The Long New Deal

Abstract

Calls for a Green New Deal in the United States represent an opportunity to learn from, and avoid the mistakes of, the last New Deal. We outline not the suite of Franklin Delano Roosevelt-era policies that fell under the umbrella of New Deal, but the conditions of their possibility, and what the aftermath of the New Deal means for the United States and beyond. The success of a Green New Deal rests both on the mobilization of a counter-movement to backlash caused by, and a commitment to avoid the injustices furthered through, the original compact after which it is named.

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The Journal of Peasant Studies
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The Long New Deal
Raj Patel & Jim Goodman
To cite this article: Raj Patel & Jim Goodman (2020) The Long New Deal, The Journal of Peasant
Studies, 47:3, 431-463, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2020.1741551
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The Long New Deal
Raj Patel
a
and Jim Goodman
b
a
University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA;
b
National Family Farm Coalition, Maryland, US
ABSTRACT
Calls for a Green New Deal in the United States represent an
opportunity to learn from, and avoid the mistakes of, the last New
Deal. We outline not the suite of Franklin Delano Roosevelt-era
policies that fell under the umbrella of New Deal, but the
conditions of their possibility, and what the aftermath of the New
Deal means for the United States and beyond. The success of a
Green New Deal rests both on the mobilization of a counter-
movement to backlash caused by, and a commitment to avoid
the injustices furthered through, the original compact after which
it is named.
KEYWORDS
Green New Deal; hegemony;
United States; militancy
I
Although an idea that has fermented for nearly two decades (Hertsgaard 2000; Elliott
et al. 2008;Barbier2010), the Green New Deal has recently burst into the public eye
as a transformative project, one able to deal with the scale of the climate emergency
(Aronoffet al. 2019; Klein 2019; Pettifor 2019;Rifkin2019; Varoufakis and Adler 2019;
Cox 2020;OSAE2020). A version was proposed in the United States in 2019, let by
Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey
(Ocasio-Cortez et al. 2019). Those concerned with the food system will have noted
within that proposal the call for ‘a more sustainable food system that ensures universal
access to healthy food’(Ocasio-Cortez et al. 2019,9).Further,theU.S.GreenNewDeal
proposed to work ‘collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to
remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector’(Ocasio-
Cortez et al. 2019). It had the makings of a bonanza for rural America. Healthy food
costs more than processed food (Jetter et al. 2019). Under a Green New Deal that
helps Americans eat more healthy food, higher spending on meals might lead to
greater rewards for its producers. And if the federal government were directing spend-
ing toward better food, and understood that well-managed soil can sequester carbon,
sustainable farming might be a way to end America’s endemic rural poverty (Tickamyer,
Sherman, and Warlick 2017).
Yet almost as soon as the Green New Deal was unveiled, the criticism piled on from
agricultural quarters. Predictably, members of the American Farm Bureau criticized the
proposal as ‘totally unrealistic’(Nebraska Farm Bureau 2019). Perhaps more surprising,
the National Farmers Union –one of the more left-leaning of the large farm
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Raj Patel rajpatel@utexas.edu Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs, PO Box Y, Austin TX 78713, USA
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES
2020, VOL. 47, NO. 3, 431–463
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2020.1741551

organizations –snubbed the Green New Deal for not recognizing ‘the essential contri-
bution of rural America‘(Hagstrom and Clayton 2019). In the words of one rural political
organizer, who requested anonymity because of their ongoing work with political cam-
paigns, ‘the Green New Deal is fucking toxic in rural America’(Anonymous, Personal
Communication, 2019).
So why the haters in farm country? Some of the reaction to the announcement was pro-
cedural: the policy appeared to have been written without widespread consultation.
Absent that involvement, it became easier for farmers to feel characteristically alienated
from national politics. In the silence from a food movement that has demonstrated a
bias towards urban consumers about their ongoing work around climate and sustainabil-
ity, rural Americans could insert a familiar refrain: that farmers –particularly those involved
with livestock –are agents of ecological destruction and, as such, the enemy of a sustain-
able future (Guthman and Brown 2016; Monbiot 2020).
Not all in farm country are of one mind. Farmers and others active in America’s rural
social movements have written enthusiastically about the Green New Deal and its possi-
bilities for family farms, about how it might spur things like rural repopulation, parity
pricing models, and climate-friendly agriculture (Cullen 2019; Dugger 2019; Goodman
2019; Henderson 2019; Lutzi and Jensen 2019). Were these writings to be presented in
meetings and discussions around the Green New Deal in rural America, it may well be
the case that an increasing number of farmers might see their interests aligned with
the policy. But that such a recognition can only be imagined after organizing, after not
simply writing but organizing around a different vision of farm country in the United
States, is one piece of evidence for the Green New Deal’s being written against the hege-
mony of the state-industrial food system complex.
Rather than parse the variety of interpretations of hegemony (Comaroffand Comaroff
1991; Cox 1983; Laclau and Mouffe1994; Kurtz 1996; Brown 2003), we offer a reading of
Gramsci (1971) that emphasizes the concept of the historic bloc, a coalition that licenses
and polices a dominant social order. The power within that bloc extends beyond brute
force –it tries to establish dominance at the level of ‘common sense,’styling ideas of
what’s socially acceptable and what’s unthinkable. The dominant historic bloc in the
United States today is an assembly of property owners, fossil fuel corporations, war-
makers, tech giants, media outlets, health care management firms, industrialists, monopo-
lists, state functionaries and, most importantly, financiers (Russi 2013; Clapp 2019), with cul-
tural leadership from some workers and farmers. The reflexive criticism of the Green New
Deal, before its details have even been hashed out, is an indicator of the dominant bloc’s
hegemony.
The Green New Deal’s success depends on its organizers’ability to refashion this
common sense. That there was so little conversation, private or public, with movements
in the food system before the release of the Green New Deal suggests that the projects’
authors might be guided by a theory of change that fails to prioritize the importance of
counter-hegemonic organizing. To rewrite common sense is to unpick the alliances that
the current bloc works to maintain, to find the fault lines that can pry that bloc apart,
and to develop the organizational links that can build a counter-hegemonic bloc.
To further that project, we trace the origins of some of the most important alliances in
the current configuration of forces in America’s food system, the first New Deal. We do
not pretend to present a general history of the New Deal, nor a theoretical engagement
432 R. PATEL AND J. GOODMAN

with food regimes literature over a world-ecology, both of which are projects for another
time. We hope, instead, to contribute to an analysis that has, until recently (Berlet and
Sunshine 2019; Edelman 2019; Montenegro de Wit et al. 2019), been lacking, to
develop a perspective that might matter both to scholars of the ongoing struggles,
and to activists in food and agriculture looking for substantive analysis. And to under-
stand that it’s worth at least gesturing at the world-ecology in which the New Deal’s agri-
cultural features emerged. ‘Gesture’is the operative term here. Although we would, in a
longer treatment, spend more time looking at the ways that US and British agricultural
hegemony were achieved beyond the boundaries of the US (see, e.g. Winders 2009),
our interests lie in highlighting some of the key processes at work prior to the New
Deal, and in its aftermath.
The New Deal today appears as a miracle, an incredible moment in which the nation
stood united behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his Keynesian policies to accomplish
Big Things. Such a reading is only possible because the New Deal’s working-class intellec-
tual labor, and the history of class conflict throughout the 1930s, has been muted. The New
Deal’s victories were achieved not because the nation united behind them, but because
the nation was profoundly divided (Collins and Goldberg 2014). The New Deal sat at
the conjuncture of global financial and ecological crisis, and class struggle, and is most
helpfully understood as a series of victories and defeats in the management of that
struggle by an anxious bourgeoisie, across rural and urban America.
The resurgence of interest in a Green New Deal offers a chance to revisit the history of
the original New Deal, and in particular the tactics and strategies around counter-hegemo-
nic militancy. Today, labor militancy in the US is on the upswing. In 2018, there were
twenty major strikes involving 485,000 workers (a little more than 0.1 percent of the US
population), led by an inspirational series of education worker walkouts (BLS 2019b).
Such struggles pale, however, next to the unrest that produced the original New Deal.
In the 1910s and 1920s, strikes and labor activism in America reached a zenith. These
strikes were a symptom of sustained rural and urban militant organizing (Stock 2017).
In 1918, H1N1 influenza killed 50 million people worldwide in the deadliest pandemic
of the twentieth century, with the working class in the front line of the disease (Mame-
lund 2018) and, Esyllt Wynne Jones suggests, organizing for better conditions in its
wake (2003). In 1919, the US saw 3,630 strikes involving 4,160,000 workers –about 4
percent of the country’s total population (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1975, A1-8). As
a reminder: 1920 was the year in which two immigrants from Italy, Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested for armed robbery in a trial that saw tensions
around immigration, race (for the Italians were not yet considered white [Berwick
2015]) and the role of anarchists in American political life achieve the level of a
moral panic.
A thorough history of the New Deal would set north American worker militancy in the
long history of rebellion and resistance to colonial contact, and the imperatives of capital-
ist expansion through frontiers. The history would certainly trace this militancy to the racial
compromises at the end of the Civil War, and the tensions between white settler farmer
militancy and predominantly black farmworker organizing, the rise of agricultural mon-
opoly power centered in Chicago, the political ecology of Indigenous activism, the resent-
ments around deflationary monetary policy and the rise of Bellamy’s Nationalist Clubs
(Bellamy 1888; Franklin 1938; Auerbach 1968; Cronon 1991).
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 433

With such a history in place, it would become clearer that one way to understand the
present US (and international) imperial capitalist project is a long battle over placing the
right kinds of people in control of the right kinds of nature to produce the most profit and
order. Such an understanding would make clear both the ambition of the Green New Deal,
the resistance to it, and the class tensions involved in organizing around it. When we
examine the New Deal itself, we remark on the class dynamics of the process, and the
conflicted position of smallholder farmers before tracing the undoing of the era, specifi-
cally through cultural, financial and agricultural policies aimed at erasing the history of
class struggle through which the New Deal was founded. We conclude with some
thoughts about the possibilities of food-system organizing around the Green New Deal.
We begin, though, with an event that will have to serve as a metonymy for the political
ecology of struggles over the food system in the Gilded Age, one that anticipates many
of the salient elements of the New Deal: the Great Cowboy Strike of 1883 (Lopez 1977;
Lause 2017).
II
Of the many tributaries that flowed into the original New Deal, we pick the Texas Cowboy
Strike because of its surprising character and location (at least one prominent contempor-
ary labor historian with whom we workshopped this paper had never heard of it) and
because, as we suggest in the conclusion, it may be in the frontier of industrial meat pro-
duction that the greatest opportunities for transformation in the Green New Deal might be
found. The Cowboy Strike allows us to begin to weave, in miniature, a broader political-
ecological approach that a larger historical project would require. The strike also takes
place in a pivotal moment in the formation of the US industrial food- and political
system, and is linked to the strategic resistance against it in the Populist movement. As
vignettes go linking strategy and tactics, militancy and counter-hegemonic organizing,
and the formation of the modern food system, this serves our purposes well.
In an admirable recent history, Specht (2019b) argues that between the Civil War’s end
in 1865 and the publication of Upton Sinclair’sThe Jungle (1906), the United States became
recognizable to twenty-first century observers as a republic. In the middle of this trans-
formation from fissile settler state to capitalist imperium sits the Great Cowboy Strike of
1883. The myth of the cowboy, sitting proud, alone, and high in the saddle, is at odds
with the reality of a wage worker conscious of the distinction between a class für sich
and a class an sich (Fantasia 1995). Yet the facts are clear: cowboys organized around,
and understood very well, the conditions of their exploitation on the ‘open range’
(Specht 2019b, 23).
The ‘open range’is, as Hämäläinen has argued (2010,2008), the result of a complex
world-ecology. The Comanche Empire, stretching from what is now Chihuahua, Mexico
through the southern Great Plains was a nation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries without an attendant liberal state. The Empire projected power, traded and flour-
ished between New Spain and the United States in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries, through a complex political ecology of grass; grass inside a horse
ridden by a warrior is a way of transforming sunlight into martial power, just as grass in
a bison is a way of turning sunlight and territory into food and hides and, then, under
the right series of exchanges, into gold. The greatest threat to the Empire came not
434 R. PATEL AND J. GOODMAN

from the disintegrating Spanish colony and the rise of Mexico so much as the colonial
expansion of the United States. Although the Civil War had slowed the process of
settler expansion, postbellum southerners saw in Comanche territory a different political
ecology of grass, and the possibility of wealth not in the trade of bison, but of cattle.
Securing Comanche territory and its grass for cattle rather than bison required ideology
and force. Cattle-ranching offered itself not merely as an opportunity to profit, but as an
educational moment, a permanent fixto‘the Indian question.’Ranching was a demon-
stration by example of the civilizing disciplines of the United States most sacred covenant:
private property.
Property is dead without its participation in networks of capitalist exchange, though,
and cattle were a way of turning gold and silver into bovine flesh into more gold and
silver –a circuit of Money-Cattle-Money’. The cattle-herding industry circulated capital,
from Chicago, from the gold rush in the West, and from European bourses, through the
frontiers between the United States and the Comanche Empire. From the 1870s, British
investment in the US West shifted from speculation in gold and silver into what appeared
to be the next sure thing: beef. A rancher need only buy a Longhorn –well adapted to the
Texas trail –and drive it north to slaughter. ‘Nature and a generous government provided
the rest’observed Brayer (1949, 88). With profit margins between 400-700%, the returns to
capital created an investment boom, and bubble. Just one company, American Pastoral,
owned a 284,618 acre Texas ranch, with a capital base of $1.5 m –over $35 m in 2019
dollars (Brayer 1949, 92). Readers of William Cronon’s magnificent Nature’s Metropolis
(1991) might understand the importance of capital markets in the creation of meat
markets, but too rarely observe that the capital circulating from Chicago was often inter-
national, and that the effects of that capital’s movements amplified the world ecological
crises in extractive metal industries in the western states and Mexico, and projected
certain kinds of power and imperatives to the United States’frontiers with Native Ameri-
cans (Tutino 2013). As Sayre notes in a fine analysis, the boom in the frontier cattle indus-
try, and then the subsequent bust, were signs not of the cyclic failure of ranching, but
rather the birth pains of the industry we currently know by that name (1999). Property
rights were invented and asserted at the frontier, and to police them, ranchers were
able to summon the US Army, the Texas Rangers, and spawn the economic conditions
that catapulted Samuel Colt to riches through his invention of a weapon suited to war
with the Comanche, the six-shooter Empire (Jennings 2018).
In this changing political ecology, capitalists found resistance not only from those
Native Americans, but from the workers deployed to drive the cattle over the ‘cheap
nature’that Texas appeared increasingly to enjoy in abundance (Mead 2017). As one
Texas rancher put it, uniting the tropes of military power, the ecology of grass, and
returns to capital, ‘The six-shooter and free grass go in hand …To monopolise the free
grass a man must have a tough set of hands, whom he has to keep around him all the
time, and they eat up the profits’(Perkins 1994, 326). ‘The hands’were understood to
be a necessary and always-too-expensive part of this circulation. Cowboy wages were
low and seasonal, with long stretches of the year either spent in unemployment, surviving
on alternative work away from the saddle, or –for a few ‘top hands’, the possibility of year-
round employment on ranches. Competition for permanent work found Mexican, Native
American, black and older cowboys systematically less likely to secure ‘top hand’status
than younger, white cowboys (Lopez 1977). The biological rhythms of bovine growth
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 435

and slaughter brought cowboys together only rarely, and it was during the spring ‘harvest’
drive that major labor actions occurred –at the moment at which investors were about to
receive the return on their investment and therefore most vulnerable to strike activity. At
the moment before harvest, Hutchinson notes that cowboys felt free to ask for almost any-
thing, including three different kinds of pie a day, better coffee, and ‘one first-class knife to
play Mumble-peg with’(Hutchinson 1972, 325). Lause’s more sensitive reporting (2017)
shows that leadership from the ranks of the LIT, LX and LS ranches met in the spring of
1883 to demand more substantive and thoughtful concessions from their bosses, includ-
ing a minimum salary of $50 per month and the recognition that good cooks should earn
the same amount as those actively on the trail. In the ‘wall-to-wall’character of this orga-
nizing demand –recognizing care work as work –and in its transcendence of racial div-
ision and discrimination by age, cowboys reflected the ‘intersectional’priorities that
mattered in their everyday lives (Yuval-Davis 2011).
Texas cowboys’victory in 1883 led to strikes spreading in subsequent years from Texas
to Wyoming (in 1886) but just as cowboys resisted their exploitation, capital fought back.
Newspapers were overwhelmingly sympathetic to ranchers, from London –where The
Economist monitored the cattle business and castigated the operations’inefficiencies
and the vicissitudes of weather (Specht 2019b)–to Chicago, where the media under-
reported strike victories and participation. From the public broadcast of the strikers’
pariah status, to the organizing by ranch owners to blacklist troublesome workers, a
sprawling domestic and international network helped to knit together a common-sense
in which striking cowboys were outliers, troublemakers and, ultimately, unthinkable
(Lause 2017). By 1888, a bursting of the beef investment bubble, strategic concessions,
successful counter-mobilizing tactics by ranchers, a demonization of worker militancy,
and a particularly brutal El Niño winter dealt the bloc of financiers, landowners, the mili-
tarized state, and their accompanying media a victory. So successful has been the
amnesia around the strike wave that even among contemporary labor activists, it is
rarely celebrated, much less understood as continuous with a history of southern resist-
ance to racial capitalism and the circulation of capital through rural soil (Hild 2007).
This vignette about cowboy strikes offers a glimpse of the complex terrain on which
resistance to capital was organized. That terrain was characterized by
(1) Complex global financial arrangements
(2) embedded within the web of life,
(3) over a sedimented history of colonial genocide, and in the aftermath of a war over
racialized slavery
(4) with a working class that understood the answers to the questions of agrarian capit-
alism, and resisted through alliances and other organized operations
(5) which recognized the importance of care work, and
(6) found itself up against representations and knowledge in culture and media that pre-
judiced a reasonable understanding of their history
No matter how fervently the Chicago press asserted to the contrary, the defeat of
cowboy unionism didn’t signal the end of working-class agrarian resistance to capital’scir-
culation through land, commodities and labor. Indeed, the cowboy strike resonated with a
broader understanding between workers and farmers of a common enmity against capital,
436 R. PATEL AND J. GOODMAN

which itself informed a more complex and sophisticated counter-hegemonic bloc: the
Populists. By the time the Texas cowboy strike was crushed, one of the largest social
movements in US history was well underway. As Grattan summarizes, ‘by 1890, the
National Farmers’Alliance had organized some forty thousand local alliances across
forty-three states and territories’(Grattan 2016, 53). The Populist formation was able
to straddle complex differences in race and class. Parsing these differences,
Woodman suggests that ‘if large-scale planters became the agrarian New South’sbig
businessmen, the former yeomen by becoming commercial farmers-either as owners
or renters of the land they worked-became the agrarian New South’ssmallbusiness-
men. And if some former slaves also became commercial farmers, most became part
of a new working class’(Woodman 2001, 808). Despite these differences, there was a
range of interests that a stratum of small-business farmers shared with workers. As
Hild helpfully summarizes ‘[t]hey all stood to benefit from regulation of railroads,
grain elevators, and warehouses, higher prices for cash crops, and, as debtors
(a label that applied even to many southern planters of that era), inflated currency’
(Hild 2007,5).
That bloc has been subject to a spectrum of political interpretations and a shifting his-
toriography. The Populists have been represented as a mob of anti-Semites and racists
(Hofstadter 1955), working class heroes (Goodwyn 1976), enemies of the working class
(West 1986), canny small-business owners (Postel 2007) and, today, an inspiration for
rural organizing in the twenty-first century (Grattan 2016; Stock 2017). Recent scholarship
is helpful in framing the Populists as a counter-hegemonic force betrayed by Republican
and Democratic party alike, not least for the contemporary lessons that it offers organizers
for the Green New Deal.
Today’s scholarship has found features of Populism that have been overlooked in pre-
vious histories. For instance, strands within late nineteenth century rural American organiz-
ing understood gender equality (Strauss 1989), black power and racial solidarity (Gaither
1977;Ali2006,2010), and even monetary sovereignty. Populists developed sophisticated
visions for cooperative credit services that could replace the power that East coast financiers
were able to project through their control of the gold-backed money supply. Mooney points
to the proposal of a ‘sub treasury’in which farmers could deposit their harvest, to sell later in
the year when prices recovered from the post-harvest lull and, in the meantime, use their
stored grain as collateral on an automatic loan at low interest (Mooney and Majka 1995).
It is hard to underestimate the extent to which discussions of monetary policy mattered
in nineteenth century working-class and agrarian political discussions. US deflation, from
the 1860s to the 1879 return to the gold standard, led to economic stagnation and then
depression after the Panic of 1893. The macroeconomic environment helped focus worker
and farmer concerns over East coast power over the money supply. Family farmers were
particularly worried about the deflationary effect of metallic currency. One of the earliest
family farm organizations, The Grange –more formally The National Grange of the Order of
Patrons of Husbandry –was founded in 1873 with, among other priorities, a firm eye to
combatting railroad monopolies. Among the many organizations that emerged from it,
from consumer to insurance cooperatives, was the Greenback Party, which from 1874
to 1889 campaigned on a unifying message of inflationary money-printing by the
federal government (Naftalin 1956; McCabe 1969; Schneiberg, King, and Smith 2008; Wain-
wright 2012; DeCanio and Smidt 2013). Although short-lived, the Party had a long tail, at
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 437

least in terms of its trace in popular culture. Such was the discussion of monetary ideas that
L. Frank Baum was able to synthesize them into The Wizard of Oz, a story which begins with
a tornado –patterned on Mary Elizabeth Lease, whose Populist rallying cry of ‘raise less
corn and more hell’earned her the nicknames Mary Ellen, Yellin Ellen, and The Kansas
Tornado –and in which the magical power of an ounce ‘Oz’of gold holds great sway in
the East, among other allusions (Rockoff1990).
Although we don’t fall into the trap of seeing Populists as woke modern monetary the-
orists avant la lettre (Wray 2015), we do want to observe the process through which
farmers came to theorize, and build alliances, through the praxis of organizing. Monetary
policy, racial solidarity, patriarchy, debt and finance are not natural topics of dinner-table
conversation. But they can become less alien when part of the movement project is basic
economic and political literacy. As Charles Macune, head of the Southern Farmers Alliance
from 1886–1889 put it, ‘[t]o induce the people to read is the first step. When people will
read they will think, and whenever they begin to think the battle is more than half won’
(Postel 2007, 62). Libraries in which everything from Adam Smith to science fiction was
shared and debated, and in which publications authored by American peasants circulated,
pointed to a vibrant intellectual life among American farmers. Again, while celebrating its
achievements, and the durability of the range of institutions it spawned, we don’t roman-
ticize the Populist moment. We’re aware of its moments of bigotry and chauvinism.
Indeed, one of the most important aporias lies in the self-constitution of the group as in
the interest of ‘American farmers’–a nativism and amnesia about the ongoing American
colonial project (Singh 2017; Denvir 2020).
To summarize: the process through which late nineteenth century agricultural capital-
ism was resisted –and formed –came to include both an understanding of, and concrete
political action against, finance, through an understanding of race, ecology, sexism and the
power of media and knowledge. Then as now, the differences between Democratic and
Republican Party appeared vast, but there was a great deal about the functioning of capit-
alism on which they agreed. The proposal for black and white yeoman farmers and
workers to control their own monetary policy was a frontal attack on federal sovereignty.
Through print, police, policy, Pinkertons and party political perfidy, the Populist movement
was destroyed, and its signifier used to besmirch any proposal that appears without the
blessing of authority. American farmers' fortunes improved through the 1890s, in part
because European crop failures drove US prices higher (Rockoff1990). But the continuity
of labor struggles, and the insults of US capitalism against workers and farmers became,
once again, acute in the decade before the New Deal (Bissett 1999).
III
There are speculators all about, you know,
Who are sure to help each other roll the ball,
As the people they can fleece, and then take so much apiece,
While the farmer is the man that feeds them all
Grange Melodies, 1891 (Lurie 1974, 118)
If the bases of capitalist agriculture were established in the nineteenth century, America’s
twentieth-century battles were over the security of those underpinnings, with the militant
438 R. PATEL AND J. GOODMAN

farmer and farm workers pitted against the owners and operators of agricultural industry.
Class struggles in the early 1900s incubated the idea among the ruling class that part of
the American agricultural project lay in cultivating the right kind of farmer, one who
approximated their own self-image: white, conservative, and above all, a self-sufficient
man of business. That farmer could be given the right kind of education to become the
right kind of American entrepreneur invested in the normal functioning of markets and
governments.
Agricultural extension services, which date to the foundation of land grant universities
in the early 1860s, were key to producing both commodity crops and conservative farmers
(Rogers 1988). Agricultural extension services were supported by the Chambers of Com-
merce and the General Education Board, funded by John D Rockefeller, before achieving
government support under the 1914 Smith-Lever Act (Fiske 1989). Extension classes
turned into national lobbying organizations for farmers who saw farming neither as a
front line in class struggle, as some farmers unions did, nor as a keystone to broader com-
munity transformation and freedom from monopoly, as the Grange Movement did, but
rather as a bulwark against rural insurrection (Mooney and Majka 1995; McCabe 1969).
These conservative farmers had their own organizational form: the American Farm
Bureau, the spawn of the Chamber of Commerce, alongside the Chamber’s Roads and
Alleys Bureau and Protection Bureau (Rogers 1988, 496).
George Naylor, a farmer and member of Family Farm Defenders, described to us the
New Deal’s prehistory like this: ‘The big push to organize Farm Bureaus in the teens and
twenties from Kansas on up through Iowa and north was intended to blunt the progress
of the Socialist Party, Non-Partisan League, and Farmer-Labor organizing in the Dakotas
and Minnesota’(Naylor 2019). Those organizations, which the Bureau was explicitly
opposed, offered an alternative reading to a farm crisis that had begun at the end of
World War I (Finegold 1982). The early 1920s saw American farmers suffer. European
farmers were back in production after the First World War. Output rose, and prices fell (Shi-
deler 1953). Farmers blamed speculators for depressing prices even further. A few tooth-
less laws in 1921 and 1922 curbed some of the speculation, and the 1922 Capper-Volstead
act allowed farmers’groups an exemption from monopoly laws in order to band together
to drive up prices. Political activism among farmers generated the farmer-labor politics of
the Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA) in 1922, whose candidate for the
United States presidency, Robert La Follette, won Wisconsin in 1924 with socialist support.
The economic crises of the 1920s weren’t restricted to farmers, nor to the United States
(Arrighi 1994; Hobsbawm 1994; Wolf 1999). Runaway inflation in Europe led to a policy that
decisively precipitated the Great Depression –the international commitment to the gold
standard led by the US (Eichengreen and Temin 2000). The deflationary impact of that
policy, and the accompanying austerity under the Hoover administration, created a
signal moment in the history of global capitalism. It was hard in 1932 for any capitalist
to point to a country in which liberal capitalism offered anything approaching a coherent
vision for the future. The rise of fascism in Europe and Asia offered alternatives to the capi-
talist order in which many US financiers were invested (Migone 2015), but against which
the broad coalition that swept Roosevelt to power was able to organize. Among the
demands made of Roosevelt’s administration by farmers was one that dated from the
Populist era –that of ‘parity’. The policy called for an income that provided ‘parity’with
the costs of industrial goods that farmers needed to survive. As Shideler notes,
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 439

A full ten years before [the Agricultural Adjustment Act of] 1933, the parity concept was estab-
lished in the farmers’consciousness. It was a product of the severe crisis which hit agriculture
in 1920 and 1921, and its antecedents reach back fifty years or more before that. Fundamental
to the idea of parity is the conviction of inequality in economic affairs, a grievance that was
aired in the literature of agrarian protest after the Civil War. (Shideler 1953, 77)
Rural and urban militancy continued through the 1930s, with a particular focus on the
injustices suffered by working class laborers and farmers at the hands of capital. The
scene in The Grapes of Wrath, in which an agent of repossession explains a Dust-Bowl
era Oklahoma sharecropper’s eviction to him is perhaps the most powerful example of
this (Steinbeck 1939). What Steinbeck neglected was that there was widespread resistance
to foreclosure –indeed, it was through the resistance to banks’takeover of farm land that
the US Supreme Court ultimately came to accept the New Deal (Fliter and Hoff2012).
Farmer-agitators in the 1920s and 1930s knew well that the fattest of the fat cats were
to be found in finance. The Farmer’s Holiday Movement, which shared leadership with
the Iowa Farmers Union, knew their enemies to be the Chicago grain traders, Wall
Street financiers, and railroad monopolies (Shover 1965). In their 1932 Union Farmer news-
paper, they called for a strike against those interests:
We can’t continue longer now
Upon our weary way
We’re forced to halt upon life’s trail
And call a ‘holiday.’
Let’s call a Farmer’s Holiday
A Holiday let’s hold
We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs,
And let them eat their gold.
Iowa Union Farmer, Feb. 27, 1932 (Stevens 2014, 109)
After all, the logic ran, if banks could have a holiday, why couldn’t farmers take a day off,
withhold their output from the market, and see what the city swells would eat if they
couldn’t eat greenbacks? It was tactics like these, deployed by militants in the Iowa
Farmers Union, that articulated with strategies to force radical policies into the New
Deal. Again, it doesn’t make sense to see the New Deal as the permanent triumph of a par-
ticular group, but a moment in the making of a bloc, one that was itself the result of a
process of struggle. The bloc was even given a name by a correspondent to one of
FDR’s advisors: ‘there are no parties left. Farmers are members of the Roosevelt party’
(Fite 1962, 660). One way that the Roosevelt party made itself felt, in rural and urban poli-
tics, was through the technology of the strike. Through the New Deal Era, the number of
strike actions increased year-on-year from 1930–1937 as Figure 1 shows.
There’s evidence that it worked for some members of that bloc. Absent this militancy,
the Federal Government raised prices for farmers through a Federal Farm Board, created in
1929. But it was only after protest and political engagement under the Agricultural Adjust-
ment Act of 1933 and again in 1938 that the government expanded its programs to store
and distribute that food (Sumner, Alston, and Glauber 2010). In a June 6, 1934 radio
address, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace announced the need for ‘an ever-
normal granary, such as had been used in ancient China and again in Bible times, to
440 R. PATEL AND J. GOODMAN

carry over the fat yield of good years and provision the people more evenly in times such
as these’(Bodde 1946, 418).
The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the first agricultural arm of the New Deal, was
aimed at paying farmers higher prices in exchange for reducing the market’s over-pro-
duction crisis (Graddy-Lovelace and Diamond 2017). The Act signaled the triumph of a
new coalition, in which the Farm Bureau’s president, Ed O’Neal, earned special thanks
from Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace for his work ‘so unceasingly to heal the
ancient breach between the Democratic farmers of the South and the Republican
farmers of the Middle West’(Soth 1983, 207). Note, though, that the coalition that
Wallace celebrated wasn’t between farmers and workers across the bloody wounds of
class and race, but between farmers and farmers across the scars of the Civil War.
For many, the AAA was a victory. As Naylor points out, ‘the early New Deal efforts saved
many family farms from bankruptcy. My dad who came to this farm one hundred years
ago, age thirteen, and farmed until 1962, would be emotional when recounting his neigh-
bors losing their farms. He would tell you that the recovery of prices helped bring that to a
halt. Even though the seeds of good policy were sown in the New Deal, the balance of
political power at the time always limited the best provisions and implementation’(Per-
sonal Communication 2019).
But the effects of the New Deal were never homogenous, and not all were members of
the Roosevelt party. There were stark divisions along lines of race, citizenship, and gender.
By delegating certain disbursements from federal to the state level, the New Deal furth-
ered a notion of citizenship segregated by gender (Mettler 1998). As Ruth Wilson
Figure 1. Strikes in the United States since 1919. Sources: USDL (1942); Bureau of Labor Statistics Work
Stoppages data program.
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 441

Gilmore put it, ‘men received automatically what women had to apply for individually’
(Gilmore 2002, 18).
The Great Depression licensed the creation and policing of a workforce segregated by
citizenship and race. The federal government responded to soaring unemployment with
the deportation of 30,000 Mexican workers in what Balderrama and Rodriguez have
called ‘the Decade of Betrayal’(1995). One of the most important counter-actions to
these deportations came in Texas through the Pecan Shellers’Strike in 1938 in San
Antonio, when 6000 shellers walked offthe job. Forty percent of US pecan production
came from Texas, and in San Antonio, home to the largest Latinx population in the US,
the Southern Pecan Company was a significant player. The industry had secured the
status of ‘agricultural enterprise’under the AAA, exempting it from higher wage-rates,
and leaving its 90% female workforce with few options. Resistance came through the
Mexican and US communist parties and local organizing structures. Workers struck, and
ultimately won a national wage increase despite the predations of the industry, the
media, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (Dinwoodie 1977; Vargas 1997;
Cannon and Cannon 2019).
For sharecroppers, the story was different from those of farmers in the north. By design,
the AAA reduced crop production. That meant less land under production for tenant
farmers. The payments made to Southern plantation owners were supposed to trickle
down to the tenant farmers who actually did the work. Yet when the law required pay-
ments to renter-farmers, landlords downgraded their status from tenant to worker, thus
evading the need to share their federal pay-out. As Moreno notes, an excise tax on com-
modity producers under the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act was supposed to be distrib-
uted in such a way that sharecroppers received
one-half of such payment, share tenants two-thirds, and cash tenants all of it ….In 1934, Con-
gress replaced plow-up payments with ‘rental’and ‘parity’payments, and gave sharecroppers
one-ninth of the latter. After the Supreme struck down the first AAA in 1936, that law’s suc-
cessor, the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, raised the sharecropper’s
share to one-fourth …The number of black tenants fell by one-third, black sharecroppers
by one-fourth, and white sharecroppers by 37 percent, whereas the number of white
tenants rose. Yet Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, intensely fearful of alienating
southern white support for the Roosevelt administration, worried that the New Deal might
be doing too much to help blacks. [emphasis in original] (Moreno 2002, 515–6)
In response, socialist organizers worked in Arkansas with white and black sharecroppers to
form the first local of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union with the vision ‘to establish a co-
operative order of society by legal and peaceable methods’(Auerbach 1968, 118). Using
their own media networks –including their own newspaper, the Sharecropper’s Voice –
they shared news and analysis that offered a counter-hegemonic corrective to their
opponents. The analysis, and the organizing, offered praxis in building and maintaining
leadership across the terrain of resistance (Figure 2).
Such public and prolonged militancy pitched the sharecroppers against Arkansas plan-
ters and ‘public officials who [were] firmly convinced that unless they [took] drastic steps,
white supremacy, Christianity, the American flag and the sanctity of home and family will
be overthrown by agents of the Soviet Union’(Daniell 1935, 6). It is possible for the AAA
both to be the savior of a certain variety of family farming, and also the inauguration of a
process of state-endorsed land consolidation away from the hands of those who work that
442 R. PATEL AND J. GOODMAN

land. Thus Howard Kester, an organizer with the STFU, was able to parse the Agricultural
Adjustment Act as ‘that economic monstrosity and bastard child of a decadent capitalism
and a youthful fascism’(Kester 1936, 26). The STFU was a critic of federal relief for land-
owners, but its members also fought the government for wage increases –which they
achieved. We cannot here trace the eventual undoing of the STFU, by the increasing
number of conservatives at USDA, and their subsumption under the CIO (McCartin
1998), or the betrayal of the Third wave of New Deal organizing in the late 1930s
(Gilbert 2015). But we can suggest that the STFU offers a lesson for what a leading
working class member of a counter-hegemonic bloc might face in the future, as other
parts of the bloc win concessions while workers of color still struggle for theirs.
The New Deal, then, can be understood as emerging from a coalition navigating
complex foreign financial arrangements embedded within the web of life –most
acutely those farmers in areas in and around the Dust Bowl –over a sedimented history
of colonial genocide, and in the aftermath of a war over racialized slavery. The importance
of care work might best be thought of as being recognized by the creation of regimes of
social security, albeit racially segregated (Quadagno 1994). The STFU’s critique of the New
Deal matters today. They were correct that the benefits of the Agricultural Adjustment Act
favored landowners over laborers (Fishback, Horrace, and Kantor 2005). And they were
right to see the shortcomings of the New Deal that grew out of the Democrats’depen-
dence on southern white supremacist legislators. Indeed, the long arc of that structural
racism is one that continues to be fought. From the racist policies around agricultural
labor to the operations and priorities of the United States Department of Agriculture –
characterized by Kristol Bradley Ginapp as ‘Jim USDA Crow’–the struggles of farmers
and farmworkers of color today can be traced to failures seeded in the New Deal
(Ginapp 2003; Perea 2011). In one of the largest lawsuits in US history, Pigford
v. Glickman, a class of black farmers who had been systematically excluded from the
federal government’s agricultural largesse successfully sued the USDA (Cowan and
Figure 2. An unidentified woman and Sylvia Lawrence read the ‘Sharecroppers’Voice’during an
outdoor STFU meeting, Parkin, Arkansas, 1937, Louise Boyle, Kheel Center. Source: Kheel Center at
Cornell University https://www.flickr.com/photos/kheelcenter/5279909248.
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 443

Feder 2013). But the settlement, in excess of $1 billion, has still failed to addressed the
deeper structural problems of USDA policy. The Green New Deal is an opportunity to
organize through these social histories, histories that inform today’s understandings of
what’s common sense and what’s absurd, in rural America.
IV
If there is a turning point for the New Deal, a moment when the counter-hegemonic bloc
can be said to have begun a slide towards defeat in the war over common sense, it
comes not at the beginning of World War II but near its close, with the passage of
the Taft-Hartley Act. As Lichtenstein notes, Taft-Hartley’s provisions against closed-
shop organizing and the weakening of labor’s power in 1947 ‘stands like a fulcrum
upon which the entire New Deal order teetered. Before 1947 it was possible to
imagine a continuing expansion and vitalization of the New Deal impulse. After that
date, however, labor and the left were forced into an increasingly defensive posture’
(Lichtenstein 1997, 765). Just as strike activity rose under the New Deal, signifying
rising levels of worker power, the level of strikes in post-war America declined, while
the persecution of its organizers increased under McCarthyism and, later, Reaganism
and neoliberalism.
For a piece entitled ‘The Long New Deal’,we’re conscious of spending precious little
time on its aftermath. In part, that’s because the long decline in workers’rights after
the zenith of the New Deal and WWII, and the ascendance of financial capital has been
catalogued already in the course of the Long Twentieth Century (Arrighi 1994). The inter-
national agricultural articulations of class conflict have been explored in discussions of the
Green Revolution elsewhere (Patel 2013). Closer to the US, similar patterns of agrarian
crossings, of rural militancy and repression, have been well documented at the US/
Mexico border by Olsson (2017). The complex history of farm labor migrations and nativist
policy have been recently documented by Denvir (2020) and classically by Walker (2004).
The arc of the farm subsidy complex from the 1940s through the 2010s has recently been
deeply analyzed by Murphy and Hansen-Kuhn (2019).
The war on worker militancy and the rightward shift in farming members of ‘the Roo-
sevelt party’were articulated in the shifts in membership of US farmer organizations
(Figure 3). In the late 1940s, Naylor told us, ‘the Farm Bureau took a hard turn to the
right and joined in the mantra that the government should get out of agriculture. But
Americans were fighting the fascists at home before we fought them in Europe and
Asia.’This is true: fascism romanticizes and transforms the heartland. European fascists
spun stories of blood and soil, while simultaneously breeding crops and animals to
reflect their visions of national purity (Saraiva 2016). In rural America, the state and
private sector had laid the basis for a kindred approach, that the right kinds of commod-
ities, and the right kinds of people to bring them to market, might build the nation. Before
the New Deal, the Farm Bureau represented a particular, racialized vision of what the right
kind of farmer might look like. But the Farm Bureau’s lurch to the right was part of a far
longer struggle over land, labor –both productive and reproductive –and capital in agri-
culture. (Indeed, it’s possible to read back through the history of the world food system
and identify moments in which the hegemonic forces within this struggle achieved
444 R. PATEL AND J. GOODMAN

continued stretches of stability. One way of reading those moments is as food regimes
[McMichael 2009,2020]).
Today, the Farm Bureau has around 6 million members (AFB 2019). The number of
farms in the US is around 2 million (USDA 2019a). The claim to be ‘the voice of the
American farmer’rings hollow when most Farm Bureau members don’t actually
farm. The membership numbers are goosed up by the bureau’s main revenue
streams: insurance. This isn’t crop insurance for farmers, but auto, home, health, and
life insurance for anyone who becomes a ‘member.’In order to benefit from discounts,
you have to join. As Graddy-Lovelace has analyzed, the Farm Bureau is a complex and
contradictory force, but one that has over the years of its existence increasingly prior-
itized the needs of a certain class of farmers over others (2019). That instinct was
present from the founding of the organization, its first president James Howard
(1920-22) reassuring its membership and the government that, ‘I stand as a rock
against radicalism’(Graddy-Lovelace 2019, 400).
The Farm Bureau’s membership is also swelled by the interests that make up the large-
scale industrial agricultural supply chain, like industrial hog farms –interests deeply
opposed to the Green New Deal. The Farm Bureau has opposed unions and Medicare –
indeed, the Medicare fight in the early 1960s saw the Farm Bureau side with the insurance
Figure 3. Family Memberships of Selected General Farmers’Organizations. Source: Tontz (1964, 146).
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 445

industry and Chambers of Commerce against the Farmers Union and Socialist Party
(Marmor 2000). More recently, the Farm Bureau has been at the front lines of opposition
to the Waxman-Markey climate change bill (Meng and Rode 2019). If the Markey-Ocasio
Cortez plan wants to avoid another defeat, it’ll have to outsmart them.
The firm link between the Farm Bureau and financial interests –it is, after all, an insur-
ance broker –points to a deeper continuity between the flow of finance capital and
climate change in the twenty-first century. Climate change is speared into the heartland
through climate catastrophe. The effects of those disasters will be mitigated for some
through the partisan politics of federal crop insurance (Crane-Droesch et al. 2019).
Farmers wouldn’t risk planting thousands of acres of monoculture crops in a market
where prices are driven down by overproduction without the knowledge that –on
average –they might turn a profit. Climate change reduces the average rate profit. Sub-
sidized crop insurance moves the average back up so that farming practices that
promote climate change are, in effect, encouraged. To put this slightly differently,
federal crop insurance is a means through which cheap money is used to keep nature
and food cheap (Moore 2010). It is no surprise to find the Farm Bureau profiting offthis
exchange.
Finance capital is, however, interested in more than insuring risk. It has increasingly
found profit in farm land itself, and has been since the New Deal. Figure 4, showing the
trend in farm size and number from 1850–2017, is one with which most farmers are inti-
mately familiar: the number of farms has declined and their size has increased. It’s possible
to trace this not to the era of Earl Butz, but to the New Deal itself (Rosenberg and Stucki
2017).
More farmers, large and small, are renters, their landlords being either other farmers or,
increasingly, out-of-state rentiers who have found in farmland an asset class ‘like gold with
yield’(Duffy2011; Fairbairn 2014; Gunnoe 2014; Zhang 2015). Despite these trends, it
would be misleading to paint the entire post-World War II period as the untrammeled
triumph of capital over an increasingly supine labor movement. Even as the forces of
Figure 4. Famers, land in farms, and average acres per farm, 1850-2017. Source: USDA
446 R. PATEL AND J. GOODMAN

the state and capital militated against large-scale counter-hegemonic organizing, there
were moments of resistance. Two such moments in the early 1980s –two years after
Ronald Reagan fired over 10,000 striking air traffic controllers (McCartin 2011)–are
worth returning to Kansas for. As Montenegro de Wit et al. (2019) note, drawing on
Scoones et al. (2018), the American Agriculture Movement was conceived in the late
1970s as a response to debt, low farm prices and a demand for parity. It was, however,
also a movement that split when understandings of monetary power melded with antise-
mitism, leading some to support the white supremacist Posse Comitatus. This commit-
ment to racist policy was compatible with membership of a counter-hegemonic bloc
led by a black man. By 1983 some members of the American Agriculture Movement
exhorted unity with Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, so that ‘two oppressed minorities,
blacks and farmers, [might coalesce] to overthrow the moneyed interests’(Leiker 2019,
266). That coalition’s defeat by the Democratic Party represents a significant loss, yet
from its ashes comes an insight: the Rainbow Coalition was able to unite through a
shared oppression by finance capital (Rogers 1990). That white supremacists might find
deep common interest with a progressive black leader points not just to the complexities
of organizing counter-hegemonic blocs, but to the importance of a firm set of prior politi-
cal commitments and philosophy to guide the bloc and define the terms of political
enmity (Pierce 1988; Harle 2000).
V
With financial capitalism’s increasing control over supply chains in late capitalism (Isakson
2014), farmers are increasingly becoming substitutable factors of production along with
their land. In a commercial ecology geared towards commodity production favored by
the state, larger farms have more of everything: credit, capital, insurance, relief, govern-
ment favor, and, at the end of the day, profit. The market share of sales by the largest 5
percent of producers steadily increased from 38.3 percent in 1939 to 54.5 percent by
1987 (Lobao and Meyer 2001). America’s largest farms –with a gross sales value of over
$1 million, representing 4 percent of all farms –made a net average of $515,000 in
2018. The poorest, with gross sales less than $100,000, representing 80 percent of all
farms, made -$1,300 in 2018 (USDA 2019a).
The riches of US industrial agriculture are unevenly distributed. Might this be fixed by a
redistribution of its industrial machinery? As Ocasio-Cortez has also noted, there may be
nothing wrong with automation –in agriculture or anywhere else –if it reduces drudgery
and promotes freedom (Robertson 2019). It’s certainly true that capitalist technology has
always driven peasants out of agriculture. The number of self-employed and family farm
workers on US farms went from 7.60 million in 1950 to 2.06 million in 2000, but since then
has remained relatively stable (USDA 2019b). Outside the heavy mechanization of com-
modity crops of corn, wheat, rice, and soy, the US continues to rely on farm workers for
‘specialty crops,’and usually pays those workers poorly (BLS 2019a). In 2015–16, two-
thirds of all farm workers were from Mexico, and 49 percent of all farm workers were undo-
cumented (Hernandez and Gabbard 2018). Those workers were often driven by the displa-
cement caused by the devastation of NAFTA and, more recently, CAFTA (Morley and
Piñeiro 2008; Otero 2011). Robots may soon pick fruit from fields that have more or less
completed their transformation into factories, a final twist of the knife for those who
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 447

were once peasants in the Global South, displaced by US economic policy and trade agree-
ments that rendered their lives as campesinos impossible to sustain.
The push towards robots in the fields and in livestock facilities highlights one of the
biggest conceptual challenges for a Green New Deal. The financial arithmetic of a
modern food system –from land ownership to insurance to the futures market –
depends on a permanent exploitation of soil, atmosphere, and labor. At the moment,
those who want to farm with dignity in the web of life plead a case for which there is
no business logic.
To pay workers well, to grow a polyculture of crops that can help sequester carbon and
battle the sixth extinction (Barnosky et al. 2011), to farm without chemicals that poison
workers, air, and water –all are militated against by the arrangements of payments that
currently prevail. It’s rarely profitable to farm agroecologically when the rules of the
game reward ecological devastation, worker exploitation, and monoculture.
Corroborating evidence that the food industry is premised on destruction comes from
an unlikely source. A 2012 report by the management consultancy group KPMG singled
out the food industry as the most environmentally damaging of any sector, with conser-
vatively calculated externalities equaling 224 percent of the food industry’s revenues
(KPMG 2012). This is the kind of result that ought to give defenders of the current food
system pause. If this data is correct –and at a conference of donors in 2015 a senior
Nestlé executive suggested that these ratios accurately reflected the findings of an internal
audit at his corporation –then there’s only one conclusion: there’s no such thing as a sus-
tainable food industry. Either the industry is profitable by dint of its externalities, or it stops
making food and money.
What, then, might be the alternative to industrial agriculture? Smaller-scale farms (fewer
than twenty hectares) produce more than 75 percent of most food commodities in sub-
Saharan Africa, southeast Asia, south Asia, and China, with comparatively high yields on
smaller farms reflecting the return to the skill and work of the farmers managing that
land (Herrero et al. 2017; Gollin 2018). One landmark report, the International Assessment
of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, suggested that for a
sustainable future, the world would need more urban and peri-urban farming with sustain-
able farming systems (IAASTD 2008). In the United States, large farms dominate, but the
latest agricultural census points to growth in farms with fewer than ten acres (USDA
2019c).
The twenty-five to thirty-four-year-old farming demographic grew from 2007 to 2012.
And although some farmers under forty-five are conservative, there are reasons for
qualified optimism. A survey by the National Young Farmers Coalition suggests that
there’s a generation of young people who want to farm sustainably, organically, and as
a part of a robust local food system (Ackoff, Bahrenburg, and Shute 2017). Their main con-
cerns are an inability to afford land, student debt, poor health care, and a shortfall of skilled
farm labor. Readers in urban areas may recognize some of these concerns as their own.
And it offers an opportunity for the Green New Deal to build a bloc that might counter
the dominant one.
When we think about how a Green New Deal might transform the food system, we have
no answers, but we do have a process. For years, the international peasant movement La
Via Campesina has advocated the idea of food sovereignty, a demand that everyone have
the right to have a say in what their food system looks like (Patel 2009; Martínez-Torres and
448 R. PATEL AND J. GOODMAN

Rosset 2010). Although this might sound like a milquetoast call for participation, food
sovereignty takes questions of power and inequality seriously: one practical consequence
emerging from the subsequent discussions around what food sovereignty might be has
been an active battle against patriarchy.
La Via Campesina’s process –of discussion, research, teaching, and organizing –takes
time, and struggles with complex politics across class and gender (Patel 2012). But that’s
what building a bloc involves. No Green New Deal can emerge perfectly formed from the
head of a single individual or organization. If it works, it’ll work because the process of
articulating it will also be the process of building the alliances it needs to succeed as a
counter-hegemonic policy. And if it works, we submit that the Green New Deal will
have managed to answer questions around financial capital, embedded within the web
of life, that are driven by an analysis of class, colonialism, race and patriarchy.
In imagining who might be in the bloc of a Green New Deal, we find it hard to conceive
of a movement that doesn’t involve labor, movements fighting for gender and racial
justice and decolonization (Aronoffet al. 2019), and the span of groups pushing for
social control over finance (Figart and Majd 2016). Following Carlisle et al, we add to
the literature with a consideration of some elements that will matter for a counter-hege-
monic bloc to succeed in refashioning the food system –in particularly, a challenging of
monopolies, food habits, farming payments, public risk management, land reform, inter-
national reparation, and a just transition for agricultural workers (Carlisle et al. 2019).
Monopoly: Of the issues that might bind a front of farmers, farm workers, and others to
win a Green New Deal, the loathing of monopolies –and banking in particular –is a potent
force. From the Populists to the present, concentrated market power has been a complaint
for a majority of Americans –and sometimes one that has been overcome. When the
Federal Trade Commission was tasked during World War I with breaking the market collu-
sion between meatpackers and railroads, it saw no way to achieve ‘fundamental improve-
ments’without the federal government making a public service out of the rail distribution
networks (FTC 1919,76–7).
Unfortunately, the government didn’t follow its commission’s advice. The 1921 Packers
and Stockyards Act was the compromise. Designed to police food monopolies and stock-
yards, the Act has been the target of industry attack ever since. Although the early
Obama administration promised to use its power to regulate food monopolies, little
came of it. Under Sonny Purdue, the Trump administration’s USDA has made regulators
accountable to those whom they regulate, and the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stock-
yards Administration offers dwindling protection for farmers against corporate power (Lil-
liston 2019).
Today, monopoly-finance capital is able to project its power globally, as Foster argues
persuasively (2015), and there are few better examples of this than the meat industry
(Sexton and Xia 2018). There have been successful rebellions against some of America’s
monopolies, and the demands they make on the social purse. What might it look like if
urban campaigns against subsidies to Amazon/Whole Foods were linked to resistance
against the order promoted by Tyson and Purdue? Better yet, since the original Populist
moment and New Deal agitation rested on a supple and sophisticated understanding
of finance capital, might it be necessary for these campaigns in turn to be linked to
efforts against JP Morgan Chase or TIAA Cref, as farmers in North Dakota did to create
their public bank in 1919 (Brown 2013)?
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 449

Food habits: Another issue that binds rural and urban constituencies is cheap food. It’s
easy to satirize the coastal elite preoccupation with organic food as bourgeois and hugely
out-of-touch with working America. Although we know through our own work that
working poor families would love to eat organic food, but it’s too expensive (Riffkin
2019; Lentz and Patel 2016). Cheap food is the corollary of low-wage cheap work
(Moore 2010).
There is potential for farmer-labor organizing that builds on the lessons of the last New
Deal, and the reconfigurations of power through the 1960s and 1970s that allowed food
stamps to enter the Farm Bill in 1977 (Rosenfeld 2010). For a Green New Deal to work in the
twenty-first century, everyone’s incomes need to increase. Growing food justly and sus-
tainably is expensive. Instead of driving down the costs of farming to make food cheap
enough for urban workers to buy on stagnating wages, all workers must make enough
to afford food that’s produced sustainably. Consumers must be able to pay for the knowl-
edge embedded in, and carbon sequestered through, sustainable agriculture: through
low-input, sophisticated agroecological farming, renewable energy, unprocessed fresh
food, and farms run by all those who want to work the land. And of course, farmers
and farm workers, too, must be paid fairly and appreciated for their work. The care
work involved in this can be socialized and democratized with public infrastructure –
such as school canteens –that eliminate the patriarchal and bourgeois demands of repro-
ductive labor (Bowen, Brenton, and Elliott 2019).
Farming payments: Perhaps the most vexed question in considering a Green New Deal
is how farmers might be paid, and the regime of family farming. The New Deal offered
the makings of a system that allowed farmers to survive, and the Texas Farmers Union
has recently been asking what a party payment system might look like in the twenty-
first century (Schaffer and Ray 2017). Variants of this parity pricing system provide
farmers a fair price for their crop, one that can be adjusted to include the costs of
good ecological management (Wilson 2012). In other words, parity pricing can pay
farmers to do right by the ecology on which they depend. An investigation into the
assumptions behind parity pricing, and the alternatives presented to it, is a project for
further inquiry.
Risk Management: Climate change brings uncertainty, one that is transmitted globally
through tightly integrated commodity markets and just-in-time supply. Public grain
storage is a way to smooth the fluctuations in basic crop availability caused by extreme
weather fluctuations and the speculative frenzy on the global commodity markets that
can accompany them (Kalkuhl, Von Braun, and Cullen 2016). With more extreme
weather on the way, a public grain storage system can short circuit the wild fluctuations
that might otherwise drive food prices sky high after a harvest failure.
But it has a downside for the existing agricultural order. The abundance of cut-price
feedcrops like corn and soy make Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) econ-
omical. CAFOs exist because of the subsidies they receive through low commodity prices,
prices that are abundantly unfair, manipulated downward by monopolies far larger than
the waste-lagoons into which CAFO shit drains. A parity price system would make
CAFOs uneconomical. This will thrill neither CAFO owners nor lovers of cheap meat, but
it’s absolutely in line with the dietary changes that need to be made for a net-zero
carbon future (Willett et al. 2019). As well as bringing lower health care costs due to a heal-
thier public, moving animals out of CAFO’s and back onto the land is compatible with
450 R. PATEL AND J. GOODMAN

returning to a ‘different political ecology of grass’, one that replaces grain fed cattle with
cattle that form part of a rich and diversified agroecological production system (Hender-
son et al. 2015; Pierrehumbert and Eshel 2015). Parity pricing will mean an end to ‘cheap
food,’and that’s only thinkable in tandem with the end of cheap work. A front that brings
unions and the urban anti-hunger lobby together with the right parts of the farming com-
munity could make this happen. But it’s hard to imagine CAFOs being a part of that bloc.
The impossibility of CAFOs in a green economy begs a deeper question: what does an
economic system that values labor, life, and carbon look like?
American corn farmers know what it’s like to transition towards renewable energy, but their
experience has happened in ways that maintain the hegemony of the dominant bloc. Because
of deals between the fossil fuel, industrial agricultural, and farm lobbies, and the selling of such
deals as a patriotic alternative to buying foreign oil, more US corn goes towards ethanol than
any other use (Lehrer 2010). But renewable isn’t the same thing as sustainable, and ethanol
production in the US is far from a winning ecological strategy. Any Green New Deal would
need to embrace a far more comprehensive accounting for energy, biodiversity, land,
water, and carbon flows than ethanol’s political calculus allows (Magdoff2008).
We know the outlines of what an energy future might look like (Sica 2019), and even
one for housing (Cohen et al. 2019), we know what it might look like to supplant industrial
agriculture to more sustainable food systems (IPES-Food 2018). We even know what it
might be like to have a unified food and agriculture policy that’s mindful of climate
change (De Schutter et al. 2019). But plenty of work remains around the process that
gets us there, and in particular what the new financial and credit systems we use in
order to invest in that transformed future.
International linkages: Greenhouse gasses don’t care where they’re emitted. The Green
New Deal has to involve international engagement. American industrial agriculture has
been justified by the claim that ‘America is feeding the world.’But the world can feed
itself, if America lets it. The US has for decades used its power in the Global North and
South to make markets for its agricultural surpluses, dumping cheap grain and undermin-
ing local agriculture (Bello 1994; Rosset 2006). US power has operated through the world
food system, rewarding and punishing states through investment, market access, and
technology for cooperation with the US national interest.
More broadly, the fossil fuel economy from which the Global North has profited for cen-
turies leaves agriculture in the Global South far more vulnerable to the ecosystem state-
shifts ahead (Samson et al. 2011). Large parts of the Global South were eviscerated in
the nineteenth century through the militarized operations of a liberal food system
(Davis 2001). One calculation puts the bill for Britain’s173-year colonization of India at
£9 trillion (Patnaik 2017). Part of a Green New Deal has to be reparative, both domestically
and globally (Aronoffet al. 2019).
Land Reform: There are within the US, vigorous debates over land reform (Williams and
Holt-Giménez 2017). Suzan Erem, a former SEIU organizer and now executive director at the
Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, asks: ‘Do we have the courage to face the original sin on which
this country was premised: land theft’(Personal Communication)? It’s barely been 150 years
since the Plains Wars and the conversion of bison rangeland to cattle territory. The United
States is a settler colony, and when that land was enclosed, capital was always at the fron-
tier, paying for arms and the cheap nature they secured. There is a reckoning long overdue
that recognizes how the US was colonized, the claims of the descendants of those
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 451

indigenous whom the United States wanted to exterminate, and the role of capitalism in
settling the ‘heartland.’A Red Deal, recently proposed by Estes (2019), articulates well
with the tenets of Green New Deal, particularly in terms of a care economy and land
restoration.
As we conclude this piece, Donald Trump has been celebrated at an American Farm Bureau
meeting in Texas. Chief among the celebrants was the President himself, who announced ‘the
farmers are sticking with Trump’(Sparber 2020). He is correct that his trade agreements have
been met with national zeal by many commodity export farmers, who believe the unlikely
scale of new agricultural trade arrangements with China (Magnier and Delaney 2019)and
with border partners under the United States Mexico Canada Agreement.
Just as during the New Deal, we live in a time of incipient fascism, racism, and class
divide (Patel and McMichael 2004). Characteristics of that project include an evisceration
of worker supports under color of the national interest. Such policies present themselves
from Bolsonaro (Crivelli 2019) to Modi (Gopalan 2016) to Trump’s evisceration of labor and
monopoly law (Shubber 2020). The burden of work requirements in order to access nutri-
tional support will fall particularly hard on rural communities in the United States, given
that rural households are 25% more likely to access the Supplementary Nutrition Assist-
ance Program, the program derived from the New Deal’s Food Stamps (Williams and
Pruitt 2019).
At the same time, the world of finance is attempting to address the climate catastrophe
in which it is implicated. The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, manages $7 trillion
in assets. Early in 2020, it joined a New York based group Climate Action 100+, which
claims $35 trillion, and offers itself, at least as far as its website as ‘an investor initiative
to ensure the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitters take necessary action
on climate change’(ClimateAction.org 2020; Henderson 2020). It is unlikely, however,
that it will be this movement of finance through the web of life that successfully convenes
the counter-hegemonic bloc necessary to tackle the climate emergency.
The Green New Deal can learn from its antecedent’s successes and failures, which pro-
vided a dramatic economic shift in rural America –not as dramatic as we might have
wished for, nor as long-lasting as we would have liked, nor as egalitarian as it should
have been. Yet the New Deal did make the case that environmental protection and
paying people fairly for their work might go a long way towards limiting the power of cor-
porations and creating a fair society for everyone.
Hindsight should inform the Green New Deal. This time, sustainable farmers need not
be forced to choose between responsibility to the land and the communities of which they
are part. Better living through farming can’t happen without canny political alliance-build-
ing, stitching together a bloc that addresses hunger, poverty, malnutrition, and inequities
in wealth and wages, both in the countryside and city.
Just Transition: One group offering a vision of what a racially equitable transition to the
future looks like are among the most disposable food-system workers: meatpackers. At a
recent conference of food workers, Dennis Olson, a senior analyst with the United Food
and Commercial Workers Union, observed the need for a long-term solution to the sys-
tematic exploitation of slaughter-house workers and the unsustainability of the industrial
meat industry (Olson 2019). One proposal lay in the transformation of the food system,
using a union cooperative model to have cooperatively worker-owned farms supplying
co-operatively owned grocery stores in ways that might be part of a carbon-sequestering
452 R. PATEL AND J. GOODMAN

food system (Witherell, Cooper, and Peck 2012). Such a system would require new
approaches to land and farming, a shift in power away from monopoly capital, and
offers a tangible vision for which a counter-hegemonic movement might aspire. It’sa
fitting coda to the cowboy strikes that began at the other end of that food chain over a
century before.
A counter-hegemonic bloc demands both a militant rural and urban resistance to mon-
opoly-finance, and strategy for achieving a radical transformation of the food system. Not
everyone will buy in, but there are farmers and farm workers who are ready to be leading
members of a counter-hegemonic bloc, to make a net-zero-carbon world a new kind of
common sense. That leadership will recognize the need for transitions across the
United States, away from carbon intensive to carbon negative work, from healthcare
denial to healthcare provision (Faust 2019), from exploitation in food service to liberation
(Gaddis 2019), from fossil-fuel extraction to energy infrastructure-building (Aronoffet al.
2019), one that understands reparation and most importantly the need for a net increase
in the number of workers on farmland as part of an agroecological transition (Cadieux et al.
2019). As we imagine these transitions, we’re aware of the failures of such attempts else-
where. We have seen bourgeois attempts to make the working class suffer a dispropor-
tionate burden of the costs of transition –fomenting reaction such as in the case of the
gilet jaunes (Noiriel 2018), or fueling the rise of ecofacisms (Ajl 2019). One of the most
widely circulated critiques of the Green New Deal will be that it’s anti-American (Specht
2019a). True –such a movement ranges itself against American capital and a white supre-
macist tradition of colonial expansion. But, as we’ve suggested, there has been little that
unites this part of the planet more –in art, action, organizing, lived experience and
thought –than a deep and sustained resistance to the destruction wrought by US
settler colonial capitalism. The fate of the planet hinges on the triumph of this resistance.
Acknowledgement
Parts of this paper first appeared in Jacobin magazine, and sections on populism are from forthcom-
ing work by Patel. Both are reprinted with permission. The authors are grateful for the encourage-
ment of Jun Borras, Phil McMichael and the insightful suggestions of two anonymous reviewers,
to whom we apologize for not being able to include excellent ideas that might have made this over-
view yet longer.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
ORCID
Raj Patel http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3669-4222
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