments, but was beginning to get the sense that he was going to ride them much further than I was willing to go.  So the reason I now mention his crack at the Dixie Chicks in The Left at War is not that I regard that regrettable remark as symptomatic of his thought; rather, I am trying to indicate that by 2003, he had become radioactive.  In many ways he gave the Manicheans exactly what they wanted:  see, they could say, the people who criticize Chomsky wind up leaving The Nation and voting for Bush; the people who supported war in Afghanistan are now leading the pundits’ charge into Iraq.

There’s a tactical question at stake here as well.  A lot of what passed for “debate” in those days—and now I’m talking about face-to-face stuff, not books and essays and blogs—now looks to me like the workings of our lizard brains.  It was not a question of assessing arguments so much as lining up friends and foes:  if X said it, it must be wrong, and if Y said it, its total and complete rightness could not be questioned.  I had one colleague back then who practically spat on the ground every time Todd Gitlin’s name was mentioned.  It didn’t matter what the context was.  If Todd Gitlin came out against gum disease, my friend would promptly march under the banner “we are all gingivitis now.”  I was trying to forestall that response as much as possible, even though I know I’ll get it anyway.  So I don’t deal with Hitchens at great length, precisely because Hitchens himself made it so difficult to deal with his work with the degree of care I wanted to bring to this book.

You’re right that Hitchens was and is the most visible and controversial pubic intellectual engaged with “the left at war.”  And he remains, at his best, a compelling and fascinating writer.  But he’s not the only person whose absence from the book has drawn questions.  One reader asked me why I didn’t say more about Edward Said; another wanted to see some treatment of David Rieff (who would most surely remind me that Kissinger will never appear in The Hague); still another wanted a discussion of Michael Ignatieff and Samantha Power.  Each of these figures would merit a chapter of his or her own, no question.  I just want somebody else to write those chapters.

Part III/Propaganda, Ideology, & Hegemony

GJL: You talk about the necessity to study how the American public, or a good portion of it, has been “won over” rather than deceived or manipulated.  While you have dealt with this distinction at length in your book, is it possible to say a few words about it here, for readers perhaps not wholly familiar with the details of your argument?  And could you also say something about this idea in terms of understanding international or global political dynamics?

MB: My point isn’t that people are never duped or deceived; on the contrary, it happens every day.  My point is simply that when you start from the premise that popular consent is always “manufactured” rather than won, you wind up with one version or another of “false consciousness.”  And when that happens, you conclude that the masses (which, as Raymond Williams said, are always other people) have been hornswoggled by the elites, by ideology, by the mass media—whereas you and those fortunate few of like mind have managed to escape The System unharmed.  As I suggest in my book, The Matrix is the most popular and accessible version of this theory:  we have been fed an elaborate delusion that keeps us from realizing the truth, and we can see reality for what it is only if we take the right pill.

Now, there is indeed such a thing as hegemony, but it doesn’t work quite so simply as this.  Let me turn things over to Raymond Williams—this from the essay “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory”:

“The processes of education; the processes of a much wider social training within institutions like the family; the practical definitions and organization of work; the selective tradition at an intellectual and theoretical level: all these forces are involved in a continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture, and on them, as experienced, as built into our living, its reality depends.  If what we learn there were merely an imposed ideology, or if it were only the isolable meanings and practices of the ruling class, or of a section of the ruling class, which gets imposed on others, occupying merely the top of our minds, it would be—and one would be glad—a very much easier thing to overthrow.”

As I admit in the book, it’s not easy to apply this idea to international or global political dynamics.  And as I point out in my reply to McAllister, when Stuart Hall tried to grapple with the popularity of the Falklands War, he more or less tossed out his Gramsci and reverted to the language of false consciousness; he was therefore uncharacteristically unconvincing when it came down to devising antiwar arguments that wouldn’t send the man in the pub (and his family) marching off into the sunset.  But what I’m trying to ask—and this is as ambitious and as utopian as I get—is how we can take the lessons of Gramsci, how we can start from the premise that consent is won rather than coerced, and build support for supranational structures that can check the system of perpetual war and eventual despoliation of the planet.  Suggestions are welcome.

GJL: Chomsky and Herman and like-minded thinkers will argue that their positions are supported by evidence; you, of course, make the same claim.  How does one decide?  Is it a question of better evidence?  Is it a matter of ethics and pragmatics—in other words, is it question of how we should conduct ourselves with others and how we actually can conduct ourselves with others, given the “nature” of this world?  Without expecting a complete answer: To what degree are we talking about reason and evidence, and to what degree are we talking about emotion, affect, or identification?

Allow me, if you will, to combine this question with the next, and answer them as one.

GNB: You (justly, many would say) criticize Slavoj Zizek for his Stalinoid politics, at the start of your book, making him into a poster-child for a Manichean Left that’s all total critique and no pragmatic vision.  Is that your whole view of him, though, or do you find anything valid, of use, or of genuine interest in his method of interpreting culture and human behavior?  For example, his notion of jouissance as a political factor, maybe?  Can we understand politics (or anything else) without taking into account the unconscious ways people “enjoy” their own “symptoms”?  Moreover, doesn’t such consideration in fact allow Zizek to present a sophisticated “ideology” model that is really very sophisticated (i.e., not a matter of false consciousness but of fantasy), as well as very far from Chomskian rationalism?

MB: Zizek has this part right, I think, so my answer to the final question here is simply yes.  Less simply:  no, it’s not just a matter of evidence.  People believe what they believe for all kinds of reasons, including reasons that are not properly “reasons” at all.  That’s why I’m not willing to throw out the enjoy-your-symptom baby with the Stalinoid bathwater, so to speak, and why I am willing to insist that Zizek can be a thrilling, illuminating, useful writer despite the whole totalitarianism thing.

I feel the same way about Foucault and Heidegger:  the fact that they had terrible political judgment does not invalidate Foucault’s work on the history of madness or of sexuality, or Heidegger’s readings of Plato, Sophocles, or Holderlin.  “I’m not going to take Foucault seriously on anything, because he was so foolish as to support Islamists in Iran during the revolution” is just a more sophisticated form of lizard-brain activity.  Surely it’s possible to acknowledge that someone is an interesting thinker even if s/he has poor political judgment.

GJL: Apart from Ellen Willis and Stuart Hall, whom you lionize as avatars of the “democratic left,” are there other thinkers out there who seem to be really grappling with reality and relations of power in the sorts of ways you find useful and necessary?  If there are, can you point to some of them and say a few words about what you find valuable in their thinking?

MB: Here’s an idiosyncratic list for you:  I liked John Brenkman’s The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy very much, and I always learn from the work of Bruce Robbins and John McGowan, because their work is always so careful and thoughtful.  Ramesh Thakur’s The United Nations, Peace and Security is a terrific book on the UN.  I’ve admired Michelle Goldberg’s journalism for some time, and can recommend The Means of Reproduction; I’m hoping that she’ll become the Ellen Willis of her generation.  And I’ll read pretty much anything Ian Williams or Laura Rozen write on international affairs; they’re always smart and unhoodwinkable.  Lastly, though he went further on Israel than I would, Tony Judt will be sorely missed by everyone who cares about the fate of social democracy.

Part IV/The Left @ Politicsandculture.org

GNB/GJL: What surprised you about participating in this special issue of Politics & Culture devoted to evaluating your book?  What did you learn or were you moved to rethink?

MB: I was surprised that this was not an exchange confined to paid-up, card-carrying leftists.  (I was a little surprised that it was all guys, but c’est la vie et c’est la gauche à la guerre.)  So I had to spend some time trying to figure out how to address people who don’t share my basic political assumptions; as I say in “The Left at Bay,” I was mildly amused that conservative readers noted that the book isn’t about them, but they were right to suggest that I pitched the book explicitly as an in-house debate.  Notably, I found myself having to take inventory of my beliefs about Israel, since I was no longer dealing exclusively with critiques from my left; and I had to put the question of Islamism (and Islamist apologism) front and center in a way that my book does not.  Very useful exercises, all.

Part V/At it Again

GNB/GJL: What is your next project?

MB: Narrative and Disability, about the implications of cognitive disability for understanding narrative theory and experimental fiction—and about the undertheorization of intellectual disability in disability studies.  Should be fun: I’m looking forward to writing it at some point in the next couple of years.  It will be something of a relief to write about literature again.

Note

[1]Interview conducted December 27-29, 2010.

Perelman’s abiding concern with, on the one-hand, burning social issues and, on the other, the brutal deficiencies and complicities of mainstream economics has animated his career ever since with books including The Pathology of the U.S. Economy: The Costs of a Low Wage System (1993), The End of Economics (1996), Class Warfare in the Information Age (1998), The Invention of Capitalism: The Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (2001), Manufacturing Discontent: The Trap of Individualism in a Corporate Society (2005), and his most recent The Confiscation of American Prosperity: From Right-Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression (2007).

In this interview Perelman offers his insights into the contemporary food and economic crises, some of their historical antecedents, and themes ranging from speculation to dependency to class.

Max Haiven (MH) for Politics and Culture: Before the recent financial crisis, discussions of an endemic and deepening food crisis was making its way into the mainstream press thanks largely to spectacular demonstrations in the global South and some anomalous prices for things like cereals at Northern supermarkets.  Since the financial crisis was fully realized last fall, that food crisis seems to have been largely forgotten (along with the related problems of “peak oil” and general resource scarcity).  Is this coincidence of the food and financial crises an accident?

Michael Perelman (MP): The relationship between the financial crisis and the food shortage is not coincidental at all, although I do not believe that the ongoing crisis is merely a financial crisis.  Instead, crises like these are endemic to a capitalist economy. A decades-long distortion of the entire economy, reflected, for example, in an epidemic of inequality and deregulation, has made this particular crisis even worse.  I tried to describe the entire pathology in historical context in my recent book The Confiscation of American Prosperity. Inequality and lack of investment in productive capital, among other things, led to a speculative fever that eventually produced a financial crisis.

Once the bubble was set in motion, speculation in all sorts of raw materials, including food and energy, became part of the contagion.  Once crops became seen as a cheaper form of energy production, a mania for producing biofuels created food shortages.

Now that speculation in raw materials is running in reverse, people in the less developed countries, whose economies depended upon the export of raw materials, will face markets with sufficient food, but without the wherewithal to afford it—a different kind of food shortage, but one that is just as lethal.

MH: One interesting aspect of the rallying cry of “food sovereignty” is its mobilization of the term sovereignty.  Social movements around the world are using the term to speak to their demands for autonomous control over their food production and markets, often at the sub-state level.   The term sovereignty is familiar to many from anti-colonial movements for national liberation.  But it’s also a loaded concept which mainstream political science associates with the European order of imperialist nation-states. What’s your sense of this term sovereignty and how it relates to food?

MP: Here, you’re treading on very difficult terrain. In an ideal world based on principles of equality, virtually everybody could be better off with some trading in food.  Trade today, however, is not among equals.

Food—especially spices—was among the earliest goods involved in long-distance trade at the beginning of the age of empires.  These spices were extraordinarily profitable. Ideally again, the producers of the exotic spices could have profited from their product, which cost very little to produce and commanded a premium price in Europe.  Instead, the spices were a curse.  The colonial powers often fought each other over control of the places where exotic spices were found. When they were not fighting each other, they were subduing the inhabitants of the areas.

When you get to trading in basic food commodities on international markets, market forces can threaten basic survival of countries that depend on imports—not just because of the threat of embargoes, but to the variability of the market  on which those commodities trade. We saw this happening recently when grains were discovered as a source of fuel: the price increased dramatically making a normal diet unaffordable for millions of people.

In this sense, concerns about sovereignty sound reasonable. After all, people would be ill-advised to put their money in risky investments when a loss would expose them severe difficulties.  In the same sense, countries should take care to make sure that they have a certain degree of food security.

Market dependence makes countries vulnerable to political mischief.  I am reminded of a statement by Senator Hubert Humphrey (who later to become Vice-President of the United States) to the Senate in 1957:

I have heard… that people may become dependent on us for food.  I know this is not supposed to be good news.  To me that was good news, because before people can do anything they have got to eat.  And if you are looking for a way to get people to lean on you and to be dependent on you, in terms of their cooperation with you, it seems to me that food dependence would be terrific.[1]

The United States, of course, has no problem with such dependency.  First of all, it has plenty of basic foods and largely imports what might be considered luxuries. But the country is powerful enough to do great harm to any country that might interfere with its access to food. In short, trade does not represent much of a risk for the U.S.  In so far as food is concerned, the greatest fear of the United States is that the market may become glutted, making food prices collapse.

Of course, for many countries, food self-sufficiency is virtually physically impossible.  International solidarity is an important defense against either market forces,  political forces, or natural forces that might interfere with food supplies.

MH: In response to the food crisis, local organizers and global organizations have begun to adopt “food sovereignty” as their rallying cry.   Neoliberals, however, have been quick to accuse these voices of some sort of anachronistic “protectionism” or other crimes against the market.  This way of framing the debate also seems to dehistoricize this food crisis as merely the product of recent economic policies.  What’s your sense of the history of this crisis and the history of food crises in Capitalism’s development more generally?

MP: In 1866, British industry could not get cotton from the Confederate states because of the American Civil War.  Britain turned to it’s Indian colony for cotton, restricting rice cultivation and causing the infamous famine of 1866.  Karl Marx reported that this famine cost the lives of a million people in the district of Orissa alone—a more extreme version of the recent food crisis resulting from the destructive biofuels movement I mentioned earlier.  Similarly, when the potato famine hit Ireland in the 1840s, the country’s agriculture was largely geared to exporting crops to England.  Local poor people relied on potatoes.  When the British finally got around to sending relief, they sent wheat, but the people had no facilities for baking.

In my book, The Invention of Capitalism, I tried to show how British economists and the powerful economic and political forces that they represented went to great lengths to figure out how to make people dependent on purchased food by making it impossible for them to produce for themselves.  Masses of people were uprooted in the Enclosure Movement.  In this case, food dependency was not national in nature, but class dependent.  The idea was that once people had to buy on the market, they would have no choice but to accept wage labor, necessary for mass industrialization.

Today, wage labor is endemic.  People take it for granted.  Even so, extra-market forces continue to manipulate the food market.  Generally, the problem is the powerful countries want to dump their subsidized agricultural products on poor countries, where the farmers have no such support.  In fact, the U.S. and other developed countries force agreements on the poorer countries that prevent them from protecting their agriculture.

Peasants who had produced corn in Mexico prior to NAFTA felt the brunt of this manipulation of agricultural markets when cheap, subsidized U.S. corn flooded their local market, rendering their crops almost worthless in exchange.  Similarly, cotton farmers in Africa—admittedly not food producers—have been cast into a deeper poverty as the result of their exposure to international markets.

MH: It seems like food and food production has had an interesting career in the history of political-economic thought from the Physiocrats to the response to them by classical economics to Marx’s ambivalent and sometimes hostile approach to agrarian production to more recent attempts to retool Marxist political economy on a global stage.   You’re work often deals with the history of economic thought and especially the way ostensibly free-market thinkers were at the vanguard of the intellectual and legal justification of the enclosures of the agrarian commons.  What’s your sense of how food has factored into economic thought?

MP: Obviously, food played an important role in pre-capitalistic thought.  I was recently in China. People showed me one written character for family.  It was a roof and a pig. I took that to mean that if you could find food and shelter, you could have a family. Part of the character for happiness was another character for a field.

Early economists were struck by the fact that the 17th century Dutch economy flourished, despite the fact that it was heavily dependent on imports for everything. Although the Dutch had developed the most intensive farming techniques in Europe, economists paid virtually no attention to that part of their economy.  Instead, they marveled at Dutch trade and finance and the sophisticated futures markets.

Agriculture appeared to be the alternative to capitalism, because every culture seemed to be relatively self-sufficient, rather than dependent on traded commodities.  Its products are not valuable enough to export abroad.  As I described in my book, The Invention of Capitalism, early economists were very concerned to find ways to squeeze people off the land in what Marx called primitive accumulation.

You mentioned the 18th century Physiocrats.  Of course, their concern was very different. The French economy was relatively backward. Development, for them, meant finding ways to modernize agriculture, by ridding the country of peasant agriculture to make way for capitalist agriculture.

Turning to Marx, his understanding of agriculture evolved. In early years, Marx saw nature as something to be easily conquered through socialism.  Agriculture was the domain of peasants and aristocrats, neither of which fit into his vision of the future at the time.  But once the cotton famine hit during the Civil War in the United States, Marx’s thinking changed.  I discussed this in quite a bit of detail in my book, Marx’s Crises Theories. At the time, workers suffered greatly because industry could not get the raw materials necessary to produce textiles.  England’s response was to search for alternative sources of cotton.  This effort led the British to convert a substantial part of Indian agriculture, leading to the famine I mentioned earlier.  In the midst of these events, Marx began an intensive study of rent theory and agronomy, at one point saying that the agronomists have more to offer than political economists.  In his later years, Marx became sympathetic to the potential of old Russian villages, seeing that their cooperative system had the possibility of moving directly to socialism.

Today, agriculture has become just another industry as far as economics is concerned. It may not be not as innovative as biotechnology or as profitable as finance typically is, but it is still just another industry.  Given the direct share of agriculture in the US economy, food production is not a particularly important industry for economists.

The drought conditions affecting agriculture around the world may be a wake-up call.  Not only is draught restricting production in poor countries, but agriculture in Australia and in California is in a crisis mode.

MH: As every first-year textbook insists, economics is ostensibly about the “rational” distribution of scarce resources.  How can we imagine a form of economics adequate to dealing with the massive problems humanity faces concerning food?

MP: I think the economics textbooks today reflect the way most people think about the world in terms of food.  In the textbook world, there are no massive problems as long as people kowtow to neoliberal principles:  poverty exists because governments are too foolish or corrupt to open their economies up to market forces.

In short, the textbooks have more to learn from the activists than the activists could get from the textbooks.

One of the most important problems that economics—not just introductory textbooks—overlooks is the whole question of resources.  Costs are seen as merely the expense of producing one more unit, what economists call a “marginal cost.”  The concept of depletion has been disappeared from economics by assuming that markets somehow take account of scarcity.  At the same time, economists understand that business has a 10 to 20% hurdle rate, meaning that investment is not worth pursuing unless you can be virtually certain of a 10 to 20% rate of return. By that calculation, the entire world would depreciate away to relatively little value in a couple centuries.

I dealt with all this in a different book, The Perverse Economy, where I told the story of the passenger pigeon.  It turns out that the price of pigeons remained virtually constant as the entire species disappeared into extinction.

Our species does not face a threat as grave as the passenger pigeon, but the crisis is serious nonetheless.  I wish that my field, economics, had more to contribute.

Endnotes

[1] Humphrey, Senator Hubert. 1957. “Exchange in with Thorsten V. Kalijarvi, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs in the Department of State. United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. 1957. Policies and Operations under Public Law 480, 83d Congress: Hearings before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States Senate, Eighty-fifth Congress, first session, on the Operation and administration of the agricultural trade development and assistance act of 1954, and its relationship to foreign policy (June 11-July 19) (Washington: G.P.O.): p. 128:

Raj Patel is an activist, organizer and visiting scholar in the Centre for African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a Research Associate at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. He has written extensively on food sovereignty as an ethical injunction and political horizon, and his recent Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System, a compendious and cogent study of the genealogies of our current global food system, has made him a major voice in discourses of food today. In this interview, he considers the ideological implications of “food security,” the limits of rights discourses and technocratic solutions in talking about food politics, the obfuscations of statistical knowledge and the possibility of mass participatory democracy today.

Scott Stoneman (SS) for Politics and Culture: How has the notion of “food security” contributed to the system of trade which currently determines who is stuffed and who is starved – or who is made to live and who is left to die? And how does the framework of “food sovereignty” offer a way of rethinking food, beyond the logic of commodity, in terms of a radical politics of public health?

Raj Patel (RP): To understand ‘food sovereignty’, it’s important to see how it pushes away from ‘food security’. So here’s a 2001 definition, from the Food And Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: “Food security [is] a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” [1] While no one disputes the importance of sufficient, safe and nutritious food to lead a healthy life, the key word here is ‘access’. Under food security, the question of power in the food system never comes up – as long as access is guaranteed under some system or other, there’s no problem. The trouble, however, is this: you can be food secure under a dictatorship. You can be food secure in prison. You can be food secure, in other words, and never have any say about what it is that you’re provided, nor the manner in which it comes to you. Food sovereignty takes these questions of power seriously. While the full definition is long and changeable, the common thread is that food sovereignty is about ‘peoples’ right to define their food system’. In other words, it’s a call to have rights about their food politics, not just their food qua commodity. As part of the deliberations around food sovereignty, concerns about public health will play a part, but so will concerns about other public goods, such as environment, education and culture. A sovereign food system is one in which a range of competing concerns around public space are balanced at appropriate levels, and in which food is treated not as a commodity, but as a right.

SS: In what way does the issue of local vs. state or corporate sovereignty and the urgency of feeding future populations transform dominant conceptions of “post-industrial” labour? Forced to square off against the managerial logic of the “network society” instantiated by companies like Wal-Mart and a seemingly universal obsession with technocratic solutions to the global food crisis, how are movements for participatory democracy such as the MST in Brazil and indigenous movements around the world making autonomies of food cultivation and consumption seem not only possible, but in your words, “beautiful” and “banal”?

RP: The debates around post-industrial labour, as far as I understand them, seem to be a little myopic. While it’s true that the major Northern cities in which these theories are spawned have seen a decline in industrial manufacturing, such manufacturing hasn’t gone away. If someone said that the world is now less polluted because Londoners’ cars need to pass a smog test, we’d think them mad. Similarly, just because food production is out of sight, it oughtn’t to be out of mind. And while Monsanto is keen, for instance, to pimp its products out as the magic bullet to end our concerns about the need for agricultural labour, it’s increasingly clear that their technocratic solutions aren’t working, nor are they likely to. A recent study by 400 scientists, the International Agricultural Assessment on Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD, online at www.agassessment.org) suggests that the solutions to questions about how we will feed the world in 2050, when there are 9 billion of us, will not be those provided by industrial agriculture. Instead, the answers will be ones that involve a great deal more regional and municipal autonomy, ones that rely on context-specific scientific solutions, rather than mass-produced technical quick fixes. For context-specific science to work well, it relies on local articulations of social and physical ecology. And the only way in which such ecologies can be effectively articulated is through a much more engaged and participatory democracy, of the kind being pioneered by movements such as the MST.

SS: What are the limitations of theorizing consumer choice, or consumer responsibility, in relation to the global politics of food? In the place of politicizing the choices that consumers, as the objects of market strategies, make about the food they buy and even the pleasure they derive from the food they buy, what kinds of problems and questions ought to instead be considered in the interest of instating what Eric Cazdyn calls a “new candor” regarding the economics and cultural politics of crisis (655)? [2]

RP: For me, the problem here is one of ressentiment. Consumers are meant to be ‘free’ to choose, but the entire notion of consumer choice is premised on domination by corporate power. The interesting questions for me lie in the politics of pleasure and sensuousness, questions that try to reclaim corporeal freedom from the realm of specious consumer choice.

SS: In Stuffed and Starved, your thoroughgoing study of the effects of free market fundamentalism on bodies and the world food system, you discuss the vanishing of India’s rural poor, and in particular poor farmers, as a kind of “statistical sleight of hand.” What is the political function of statistical knowledge in the Global South? What form of power drives the erasure of dispossession and the informational suppression of the specific burden placed on women? And why is belying the growing instance of farmer suicides an especially necessary occlusion for the state?

The question of how statistics function as a means of domination is akin to the use of maps as colonial tools – statistics and maps operate in similar ways as epistemic weapons of surveillance, centralization of power, and dispossession. The question of women being rendered invisible is not, of course, unique to the Global South, nor to agriculture. But sexism is particularly germane to agriculture because the majority of food eaten in developing countries is grown by women and because the majority of hunger is borne by women (60% of those food insecure on Earth are women or girls). Yet the confrontation of the full force of this fact, just as with the ongoing human and ecological disasters in agriculture more broadly, is something that states aren’t prepared for. Or, better, that the consequences of genuinely confronting this would lead to policy changes that profoundly upended capitalism. So farmers are forgotten, and women’s reproductive labour exploited. The state doesn’t always forget farmer suicide, though. India, for instance, has an election-year stunt at the moment designed to keep farming communities sweet for four more years. The idea is to prevent farmer suicides by having a generalized debt amnesty – but it only works for those with formal sector loans who own their own land. In other words, it’s only for a fraction of the entire sector. And, of course, the stunt fails to address the underlying causes of debt, and fails to address the fact that the greatest burden continues to fall on women.

SS: Are there ways in which determining the rights of citizens to self-govern still excludes groups for whom citizenship is less certain? In other words, how might food and food crisis necessitate a different form of cosmopolitanism, or world citizenship, as a means of providing an ethical orientation to competing notions of sovereignty (i.e., state sovereignty, sovereignty as the right to local autonomy, corporate power/capitalist sovereignty)?

RP: The problem word here is ‘citizen’. It summons a Westphalian notion of nation-state membership that delimits the possibilities of ‘rights’. The kind of rights that are part of food sovereignty are, in an important way, human rights. Hannah Arendt’s work on refugees, and her observation that they are a population denied the right to have rights, is particularly appropriate in understanding what peasant and landless movements are fighting for. Take this quote, for instance, from The Origins of Totalitarianism, which might have been written directly about peasant struggle:

“…people deprived of human rights… are deprived, not of the right freedom, but of the right to action, not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion… We become aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerge who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation.” (Arendt 1967: 177)[3]

To boot the domain of rights to a planetary level is not, however, to suggest that the appropriate body for enforcing those rights is a world government. It seems to me that what we need is not one authority, but several competing ones, with jurisdictions that match the appropriate decision-making scale. So, for instance, municipal participatory budgeting is good for making decisions around how the right to the city is cashed out. But it’s not the best level for making decisions about regional watersheds, or planetary CO2 levels. This looks like I’m making a case for a sort of Kantian cosmopolitan federalism, but I think, following Andrej Grubacic’s thinking on this, I’m calling instead for a sort of Balkanisation, understood as a series of overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions and domains of government, resolved through consensus-based politics.

Endnotes

[1] http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/y4671e/y4671e06.htm

[2] Cazdyn, Eric. “Disaster, Crisis, Revolution.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106:4, Fall 2007.

[3]  Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Allen & U, 1967.

Julie Guthman is an Associate Professor in the Community Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz. Her pressing and rigorous work has dealt with the ways in which organic farming movements and reform in California strain the boundaries that obtain between nature and capital and between the local and the global (Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California), with governmentality, embodiment and resistance in the age of neoliberalism (“The Polanyian Way? Voluntary Food Labels as Neoliberal Governance,” “Embodying neoliberalism: economy, culture, and the politics of fat” [with Melanie DuPuis]), and the racial assumptions that impinge community projects for the distribution of local, organic food in African-American neighborhoods (“Bringing good food to others: investigating the subjects of alternative food practice”). Her developing research examines the biopolitics of obesity in terms of race, embodiment and the evolution of alternative food practices. Among other difficult questions, in this interview Dr. Guthman offers critical perspectives on the intersection of alternative food and political subjectivity, the social, cultural and bodily impact of neoliberalism, and the possibility of responsible food criticism and radical food pedagogy in a time of crisis.

Scott Stoneman (SS) for Politics and Culture: Can you describe the deterritorializing and political economic effects of the neoliberalization of food?

Julie Guthman (JG): To say anything about the effects of neoliberalism on the production and distribution of food we have to pay attention to “actually existing neoliberalisms”[1] rather than the free market myths that stand in as neoliberal philosophy. And, in fact, neoliberalism has been applied to food and agricultural sectors in highly uneven ways. On the one hand, agriculture and food sectors have been subject to some of the most intense attempts at neoliberalization – from the privatization of land and water rights, to the use of free trade agreements to dismantle national-level food safety regulations, to the dismantling of entitlement programs and other public support that exist to combat hunger (e.g., India’s “fair price shops”). On the other hand, neoliberalization has been limited in this sphere. Notwithstanding the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) provisions regarding Agriculture, in both the EU and US, domestic food sectors remain economically protected through, for example, subsidy programs, and federal level agencies continue to play a major role in environmental and health regulation – although these regulations have been challenged in the WTO.

I find salutary the new found attention among American food activists to the US commodity programs, as evidenced, for example, in a significant reform campaign during the creation of the 2008 Farm Bill. These subsidies benefit some of the wealthiest farmers and clearly work against ecological farming practices. By the same token, the main critique activists forwarded during the campaign was that the commodity programs are responsible for the over-production of corn and soy, which, in turn, make for cheap, junky domestic food (perhaps a new iteration of our bodies, ourselves). In fact, rationales for farm policy are much more complex and historically dynamic, and much excess production never reaches the American stomach. Chronic food surpluses were put to strategic use abroad well before the advent of neoliberalism, most famously through Public Law 480, instituted in 1954, which allowed the US government to dispose of crop surpluses through direct aid, barter for strategic raw materials, and concessionary sales to other countries. The law proved to be an invaluable weapon for extracting political and military concessions. For example, Egypt became one of the largest recipients of US food aid (in dollars) upon its post-1973 accord with Israel.

I say this as a reminder that even though the US continues to urge the liberalization of farm and food sectors abroad, current US farm policy remains highly protectionist – and not simply to provide cheap calories for American consumers but also to open up new markets for exports. Many of the issues that have bogged down the last ten years of international trade ministerial meetings (e.g., in Cancun, Doha, and Hong Kong), are related to the recalcitrance (and hypocrisy) of the US (and EU) to terminate subsidies and walk the talk of free trade. Because, at the same time, farm sectors in much of the world have been neoliberalized, and many countries in the global South continue (and are often forced) to devote some of the best land to export crops to comply with neoliberal structural adjustment policies. Yet with some crops, notably cotton and rice, they can’t compete in US markets.

Given how this uneven neoliberalization exacerbates already existing global inequalities, you have to question localization as an ethical (or coherent) response. At the very least it is ironic that re-localization efforts have gained traction in some of the most well-off regions in the world. In coastal California, from where I hail, most local food initiatives have taken root in already existing privileged communities, both economically and ecologically. Hundreds of crops are grown year round in these areas based on favorable climate conditions and a huge helping of technology. Clearly not all places in the world have similar resource endowments, in no small part owing to uneven developments. Yet, I see shockingly little reflexivity among both local food activists and writers as to how “going local’ might affect places that retain post-colonial dependencies on export markets. To be sure, any web site that hosts a “locavores challenge” posts many more comments from potential enrollees that express concern about giving up coffee for their morning wake-up than what it might mean for coffee farmers in, say, Sumatra.

SS: In this context, what is the importance of alternative food networks, or “morally embedded” supply chains, in the context of the transformation of the political economy of food since the 1990s? How does the emergence of alternative food change the way we read food as a commodity?

JG: One of the aspects of alternative food networks and so-called morally-embedded supply chains that interest me is the way in which they seem to replicate, and even create neoliberal modes of governance. We see projects which are putatively in opposition to neoliberalism that in some cases uncritically take up ideas of consumer choice, value capture, and pre-political communitarianism, while negating the role of the state as provider of services or regulator of externalities – all ideas which seem standard to neoliberalism.

I am particularly struck by various voluntary labeling schemes that use private organizations to certify to particular standards, giving consumers the choice to purchase particular social and environmental qualities. Voluntary food labels are in some respects analogs to the very things they are purported to resist, namely property rights that allow these ascribed commodities to be traded in a global market. Given that virtually all of these labels are incentivized through intentional barriers to entry, they are at best redistributional, meaning that they may allow producers who are somehow “better” in the their practices to capture more value (putatively from so-called middlemen but ultimately from wealthier consumers). Even then, different sorts of labels significantly vary as to whom and what they protect, and many commodities (and producers) in the world do not stand a chance of being valorized with a label at all. Recent research on fair trade, which is arguably the most explicitly redistributional of the lot, casts doubt even on that quality.

In the past my critiques of these labels has been rather hard-boiled, based more in political economy than, for example, the politics of affect. So I have been giving more thought to the non-structural effects of alternative food, and particularly questions regarding political subjectivity. Whose desires are reflected in the constitution of these networks and sites? What sort of activities does consumption of alternative food incite? Do these networks bring reciprocity between producers and consumers? On this last question, the research does not seem point to reciprocity or transparency – or even reflexivity on the part of those promulgating these alternatives.

For example, Catherine Dolan’s recent work on fair trade tea [2] suggests that producers of fair trade tea know little about the consumers of their tea and assume that fair trade is yet another form of development charity. And yet, in a world where activist politics have been highly constrained by larger political economic forces, these alternative networks may be one of the few tools available to provoke a broader politics. It is possible that social movements around labeling may help embarrass (or encourage) major suppliers into changing their practices as Unilever did in nearly abandoning the use of genetically engineered supplies of grain for its European market. They may make transparent corporate vulnerabilities that activists can then exploit. Or they might produce more radical and collectivist political subjectivities, including among those who are not particularly “helped” by these labels. The jury is still out on the multiplier effects of these networks, I think.

SS: A December 2003 article in The Economist hastily summarizes the relationship between body politics, public health, food and globalization in the following way: “When the world was a simpler place, the rich were fat, the poor were thin, and right-thinking people worried about how to feed the hungry. Now, in much of the world, the rich are thin, the poor are fat, and right-thinking people are worrying about obesity.”[3] How do we deconstruct this? And in what sense does it gesture to what Raj Patel calls the “big fat contradiction” (1) of the global food system [4]: the coexistence of a starving multitude and an “obesity epidemic,” or of what you and Melanie Dupuis have termed “accumulation by engorgement” (427)  [5] and “accumulation by dispossession” [6] (the latter of which, in the context of the current food crisis, takes the particular form of food dependency)?

JG: Seriously, is it not possible to call into question the violence of the global food economy without picking on fat people?

Ok, I am working on a book on this issue and I can’t do it justice here, but here’s the basic argument: Many of the changes in the food system that are associated with obesogeneity can easily be traced back to the political economy of neoliberalism (particularly as it has taken shape in the US). Specifically forms of food processing, marketing, and regulation must be couched in larger transformations of post-war capitalism, in important respects outgrowths of falling profits, declining US economic competitiveness, and a political project of the right to remove obstacles seen as unfriendly to business. Specifically I would point to the persistence of geo-politically driven agricultural subsidies, the treadmill “logics” of intensifying farm production and cheapening food production, the reconfigured mandates of regulatory institutions, and the reduction in entitlement funding and real wages so that cheap food has come to substitute for income. Neoliberalism as a political economic project has also encouraged particular forms of urban economic development, from fast-food-choked strip malls to suburban environments hostile to walking to gentrified urban cores.

Yet, as your question suggests, not everyone is getting fat because of this so-called obesogenic environment. Indeed, these same policies have also produced profitable solutions to these problems, from food-like products that do not metabolize to weight loss-inducing pharmaceuticals to storefront exercise gyms. Creating purchasable solutions to the problems it generates has provided a doubly good fix for the crisis of capital accumulation that underlies the neoliberal political economic project.

Of course you can’t understand difference in body size without understanding the class differentiation that has been furthered with neoliberalism, and we need to understand this in a cultural way. These are ideas I am still working out, but I will say that current cultures of the body place a high premium on thinness as both a performance and requisite of success, while those who have little chance for success in the neoliberal economy have little to gain, so to speak, by trying to meet impossible bodily ideals. No matter what, it seems to me that the moral outrage with fat gets it wrong.

SS: In “Can’t Stomach It,” the piece you wrote for Gastronomica, you note the “moral superiority” with which “[Michael] Pollan et. al” engage with contemporary anxieties surrounding food (75). [7] How are the ethics of consumer choice or consumer subjectivity framed in popular food criticism? What is the main source of your impatience with Pollan et. al (as you cheekily put it), and how do you imagine the role of the intellectual in terms of the politics of her intervention, not just in the economics of food, but also in the interest of sustaining a dialectical tension in thinking about the “cultural, ecological and political-institutional” worlds of food, especially in a time of crisis?

JG: There is so much to say about Michael Pollan. He provides new writing fodder for me regularly. Just last week he had a piece in the New York Times (reference via endnote) that asked people to send him their food rules. All of the examples he provided of a possible rule, including one from his own grandmother (“I always like to leave the table a little bit hungry”), were about eating in a more refined way – more or less. For that matter, the last third of his latest book, In Defense of Food, reads like a diet book, a variation on the theme of Why French Women Don’t Get Fat, which is reportedly because they slowly eat deliciously prepared food with just the right amount of wine. They take pleasure in it – just not too much. Pollan is usually spot-on with his critiques of industrial food, but he often ends up in a messianic place that I find, well, distasteful – namely, he tells readers to buy and eat just like him. He appeals in that way to those who already are refined eaters and want to feel ethically good about it.

Yet, what really makes me impatient with Pollan is lines such as the following, also from In Defense of Food: “Not everyone can afford to eat high-quality food in America, and that is shameful: however, those of us who can, should . . .” (184).[8] To me, this is a punt, and an indefensible one. It’s not only that he shrugs his shoulders at issues of food security; it is that he sets aside the problem that the world food system developed through colonial labor and land relationships and that today’s food system, with its uneven neoliberalizations, continues to contribute to this structural inequality – as does eating “just like him.” Food politics cannot just be about the food.

SS: In this issue Michael Perelman, when asked about the hegemonic effects of economics textbooks in thinking about food, responds that “the textbooks have more to learn from the activists than the activists could get from the textbooks.” This, because the texts to which he refers merely reproduce normative neoclassical economic ideas about how to govern the flow of commodities, as well as the bodies which produce and consume them. What challenges do educators face in trying to negotiate the institutionalized discourses which obtain about food? And what is your sense of how educators might go about coordinating a critical or, dare we say, radical pedagogy of food?

JG: I think it’s pretty difficult to talk about food pedagogy without considering how food itself has become such a huge part of the social imaginary. Courses on food (from social, critical angles) are proliferating these days and students can’t seem to get enough. On my campus alone, about four social science faculty members regularly “teach food” and the rush to enroll in these courses seems unreal at times. So this tells you something about the current zeitgeist. For that reason alone, I think a radical pedagogy of food must provincialize its object of study and ask what is it about food that has interpolated relatively privileged people into studying it and/or reading about it.

No doubt a lot lies with the pleasure of talking about food (as some sort of surrogate for eating it?) and that food choice as politics has gained such traction. But since I’m somewhat critical of this move, in the several related courses I teach on food I make a big point of not making it about what I eat or my students should eat.

That said, it is hard to resist the “what to eat” move. For example, many food courses these days have students do commodity chain analyses so students learn how food commodities are constituted across the globe. Students learn a lot from these exercises: for instance, that not all crops are grown on giant factory farms, that unexpected places are sources of certain raw materials, that fair trade food isn’t as easy to trace as its claims to “transparency” promise.

The problem with this exercise is that for many students the take-home lesson is that knowing where you’re food comes from is of utmost importance – and this leads many students into what Branden Born and Mark Purcell call the “local trap” (195): the presumption that proximity is a good proxy for just or sustainable.[9] I want my students to go further than that. I push them to reflect on their own desires about food (and teaching others what to eat), including pushing them on questions of who gets the privilege of knowing food and eating locally. A radical pedagogy must go beyond self-satisfying food choices and have students reflect on potential levers of transformation.

Endnotes

[1] Brenner, N. and Theodore, N. “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’.” Antipode 34, 349-379. 2002.

[2] Dolan, Catherine. “The Mists of Development: Fairtrade in Kenya Tea Fields.” Globalizations 5(2). 1-14. 2008.

[3] Anonymous, “The world’s expanding waistline.” The Economist 11 Dec 2003 <http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=2282754>.

[4] Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. New York: Melville House Publishing, 2008.

[5] Guthman J, and DuPuis M. “Embodying neoliberalism: economy, culture, and the politics of fat.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 24(3) 427 – 448. 2006.

[6] Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford, 2005.

[7] Julie Guthman, “Can’t Stomach It: How Michael Pollan et al. Made Me Want to Eat Cheetos.” Gastronomica 7:3 (Summer 2007): 75-79. 2.

[8] Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food. New York: Penguin Books Inc, 2008.

[9] Born, Branden and Mark Purcell. “Avoiding the Local Trap: Scale and Food Systems in Planning Research.” Journal of Planning Education and Research, Vol. 26, No. 2, 195-207 (2006).

At a time when the fear and turmoil found in the U.S. is perhaps greater than it has been since the 1960s and equally full of contradictions–continuing fear of terrorism, patriotism fostering a lust for war, collapsing trust in corporate accounting–it seems appropriate to reflect on the role of academics in social protest. Or maybe more important, what are the limits of their role? Can they only follow along while a movement takes place outside their reach? Does the University campus remain an important center of social activism? These are some of the questions that framed the interview that follows.

Gabriel Noah Brahm & Paul Mason Fotsch: Many people who see Herbert’s Hippopotamus ask why you did not include interviews with other friends, activists and philosophers who knew Marcuse. How did you decide who was relevant to interview or include in the film?

Alexander Juutilainen: It is most often a mixture of the story you choose to tell and your resources. Since I chose to have Marcuse’s philosophy and life be exemplified by the political turmoil generated by his presence at the University of California and amid the socio-economic landscape of San Diego and Southern California, it obviously made some people more relevant to my story than others.

You also have to remember that this documentary was made on a shoestring budget. It was made with the support and help from many people and sponsors and on a budget that was under a fourth of what such a documentary for broadcast normally would cost. Making a documentary is a very practical undertaking and in many ways closer to making sculpture or carpentry. Even if a specific person or some footage may be relevant and interesting for your piece, the question is always if you can afford to conduct such an interview or afford to license the specific material. As I began doing research, a majority of archival footage I managed to uncover was from the years 1968 to 1971. The footage was very interesting, it was donated to the project, and nobody had seen it for 30 years. Finding this resource naturally influenced who I would interview.

I wish that I had had the funds or resources to interview people such as Jürgen Habermas, who visited Marcuse in San Diego, or Leo Lowenthal. There is also some interesting footage of Marcuse with Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis from the Dialectics of Liberation conference in London from 1967. I know it exists. I know it’s interesting. But, then you ask yourself why do I want to show Marcuse in London during the documentary? Is this event central to your story? Even if it is, how much trouble and expense do you want to put into getting it? These dilemmas are much more true for an independent filmmaker than a huge television station.

GNB/PMF: Given that you made the documentary independently, how long did it take?

AJ: On and off, working occasionally on other jobs, about five years.

GNB/PMF: What inspired you to make a film about Marcuse in the first place?

AJ: Marcuse is commonly regarded as one of the major philosophers and influential social critics of the Twentieth Century. I had come across his writings in Europe as a student of philosophy and also later during my studies in Modern Culture and Communication Arts. Actually, the fact that Marcuse had been teaching at UC, San Diego was one of the few things I knew about the University before I arrived in San Diego in the early 1990s, and I therefore expected some sort of recognition at the place. But after my arrival, I noticed a peculiar absence and lack of any trace and was instead faced with numerous and often, I realize now, completely fabricated stories about Marcuse and student protests, Ronald Reagan’s attempt to fire him, Angela Davis, the American Legion, etc. I felt that something truly traumatic had happened to the institution called the University of California, and I decided to explore it further. So, the project slowly grew in dimensions and scope.

A major turning point was the archival research I undertook. I knew that the media had covered the events surrounding Marcuse. But the question was, did the clips still exist? And if they did, where were they? I was fortunate because newsreels were still shot on 16mm film in the late 60s. If these events had happened some years later, they would have been shot on videotape and most likely recorded over or lost today. This doesn’t mean the research was an easy process. I remember a specific archive bringing me the newsreels from the year 1968. They rolled in 30 boxes, each box containing 200-300 rolls of film, the clips randomly tossed into the box, not cataloged, and often without even a clip name. It took some assistants and me over two months to view, clean, repair, catalog, and transfer the material. The lucky outcome was that much of the footage was donated to the documentary in exchange for my restoration work. So, after going through the same procedure in different archives and tracking down people involved in the whole ordeal, I ended up with over 50 hours of newsreels, interviews, stills, and audiotape.

The question was now which story to tell about Marcuse. I could have told many stories, but I thought the material leaned towards focusing specifically on his life in San Diego. I found it both intriguing and ironic that he spent his later years in San Diego, California – a town and a state that in many ways exactly stood for the things he had criticized so intensely. San Diego was in the late 60s a booming Southern Californian community, a conservative and affluent suburban society centered around a navy base where the prosperity was largely based on the military industry. San Diego became the metaphor for the paradise of the postwar consumer society. I thought it would be interesting to see what had happened when a person such as Marcuse plunged into this community teaching students critical theory about the affluent society.

GNB/PMF: Some might find a philosopher’s involvement in sixties activism to be a somewhat unusual topic. How is a film about Marcuse important today?

AJ: I see the importance in two ways. First, the story about the political struggles surrounding Marcuse and the student movement seems in many ways so distant from the daily activities of students today. Many students have told me that they were simply not aware what was happening on their campuses thirty years ago. Secondly, I think Marcuse had something important to say about the advanced industrial society or postwar consumer society that we in many ways still live in. His analysis of the specific historical situation that occurred in the postwar societies of the Western World during the 50s and 60s changed the formulation of a relevant philosophy of protest.

Marcuse is important because of the contradiction he found inherent to the affluent society that San Diego exemplified: it appeared to satisfy our immediate needs, appeared to “deliver the goods”, and appeared to be the ultimate sign of progress while at the same time it depended on consumption of waste, planned destruction, and the military industrial complex. Furthermore, and more importantly, he asked the question: what is the nature of political protest in a totally managed or administrated society?

Earlier revolutions and social unrest in the Twentieth Century were based on basic needs not being delivered, such as lack of food, low wages, not enough land for farming, etc. That was not the case anymore. So much so, that the working class even had been co-opted. What to do? Marcuse’s search for new agents of social change directed him to certain marginalized groups that were excluded from the system of abundance–the outsiders and the outcasts–such as certain ethnic minority groups, students, and later on women. While some might say that these conditions have changed somewhat or that political groupings have become more complicated, the search for such new agents of change still remain. Especially with less and less participation of the average citizen in the political process because of growing mistrust to politicians and government, the decrease of an independent critical media, the globalization of power and ownership, and the corporate scandals currently happening in the US, the question is still relevant. How do we engage each other in a critical philosophy of protest as citizens today?

GNB/PMF: To engage people in critical thought a philosopher must in some way connect with the audience. One of the paradoxical moments in Herbert’s Hippopotamus comes near the end when Marcuse is asked if he thinks that student activists understood One Dimensional Man. His response is to grin and say, “That I do not know”. This indicates the problematic nature of presenting complex theoretical concepts to a general population, and yet you have received criticism for not exploring Marcuse’s theories in greater depth. How do you respond to these criticisms?

AJ: There is no way that you can explain the depth and complexity of the writings of a philosopher such as Marcuse in 56 minutes. It’s just not possible. You probably cannot even do that in a 56 minute lecture.

Also, I think some of this criticism is based on certain notions and expectations of scholarly and literary work that do not correspond well to the distinctiveness of the audio-visual medium. Film and video making is about arranging concrete elements of sound and images into some meaningful whole. In the classical dramatic sense this arrangement is based on how people act and react and not what people say and tell you. Filmmaking is an experiential medium more than a conceptual medium – it is not about presenting ideas only. Robert Richardson once said that literature deals with making the significant (the ideas) visible while film often tries to make the visible significant. If you don’t have these concrete elements of visuals and sound, you simply don’t have a film. You might have something else such as a slide show, a lecture or a radio show with illustrations. A documentary cannot and should not be a book, a Ph.D. dissertation, or high prose in literature. It’s none of those. The audience knows it. They find such programs pretentious and condescending.

I wanted to make Marcuse a real human being and not present a bundle of philosophical concepts that while interesting in a philosophical treatise seldom make good documentary material. I wanted actual events–such as Marcuse’s participation in a student sit-in, or him breaking the silence in the silent protest, or taking a walk on the beach every morning, or challenging the Playboy Magazine interview–to be concrete examples of his persona and thinking as a philosopher. If you know Marcuse’s writings it is not difficult to see how his actions relate to his philosophy. As a filmmaker I wanted to give the viewer the experience of a historical era that was influenced by Marcuse’s philosophy illustrated through his actions and student protests. If you want the conceptual depth and complexity of Marcuse’s writings, read his books.

GNB/PMF: Does this mean that one cannot present philosophical ideas and critical theory on film or video?

AJ: No – I think you can. And some are very good at it–such as Resnais, Godard, Kluge, and more recently filmmakers such as Rea Tajiri and Kidlak Tahimik. But, the question is always the filmmaker’s degree of voice. In documentary you always risk placing yourself in a position of authority overtly or covertly. I am not in the position as a filmmaker to demonstrate the true and quintessential Marcuse. I didn’t want to make a documentary with underlying nostalgic music and with grandfatherly and reassuring voice-over telling the audience about the true character of Marcuse as the greatest American in the history of Western philosophy. I cannot do this. Another criticism I often hear in the same vein is that “You did not get the essential Marcuse”–after which I am presented with a lecture about his essence. While I do not mind discussing Marcuse and his philosophy with anyone, at the same time I do think that such an approach is contrary to Marcuse’s philosophy. When I asked Angela Davis a similar question about what the single most important contribution of Marcuse had been, she gave me the answer I deserved. It would not give justice to the complexity and depth of Marcuse’s thinking to ask for any single essence. He always had the ability to change and adapt to the given new historical situation.

GNB/PMF: In Europe philosophers and academics seem more successful in reaching a general audience than in the United States. You note in your film how strange it is to have philosophers like Davis and Marcuse discussed in the news. Do you agree that there is less regard for academics in the U.S.? Is this part of an “anti-intellectual” bias?

AJ: I’m not sure the anti-intellectualism you are speaking about originates only from the cultural differences between Europe and the U.S. Yes, many European countries–such as France–do teach subjects such as philosophy already in primary school. But, I think we should also look for the origin of this resentment elsewhere.

I think we should ask if this antagonism really is against intellectuals or against academic experts. During the production of Herbert’s Hippopotamus I read with great interest Russell Jacoby’s book The Last Intellectual. Following Jacoby’s analysis, I think it is fair to describe Marcuse as belonging to a generation of intellectuals that saw themselves having the responsibility and obligation to publicly engage in social and cultural issues without answering to anyone – meaning without submitting to any authority. For me the central phrase here is to publicly engage. Great intellectuals from this generation such as Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, C. Wright Mills, Umberto Eco, and others wrote dense philosophical work as well as more accessible novels, theater plays, newspaper articles and reviews. They wrote in an informed but common vernacular. How much they succeeded in engaging a large public is another question, but at least the attempt was there.

Where is the new generation of intellectuals today? The answer by Jacoby is very depressing. Nowhere. Today the general public’s perception of intellectuals is altogether different. Intellectuals are for the most part seen as academic experts who create a body of incomprehensible and perhaps radical work only to be understood among experts themselves. The intellectuals as such “experts” are perceived as technical specialists that are dragged in front of the camera to articulate academic or scientific knowledge. But, the term “expert” has a tone of authority that is far from Marcuse’s philosophy of liberation. I think it is this form of authoritative intellectualism that the general public is reacting against. This activity is quite different from the life of an intellectual such as Sartre, who besides writing philosophical texts also wrote theater plays, novels, was a cultural critic for newspapers, imprisoned for being a member of the French resistance, and participated in the May ’68 events. You might object and point to people such as Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky who are writing for a wider public today, but as much as I admire their work, they can hardly be classified as belonging to a new generation.

GNB/PMF: Certainly there are contemporary popular writers who do work that is meant to be thought provoking, although it is unclear whether they would be called intellectuals. Many of them are investigative journalists such as Robert Caro, Eric Schlosser or Barbara Ehrenreich.

AJ: I do not exclude that intellectuals can and have been operating outside academia. Umberto Eco has written many newspaper articles that have later been published, and Susan Sontag has recently created a very interesting debate in the New York Times about the concepts of courage and cowardice in relation to the 9/11 terrorists highjackers. Also, remember that the Frankfurt School was not functioning as a university institution in the traditional sense, and that Marcuse himself was working for the OSS (the department preceding the CIA) during WWII. Many intellectuals have done their work outside the university.

GNB/PMF: But might the term intellectual also be applied to writers on the right who get significant publicity such as David and Abigail Thernstrom or Lynn Cheney? These writers even have academic credentials. The term “critical intellectual,” someone who challenges power structures and champions the marginalized, might be more appropriate to draw a parallel with Marcuse. On the other hand, what about a writer like Michael Moore (also a documentary filmmaker) who has had great success skewering the powerful? We probably would not call him an intellectual, but we would certainly call him critical, so is the “intellectual” or “academic” piece even necessary?

AJ: I do not see how constructing the term “critical intellectual” is going to achieve anything. Are there intellectuals who are not critical? Not in the way that I think of such activity. Also, how does your concept of being a “critical intellectual” differ from how I have been talking about it? How are “critical intellectuals” challenging power structures and championing the marginalized differently? The questions where and how you go about being an intellectual are important to me, so I would carefully inspect or challenge such a notion without these indications.

If writers on the right confront illegitimate social structures and oppressive ideology without submitting to any authority and in the broader public sphere they might be considered intellectuals. Certainly the right has been better in engaging the general public in America during the 1990s on issues such as criticizing the state or “big government.” But, my experience is that such writers at the same time advocate other forms of authority such as duty to your country, a strong military, or a powerful police state that at the same time leaves private enterprise with the absolute right to accumulate wealth. In those cases I do not think the term intellectual is appropriate and should not be applied. However, as I have already said, I do not see how academic credentials are necessary to generate intellectual endeavors.

GNB/PMF: You seem to believe that academia is in part responsible for the lack of critical public dialogue today. Near the end of the film you comment that many of the 1960s activists wound up in the university as teachers and that this is ironic in some sense because academic freedom today means only the “freedom to be academic.” What do you mean by this?

AJ: I saw the whole range of events leading up to Marcuse’s forced retirement as foreshadowing what was generally to become of academia. As soon as Marcuse broke out of his Platonic role as a university professor and publicly engaged on issues regarding the Vietnam War, he was forced out by the university institution itself under pressure from Governor Reagan. Since the emergence of Reaganism on a national level, and in Congress, the universities have become the last refuge in an increasingly hostile environment, but at the same time they have also become more comfortable. Moreover, they now perpetuate strictly academic communities. Increasingly papers, books, and journals are written only for academic seminars and conferences. The problem is not that university professionals have deserted the public today, but that they have not sought it in the first place. I see many reasons for this. Campuses have moved from urban centers to suburbia, students from urban coffee shops and streets to campus cafeterias and suburban malls. Universities have become more isolated from the rest of society and developed into professional and interdependent enclaves. Academic freedom is mainly exercised within this context, and this is all quite different from Marcuse’s era. I say all this at the same time as I regularly teach at a university. I admit being part of the problem, but that doesn’t mean that it does not exist.

GNB/PMF: At the same time, the documentary seems to have a wide audience in Universities. Undergraduate students find it fascinating. They love the image of Marcuse and identify with his struggle against the UCSD administration, the Vietnam War, and consumer society. They say they feel inspired by the film, and their reactions during it–of laughter and booing and so forth–suggest a clear identification. Students are still attracted to Marcuse. What do you make of this? And what do you make of the fact that many of them then take out their cell phones to call their friends and tell them about it while getting into the SUVs their parents bought them?

AJ: Considering how many people today use cell phones and drive SUVs from all groups of society, I am not sure what to say about your observation. Didn’t the rebels in Chiapas use computers? My immediate answer would be that if Marcuse’s philosophy is disseminated through cell phones let it be so. But, if your question addresses if it is possible to read and understand Marcuse in the backdrop of middle-class values and lifestyles, then I would answer that the student movement and the New Left in the 60s very much consisted of affluent sons and daughters from the middle-class. What is remarkable for me was their attempt, despite their backgrounds, to break through the confined university life, reach out, and coalesce with other groups in society with different class, ethnic, or cultural backgrounds. This sense of compassion for fellow citizens and the effort to find mutual understanding and support among communities seems to be missing and not really on the agenda in our culture today.

GNB/PMF: But what about “The Great Refusal”? Weren’t we supposed to refuse something? Are fancy cars and expensive gadgets things we’re now supposed to accept, from a Marcusean perspective?

AJ: The Great Refusal is not just a refusal of everything. It is a concept that is related to when non integrated groups of outsiders or outcasts in an affluent society bring about a total social upheaval. It is a revolutionary and somewhat erotic term that is influenced by Rosa Luxemburg and the surrealist writings of Andre Breton. In this respect I think focusing on cell phones is beside the point. I do not think cell phones are luxury items in the same way they were even 5 years ago. Cell phones are cheaper and even have practical and useful applications in today’s world. Cell phones are widely used in South East Asia and Europe much more than the U.S. In countries such as Italy and Finland, 70% of the population use cell phones, and in some developing countries cell phones are preferred over traditional phone lines because of the country’s poor infrastructure. Definitely there are certain trades such as carpentry, road construction, forestry, even filmmaking, where cell phones make the work much easier. I doubt that they are expensive gizmos only.

If your observation indicates that cell phones are unnecessary gadgets because of their inherent and planned obsolescence, then your assessment is more pertinent. But, then we also have to put into question the use of DVDs, digital cameras, microwave ovens, portable CD players, and computers. If you want to talk about a critical approach to emerging technologies, the planned obsolescence of computer operating systems and hardware technology is much more outrageous in my mind. But, does this mean that we are not going to use computers? This would even make on line journals such as Politics and Culture impossible. Instead we have to talk about the whole socio-economic system that promotes and perpetuates certain uses of technology.

The overall refusal to play the game, not to be constantly available via pagers and cell phones, refusing to be checked and analyzed all the time via computer, bank tellers, and various plastic cards, to protest such unnecessary repression and instead find alternative and more constructive or compassionate uses of your time and energy is closer to Marcuse’s critical philosophy. Protesting the U.S. military involvement in countries abroad and the current suppression of basic civil liberties has the potential to change much more in our present society than refusing to use cell phones on university campuses. Such a notion of the Great Refusal is much more meaningful and also more practical to me.

As for the response of students to the film, it is rewarding that the documentary has been used, and still is used, in college campuses as a means of sparking discussions about education and campus activism. I am pleased that younger students find Marcuse interesting today, and I hope it will lead them to explore his ideas and analyze the purpose of their education. At the same time, my concerns are if this interest you describe reflects critical thinking and awareness of political and cultural issues or just an entertaining flashback. If I failed as a filmmaker it is not with regards to the people I chose to interview, but whether I managed to evoke insight and understanding in the viewer rather than nostalgic curiosity. We are now in a different historical situation where student protests do not have the same social impact as then.

By the way, I was nearly slaughtered for saying this during a screening at UC, Santa Barbara most likely because I was showing the documentary to a group of activists. The audience there felt that I romanticized the 60s student movement and put it up on a pedestal. But, I am not sure who is really romanticizing what. In the 1960s the student movement did achieve concrete results though perhaps in its own self destructive way. I do not see that today. I do not see one million students protesting nationwide today. I do not see an organization such as SDS with 200,000 members. I do not think it has the same effect anymore. The university has adapted to activism and found successful ways to counter it. Campuses are built with less open spaces to where students can hold demonstrations; this is no secret. Tuition has sky rocketed and the students are under harder financial hardship. Society today is also more fragmented. A new historical situation requires a new political strategy, and I sense that merely re-introducing student protests without considering the present situation can be not much more than a romantic move. On the other hand, nobody predicted that the affluent middle-class children of the 50s would take the streets in the 60s in protest. So who knows?

GNB/PMF: Then what do you think of the global justice movement? After the massive demonstrations in Seattle, there have been significant protests at meetings among global economic leaders in cities throughout the world. Linked to this, on campuses students are protesting sweatshop production of university t-shirts and demanding living wages for service employees.

AJ: I have great respect and admiration for the work of today’s global justice movement, and it might gain in strength, but I do not see this movement as a student movement per se. Besides, the student movement of the 1960-70s was a global student movement. The campus activism that you speak about definitely has its function, but it just does not compare to the social turmoil related to the student activism of the 1960s. You don’t have a Daniel Cohn-Bendit or Rudi Dutschke traveling across borders to support protest against sweat shop productions in the US. You don’t have the Governor sending in the National Guard to university campuses. The social unrest in France during May ’68 included hundreds of thousands of students in coalition with 10 million workers in a national strike that basically paralyzed the country. You don’t have a president Lyndon Johnson being faced with the difficulty of continuing the war in Vietnam without losing control of the population because of anti-war protests. The sense of diverse representation is perhaps stronger, but I do not see any major coalescing of groups.

GNB/PMF: But isn’t there a potential for alliances that cross classes in a way that might not have existed in the 1960s because the student body is more diverse today? More students of color and students with working class backgrounds now have access to the University. These first generation college students probably have a stronger connection to those outside of academia.

AJ: The potentials for creating new alliances might be greater, but where are these new alliances? Because you have access to an institution of higher education does not mean that you automatically become a student activist. Maybe the university is no longer the place to carry out political protest. Maybe such political activity is better outside the university. You also seem to assume that because you have a working class background or are a student of color that you automatically have access to the general population of activists outside the university itself. I don’t think these relationships are so straightforward. The Mormon Church is also more diverse today, but that doesn’t mean that critical theory and social activism is advocated from there.

Besides, the economic pressure of high tuition is especially hard on students today. I can feel the increased strain on students and constant demands to perform, a situation which is different from the time I was a student. I think the university has changed in character and is more of a career training center than a place to experiment and propose alternative human interactions while criticize social structures. I’m afraid I can’t be more jubilant about the current situation on university campuses. I’m not saying that the potential is not there, or that it could not happen again, but that it is not happening today.

Gabriel Noah Brahm and Paul Mason Fotsch are members of the Santa Cruz Editorial Collective of P&C.

Interviewed by Max Haiven

Silvia Federici is a researcher, activist and educator. She was born and raised in Italy but came to the US in 1967 on a scholarship to study Philosophy at the University of Buffalo. Since then, she has taught at several universities in the US and also at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. She is now Emerita Professor at Hofstra University (Long Island, NY) and lives in Brooklyn.

A veteran feminist activist, Federici’s work is informed by and in dialogue with the many struggles which have animated her career. Since the early 1970s Federici was, along with theorists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, a founder of the International Feminist Collective and an organizer with the famous Wages for Housework campaign. This movement brought together a global alliance of feminist groups to make a revolutionary challenge at the very hinge of capitalist and patriarchal power by demanding economic sovereignty for women engaged in the elemental labour of social reproduction.

Federici has also been a central part of the Midnight Notes Collective and a co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA), a support organization for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against structural adjustment. Between 1991 and 2003 she was a co-editor of the CAFA Bulletin. In 1995, she co-founded the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) anti-death penalty project.

Her ground-breaking 2004 book Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia), received critical laudations and was much talked of in both academic and activist circles, supplying as it did a capacious, lucid and historically rigorous picture of the intersections of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism and violence from the 15th to the 18th century. The book served as a crucial corrective to both Marxist analyses of the period of primitive accumulation which write gender out as well as to the fashionable academic discourse of biopolitics. The latter, Federici argues, has tended, in the work of both Foucault and his followers, to forget the witch trials of the 16th and 17th century. These were part and parcel of the systematic destruction of women’s power over biological and social reproduction and social creativity, a process essential to the enclosure and colonial movements and the scene of the nascence of both capitalism proper and the modern state.

In other work, Federici has addressed themes of enclosure, colonialism, labour, patriarchy and racism in areas as diverse as the advance of capitalist accumulation, international development policy, the labour of “immaterial workers,” the analysis of social movement strategy and anti-colonial struggle.

In this interview Federici shares her thoughts on the relationship between food, agricultural production, women’s work, global capitalist accumulation and struggle around the world.

Max Haiven (MH) for Politics and Culture: Your historical work has focused on the way the process of what Marx called “primitive accumulation”—the way capitalism is created out of the destruction of other ways of life—has relied upon the systematic destruction of women’s power and the “accumulation of divisions” amongst the working class. Can you speak to how this relates to the history of food politics?

Silvia Federici (SF): There is a direct relation between the destruction of the social and economic power of women in the “transition to capitalism” and the politics of food in capitalist society.

In every part of the world, before the advent of capitalism, women played a major role in agricultural production. They had access to land, the use of its resources and control over the crops they cultivated, all of which guaranteed their autonomy and economic independence from men. In Africa, they had their farming and cropping systems, which were the source of a specific female culture, and they were in charge of the selection of seeds, an operation that was crucial to the prosperity of the community and whose knowledge was transmitted through the generations. The same was true of women’s role in Asia and the Americas. In Europe as well, until the late medieval period, women had land-use rights and the use of the “commons”—woods, ponds, grazing grounds—that were an important source of sustenance. In addition to farming with men, they had their gardens where they cultivated vegetables as well as medicinal herbs and plants.

Both in Europe and the regions the Europeans colonized, primitive accumulation and capitalist development changed this situation. With land privatization and the expansion of monetary relations, a deeper division of labor developed in agriculture that separated food production for profit from food production for direct consumption, devalued reproductive work, starting from subsistence farming, and appointed men as the chief agricultural producers, whereas women were relegated to the rank of “helpers,” field hands, or domestic workers.

In colonial Africa, for example, British and French officers systematically favored men with regard to allocations of land, equipment, and training, the mechanization of agriculture being the occasion for a further marginalization of women’s agricultural activities. They also disrupted female farming by forcing women to assist their husband in the cultivation of cash crops, thus altering the power relations between women and men and instigating new conflicts between them. To this day, the colonial system, whereby land titles are given only to men, continues to be the rule for “development agencies” and not in Africa alone.

It must be said that men have been accomplices in this process, not only claiming control over women’s labor, but, in the face of growing land scarcity, conspiring to curtail women’ communal land-use rights (wherever these survived) by rewriting the rules and conditions of belonging to the community.

Despite women’s resistance to their marginalization, and their continuous engagement in subsistence farming and land reclamation struggles, these developments have had a profound effect on food production. As Vandana Shiva so powerfully described in her book Staying Alive [1], with the exclusion of women from access to land and the destruction of their control over food production, a large body of knowledge, practices, techniques that for centuries safeguarded the integrity of the land and the soil and the nutritional value of food has been lost.

Today, in the eyes of “development” agencies, the image of the female subsistence farmer is one of complete degradation. For example, this is how the latest World Bank annual report [2], dedicated to agriculture, begins “an African woman bent under the sun, weeding sorghum in an arid field with a hoe, a child strapped on her back–a vivid image of rural poverty.” For years in fact, following the footsteps of the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, the World Bank has tried to convince us that land is a dead asset when used for sustenance and shelter, and it becomes productive only when it is brought to a bank as collateral to gain credit. Behind this view is an arrogant philosophy that sees only money as creative of wealth, and believes capitalism and industry can recreate nature.

But the opposite is the case. With the demise of women’s subsistence farming, an incredible wealth is increasingly being lost, with severe consequences for the quality and quantity of the food available to us. What the Bank does not tell us is that much of the nutritional value of food is lost through the industrialization of agriculture. It also does not tell us that it is thanks to women’s struggles to continue to provide for their families’ consumption, often farming on unused public or private land, that millions of people have been able to survive in the face of economic liberalization.

MH: This all brings up the importance of agricultural labor, especially women’s labour, to the processes of globalization. What’s your sense of how agricultural labour fits into how we are conceptualizing global labour today. Numerically, it remains the biggest employer of people’s time, especially women’s time, world-wide. But it seems to fall off the radar in analyses of the changing forms of work and capital these days.

SF: It is a mistake for left movements to underestimate, practically and analytically, the importance of agricultural work in today’s political economy and, consequently, the transformative capacity of the struggles that farmers are making on this terrain. Certainly, the capitalists are not making this mistake. As the World Bank reports I mentioned (among other documents) indicate, the reorganization of agricultural relations always takes priority in its restructuring programs.

Although the number of people employed in agricultural work is impressive (probably amounting to two billion people), its importance is not to be measured only by its sheer size. Most important is the contribution agricultural work makes to social reproduction. As I mentioned, subsistence agriculture in particular, mostly done by women, enables millions to live who would otherwise have no means to purchase food on the market. Moreover, the revalorization, extension, and reintegration of agricultural labor into our lives are a must if we wish to construct a self-sufficient, non-exploitative society.

There are many political groups and movements, also in the industrialized North (eco-feminists above all), who recognize this need. It is also encouraging that, over the last two decades, we have seen the growth of urban garden movements, returning agricultural work to the heart of our industrial metropoles. But unfortunately, many in the left have not yet overcome the legacy of class struggle in the industrial era with its unique stresses on the factory and the industrial proletariat, as well as its belief in a technological road to liberation from capitalism.

For example, in Negri and Hardt’s Multitude [3] we read that the peasantry is destined to disappear from the historical scene because of the increasing integration of science and technology in the organization of agricultural production and the dematerialization of labor. It is disturbing that Negri and Hardt cite genetic engineering to support their view that the peasantry, as a historical category, is on its way to becoming defunct, given the fierce struggle farmers are conducting worldwide against genetically modified (GM) seeds, which, from this perspective, is already presumed defeated.

In reality, what we are witnessing is a process of re-peasantization and “rurbanization” which the present crisis can only accelerate. It’s already occurring in China: former immigrants to the towns are returning to the rural areas destined to become a body of laborers in constant motion between these poles. In Africa too, many urban dwellers are now returning to the village, but they often move back and forth, because they cannot find sufficient means of survival in any single place.

MH: There is something deeply chilling about this image of constantly moving labourers eking out an existence in a world of enclosures. I’m reminded of the sections of Caliban and the Witch where you talk about vagabonds as those condemned to wander having been dispossessed of their common lands through the medieval European enclosures. In the same vein, Zygmunt Bauman uses the metaphor of the vagabond (as compared to privileged “tourists”) to describe the paradigm of human dispossession under globalization [4]. It certainly should chasten the often too hasty celebration of mobility and unfettered existence which many on the left take to be the basis of a new politics. It brings up one of the things I’ve always admired about your work is your ability to keep globalization and colonialism central. Over the last few years you’ve done quite a bit of work on the new processes of enclosure in Africa under neocolonialism and neoliberalism. Can you tell us about how these are related to the ongoing global food crisis?

SF: A book would not be sufficient to describe the many interconnected ways in which colonialism, old and new, and neo-liberalism have contributed to created the present food crisis.

What we are witnessing today is but the latest act in long process that has been unfolding for at least two centuries. Colonialism disrupted the farming systems of Africa, Asia, South America through land expropriation, the introduction of cash crops and mono-cultures, and the enforcement of policies that degraded the environment (e.g. logging) or took workers away from food production.

Independence did not remedy this situation, although it allowed for the creation of domestic food markets. Land reform, based on the restitution of the stolen land which the former colonial subjects demanded as the fruit of the liberation struggle, was only very marginally realized. In a context of continuing economic and political dependence on the former colonial powers, the new states preserved the commercial, export-oriented, model of agriculture the colonizer had planted on their soils, even though it visibly undermined the ecology and the social relations of the rural areas, starting with the relations between women and men I mentioned earlier.

Two further blows to food production in the Third World in the post-independence period were the US sponsored “food aid programs,” a weapon in the Cold War as effective as military intervention in creating new forms of political control, and the “Green Revolution.” A bonus to the developing agribusiness, the Green Revolution industrialized Third World agriculture, made it dependent on imports from abroad (of hybrid seeds, pesticides and fertilizers), and expelled small farmers from the land.

By the early 1970s, the disastrous consequences of decades of colonial and post-colonial degradation of the rural environment became most visible in the form of recurrent famines, the most severe of which struck the countries of the Sahel Belt, just south of the Sahara, where more than 100,000 people died and many more were permanently displaced. By the 1980s, when, in the name of the debt crisis and economic recovery, the World Bank imposed on Third World nations across the world a rigid neo-liberal agenda, the agriculture of “developing countries” was already a disaster area, with famines and malnutrition an endemic reality. In this context, the requirements of “Structural Adjustment,” as the World Bank’s recipe was dubbed –(import liberalization, the removal of subsidies to farmers, the diversion of agricultural production towards the production of “high quality,” “luxury products” for the export market)– signaled a catastrophe in the make, as farmers’ organization, anti-globalization activists, environmentalists repeatedly warned. Add to it the effects on farming of logging, of long distance pollution, of trade agreements sanctioning the appropriation and patenting of Third World farmers’ traditional knowledge, the increasing and truly totalitarian corporate control of seed production, and you have what Mariarosa Dalla Costa defines as a “policy of genocide.” And, in fact, many farmers, especially in India, have taken their own lives, utterly ruined by these policies.

We must be careful, then, when we hear that the worldwide hikes in the price of food in recent months have been the outcome of the same speculative drive that created the housing bubble. Speculation is possible only under certain conditions and it is with these conditions that we need to be concerned.

What we are dealing with is a crisis far deeper than it is generally acknowledged and one that cannot be resolved through more “regulations.” Neo-liberalism, the speculative drives of the financial system, the promotion of bio-fuel, all have exacerbated trends that are inscribed in the logic of agriculture and food production under capitalism. As long as food is grown for profit and is a tool to be used to force people to accept the desired forms of exploitation, the creation of food scarcity will remain a dominant objective of agricultural production as planned by governments and financial institutions.

What is needed is a systemic change, a completely different form of agriculture, one that does not poison those who produce and consume food. And this requires, in the first place, a very different system of social relations and values.

MH: I’m glad you mentioned the way food and food politics become weapons to reproduce, spread and intensify systems of exploitation and, in particular, a capitalist and patriarchal system of value that is fundamentally genocidal. In this journal issue we’re trying to puzzle out this term “sovereignty” when it’s applied to food. On the one hand, the term signifies the fundamental principle of international politics of imperial Europe: the discrete nation-state and its exclusive right over territory and population. On the other, since anti-colonial movements of national liberation, the term sovereignty has taken on new meanings, speaking instead to the rights of people to self-determination. The term has also stimulated a lot of new reflections in critical theory camps with the renewed interest in biopolitics and globalization. What’s your sense of the term? Do you think it’s useful or appropriate? Where and when?

SF: I understand that we should be suspicious of the concept of “sovereignty” given its genetic association with the history of the nation-state. But in the case of “food sovereignty” we should focus on its use rather than on its genealogical meaning.

“Sovereignty” today, as used since the early 1990s by the farmers’ movements forming the Via Campesina coalition, is a weapon against the international corporate takeover of food production, against land expropriation, GM food and the industrialization and commercialization of agriculture. “Sovereignty,” in this sense, has none of the monarchical or nationalistic connotations historically associated with the term. It is a call for autonomy, for self-determination, and it is a rejection of the capitalist model of agriculture, that expropriates people from their lands and their traditional knowledge, subjects them to deadly international regulations, and turns food into a poison. As Mariarosa Dalla Costa puts it, “sovereignty” is an affirmation “of the right of populations to decide what to eat and how to produce it,” with a view of food as a “common good” rather than a commodity[5].

The question, of course, is whether “sovereignty” should be understood in the sense of total “autarchy.” Despite some declarations suggesting this possibility, I believe those who have such fears are mistaken. Broad trade networks and sophisticated systems of exchange existed in Africa and the Americas for centuries before the arrival of the Europeans, who proceeded to disrupt them. Thus, we should not be concerned that those calling for “sovereignty” today will be averse to trading with neighboring countries and in regional networks of the type that existed prior to colonization. A broad effort is already underway to construct regional exchanges based on the principles of dignity and autonomy. This will undoubtedly be one of the main challenges facing social justice movements in the years to come.

MH: On that note, your research on historical and contemporary women’s labour and struggle has been extremely insightful. How do women’s work and women’s struggle factor into the politics of food sovereignty today?

SF: Women’s work and struggles are central to the question of “food sovereignty” today. Women are those who pay the highest price for the increase in food prices, and the fact that their access to land and capacity as agricultural producers have been severely undermined is one of the reasons why such price hikes are possible.

As I mentioned earlier, women have been the world’s food producers and processors since time immemorial. To this day, in some parts of the world (Africa above all) 80% of the food consumed is produced by them. Their subsistence agriculture enables millions to live who could not otherwise purchase food on the market. However, their ability to grow food is increasingly threatened by increasing land scarcity, the privatization of land and water, the commercialization of agriculture, and the shift in most Third World countries to export-oriented agricultural production (now dubbed “high value” agriculture by the World Bank). These trends reinforce each other. To the extent that the land available to farmers is constantly diminishing, even in regions where the majority of the population depends on agriculture, women are subjected to exclusionary procedures by their male relatives and male members of their communities so that their access to land and customary rights are increasingly restricted. This represents a major threat to food production and the food consumption of large segments of the world population. It also places the control over the food consumed out of the hands of women.

A campaign is now taking place in Latin America and Africa, conducted by women’s groups and associations who demand that women’s rights to land be guaranteed in the laws and constitutions of their countries. Meanwhile, women have been at the forefront of urban farming and land struggles. In many African cities, from Accra to Kinshasa, they take over unused plots of land to grow maize, cassava, and peppers, changing the landscape of African towns, adding to their families’ food and monetary budget, and boosting their own economic independence. But the battleground remains the redistribution of lands and the guarantee that women have full access to them and to the waters than run through them. As feminist writers like Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva have stressed, food sovereignty is best guaranteed when food production is “in women’s hands,” in the sense that women have the means to control how food is produced and consumed.

MH: It seems that such demands have even made their way to the halls of international power, albeit in a typically neoliberal form. The recent micro-credit “movement” that is currently being promoted mobilizes the idea of Third-World women as crucial economic producers to promote small-scale loans. Critics argue that it is just a sort of neoliberalism from below which seeks to make women the new “economic men” of the Third World and agents of further enclosures. What do you make of this movement?

SF: World Bankers and other economic planners have discovered women as economic producers because they believe that women can be more easily controlled given their responsibility toward their families. They know that women will make any effort to ensure that their children are fed, or go to school, and also that they can be counted upon to be more responsible in the repayment of debts. They are also eager to integrate women into the money economy and discredit subsistence activities, which they consider a threat to the hegemony of the market.

Many women would most likely prefer to have land; that would give them more independence as well as the possibility of selling their surpluses to the local markets. But it is a solution economic planners never propose, because they oppose any redistributive policy, believing land should be used just for commercial purposes. Not surprisingly, a great advocate of micro-credit has been the World Bank, for its Structural Adjustment Programs are creating the very poverty and landlessness that the micro-credit schemes are supposed to “alleviate.”

Micro-credit schemes are also a source of divisions within the community and among women by selecting the “worthy” of credit from the unreliable and subjecting women to a reciprocal policing that undermines their solidarity. They are also a perverse ideological tool, suggesting that self-discipline is all that is needed for a positive outcome, thus drawing a blanket on the disastrous conditions in which the majority of women live in Indian or African villages, thanks to policies that are not of their making.

Critics also point out that debt repayment often comes at the expense of the needs of women’s families and that, after many years of experience, there is no evidence that micro-credit schemes have had any positive impact on the lives of women.

MH: While the global south has seen a huge rise in social movements contesting corporate globalization’s sovereignty over food it seems that food movements in the global north, and especially in North America, have tended to follow a consumerist logic (slow food, eating organic, etc.). Do you think there are new political possibilities for organizing around food that move us beyond this?

SF: The contrast is real, but a number of trends, in recent years, indicate that new ways of organizing around food are developing that move beyond the narrow concept of self-interest embodied in the demand for organic food.

First, there has been the urban gardens movement I mentioned before that has spread in several US cities. It has increasingly been acquiring a political dimension, thanks, in part, to the attacks against it by conservative politicians like former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. His plan, to bulldoze dozens of gardens in New York in the mid ’90s, raised everyone’s consciousness and had the effect of turning gardening into a movement. We now realize that the gardens are the seeds of another economy, independent of the market. Not only do they fulfill an economic function by providing cheaper, fresher food that many could not otherwise afford, but they create a new sociality; they are places of gathering, cooperation, reciprocal education between people of different ages and cultures.

There is also a new interest, among youth in North America, for farming, for learning the properties of herbs and plants, and for creating a new relationship with nature. I continuously meet young people in the U.S. who are genuinely disgusted with the consumerist culture that surrounds them, and become vegetarian or vegan out of concern for the ecological and human cost of cattle raising as well as their refusal of animal suffering. The spread of food co-ops, Community Supported Agriculture, and groups such as Food Not Bombs, indicate the existence of this new consciousness.

The problem we face in building a mass movement is that changing consciousness is not enough to change food buying and eating practice. Lack of access to land, lack of money, space and time (to shop, cook, and learn about the conditions of production of what we eat) are the main obstacles in this respect. The food movement must be embedded in broader movements addressing the totality of our lives. At the same time, social movements need to build campaigns to stop

* large-scale /industrial concentrations of animals, that are as cruel as they are disastrous for our ecology and our health.

* the continuing devastation of million of hectares of lands and miles of coastal areas for the purpose of cattle ranching and fish-farming, both of which displace and impoverish large populations, destroy the land, and produce poisonous food.

* the systematic expropriation of the natural wealth of Third World countries, under the guise of structural adjustment, which forces them to export their food, see their fisheries depleted, log their forests, waste their crop land for luxury fruits and vegetables and now even bio-fuel.

Lastly, it helps us to be cognizant of the struggles that other countries are making to refuse our food exports, which always provide us with interesting information we in North America are the last to acquire. For example, I have learned from the EU’s refusal to import frozen chickens from the US that, prior to packaging, they are plunged into a chlorine bath. I have learned that beef “produced” in the USA contains a cancer-producing hormone. And so forth.

Endnotes

[1] Shiva, V. (1988). Staying alive : women, ecology, and development. London, Zed Books.

[2] (2007). World development report 2008: agriculture for development. Washington, D.C., The World Bank.

[3] Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2004). Multitude: war and democracy in the age of Empire. New York: Penguin.

[4] Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization: the human consequences. New York: Columbia University Press.

[5] Dalla Costa, M. (2008). “Food Sovereignty, Peasants and Women.” The Commoner (12).