Third World feminist agrarian struggles and the colonial question for transnational feminist solidarity

abstract

Third World agrarian feminists have, through debates and struggles over the course of at least nine decades, explored the meanings of liberation – directly through involvement in land and agrarian struggles, and indirectly through solidarity with movements against raising other related social justice questions. The link between feminist agrarian movements and the broader movements is partly based on a common historical concern with gender as a colonising substructure. In the still largely agrarian south, for instance, the gender question to class would highlight the regimes of gendered labour which fracture solidarity among working people, and ask whether feminist resistance can undermine the basic gendered structure of reproduction that stabilised the colonial/capitalist mode of accumulation. To ethnicity, the question would be the extent to which feminist movements can overcome reactionary nationalisms in order to reach for global Black solidarities on the basis of shared transnational histories. To race, the question would be the extent to which Black feminists can overcome the universalising tendencies of empire in order to retain a structural critique of the ways in which structural racism aids capitalist exploitation of gendered labour. Drawing on these concerns, this article examines various contemporary feminist agrarian questions from a global south vantage point, highlighting the limitations which these questions present to the (de)colonial present, and possibilities that exist in articulating a position in which the colonial question is core to gender and Black feminist solidarities.

keywords:

• feminist
• agrarian
• land
• class
• colonial
• gender

Notes

1 With the gradual slipping away of political control by advanced countries over world fossil fuel resources, agriculture is once again under pressure, now to produce biofuels/agrofuels as a fossil fuel substitute or supplement. In the USA and EU there is an almost fourfold rise in corn going into ethanol production, with the same occurring in Brazil (sugarcane) and the USA (maize). The question is, where are the developing countries to go now, with large-scale diversion of food grains to fuel production in the north, and the resultant disappearance of global food stocks and price inflation (Patnaik 2009)?

2 Transnationalism requires shifting research focus from individual states to the global system, and from movements bounded by nationalist logics to those animated by how globalisation enjoins people in common struggles across boundaries of difference. A transnational feminist subject, therefore, is one who bears common struggles across boundaries of difference. A transnational feminist subject, therefore, is one who bears the burden of both the nation as well as the colonised/enslaved figure that exceeds nation.

3 Some scholarship has likened structural adjustment to neocolonialism, highlighting the power imposed on formerly colonised countries by new agencies in the global north. The SAPs’ conditions sought to impose a neoliberal economic regime on African (and other formerly colonised developing countries) through stabilisation, liberalisation, privatisation, and rationalisation. This has become the dominant orthodoxy in economic policymaking on the continent. The central tenet of this economic policy approach has been to reduce the size of the state, relegating the state to a role which seeks to create enabling conditions for the market to provision public goods and services (Kentikelenis 2017). The negative impacts of SAPs on women include budgetary cuts in social spending such as on education and health.

4 The concept of the semi-proletarianisation of agrarian labour (the semi-proletarian thesis) in classical Marxist theory derived from analysis of the separation of rural producers from the land and the emergence of a class of ‘free’ wage labourers considered the hallmarks of capitalist development. This assumption of full proletarianisation was, however, shown to bear little semblance to reality. In Southern Africa, for instance, a system of circular migration between rural labour reserves and the urban capitalist sector produced a class of semi-proletarianised peasants whose livelihoods depended on a combination of wage and non-wage income sources (Zhan & Scully 2018; Arrighi 1970). This anomaly was elaborated through the semi-proletarian thesis which argued that conditions in which rural households earn income from both farming and labour migration are in the best interests of capital, because the non-wage agricultural income subsidises part of the cost of labour reproduction, allowing employers to pay lower wages (Burawoy 1976; Meillassoux 1972; Wolpe 1972). However, beyond the internal workings of the colonial political economy, semi-proletarianisation reflects, to Wallerstein (1983) and Moyo and Yeros (2005), uneven development in the capitalist world-system, being most prevalent in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries.

5 UN Women since indicated an intention to step back from the agreement, but its elaboration here remains relevant as it illustrates an ongoing turn in gender funding.

6 Open Letter from global feminist organisations and individuals to UN Women: file:///Users/user/Downloads/Letter%20to%20UN%20Women%20on%20BlackRock%20MoU_9%20August%202022.pdf. See also: https://blackrocksbigproblem.com/

7 Gender lens investing is defined by UN Women as the intentional allocation of capital and alignment of investment strategies, processes and products to achieve positive and tangible contributions to women’s empowerment objectives and that has the potential to generate a financial return.

8 BlackRock: https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/newsroom/press-releases/article/corporate-one/press-releases/blackrock-and-un-women-to-promote-gender-lens-investing

9 Evidenced in part by a recent statement demanding UN Women’s withdrawal from this partnership, widely endorsed by feminist organisations and individuals across the world (see: file:///Users/user/Downloads/Letter%20to%20UN%20Women%20on%20BlackRock%20MoU_9%20August%202022%20(1).pdf).

10 Indeed, as Sharad Chari (n.d.) points out, important as the formulation of ‘racial capitalism’ is, it has nonetheless been stronger in analysis of ideology and consciousness than in a clear articulation of material concerns.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lyn Ossome

LYN OSSOME is an educator and senior researcher with specialisations in the fields of feminist political economy and feminist political theory, and research interests in gendered labour, land and agrarian studies, the modern state, queer histories, and the political economy of gendered violence. She is Associate Professor of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and previously taught at Makerere University. She is the author of Gender, Ethnicity and Violence in Kenya’s Transitions to Democracy: States of Violence (2018) and co-editor of the volume Labour Questions in the Global South (2021). She is an editorial board member of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, advisory board member of Feminist Africa, and serves on several boards, including the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE), and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Email: [email protected]