Ecology in Wynter The World Between Plot and Plantation - Tilley

Abstract

Reading ecology in Wynter causes us to turn back to the real and tangible use value structure of the plot and away from the fiction of the monocultural/monotonous plantation regime which we know leads to socioecological decay. Returning to the plot, as La Via Campesina and other anti-systemic movements have done in recent years, is to reaffirm the (inevitably racialised) class struggle when organising for ecologies of liberation. Returning to the plot is therefore to consciously think through metabolic repair along with social repair, as well as to actively organise against the ecological rupture provoked by the exchange structure of the plantation. After all, the plot, as the basis for all socioecological reproduction, survives without the plantation, but the plantation does not survive without the plot.

Full text

Lisa Tilley, SOAS University of London
Essay forthcoming in International Politics Reviews
1
Ecology in Wynter:
The World Between Plot and Plantation
[W]ith the discovery of the New World and its vast exploitable lands, that process
which has been termed the ‘reduction of Man to Labour and of Nature to Land’ had
its large scale beginning. From this moment on Western Man saw himself as ‘the
lord and possessor of Nature.’ The one-way transformation of Nature began. Since
man is a part of Nature, a process of dehumanization and alienation was set in train.
(Wynter 1971: 99)
Sylvia Wynter’s 1971 essay Novel and History, Plot and Plantation, is condensed into just
eight unassuming pages, yet the text opens up into a stirringly capacious analysis which only
continues to expand in relevance as contemporary conditions of economy and ecology
reconfirm Wynter’s acute conclusions. By way of engagement with this small/capacious essay,
the following paragraphs begin by drawing out Wynter’s analysis in light of contemporary
ecological thought and conditions of crisis. The essay ends by thinking through how Wynter’s
analysis pushes us towards a reinvigoration of the plot/plantation consciousness of resistance
and revolution. Extending Wynter’s work with reflections drawn from the restive plantations
of Hawai'i, Indonesia, and Vietnam, this brief engagement suggests that the uneasy relationship
between ecology and revolution, as read through the plot/plantation, provides lessons for
today’s thinkers of liberation ecology.
Ecology in Wynter
The distinction and dialectics between plantation and plot – which Wynter pins down at the
scale of Jamaica’s political ecology, yet also connects to the structures of global capitalism –
continue to capture our contemporary struggle as humanity-in-Nature, as a world torn between
plot and plantation, existence and extinction, regeneration and depletion.
The plantation
1
itself is a rationalised and industrialised mode of agricultural production of
cheap commodity crops, grown generally for purchase and consumption elsewhere. The
colonial plantation revolution initially brought the simplification of production specifically
with coerced forms of labour in mind. This attempt to transform the skilled peasant producer,
1
See also McKittrick (2013); Perry (2022)

Lisa Tilley, SOAS University of London
Essay forthcoming in International Politics Reviews
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who would ordinarily cultivate rich genetic complexity through agriculture, into the violently
coerced enslaved labourer, also demanded the rationalisation of production into the kind of
monocultures amenable to coerced monotony. The deep connection between monocultural
production and alienation through monotonous work is more than simply semantic, and the
plantation marked a profound rupture from the real complexity of pre-plantation cultivation.
Reaching to the heart of this condition, Wynter describes the plantation as a place so unreal, so
externally authored, that even the factual history it generates is a fiction of sorts (Wynter 1971:
95).
In contrast, the plot, as the provision grounds for subsistence, is the antithesis but also the
condition of possibility of the plantation. It was within the plot that combinations of crops could
still be skilfully cultivated for sustenance, and therefore one site where total submission to the
transformations of plantation enslavement could be resisted. Outside of the monotonous
coercion of the plantation, plot cultivation contained the potential for generating renourishment
(of enslaved communities) and regeneration (of ecology). And in this sense, as a vital site of
social reproduction, the plot sustained the plantation itself.
More than this, the plot and the plantation each represent a distinct “structure of values” in
Wynter’s terms. On one side, a structure of sustenance and restoration, feeding socioecological
cycles; on the other side, a structure of extraction, leeching life, labour time, and nutrients out
to the global market. In Wynter’s analysis, drawing on Asturias, the contradiction between the
plot structure and the plantation structure represents a “clash” between “the indigenous peasant
who accepts that corn should only be sown as food, and the creole who sows it as a business,
burning down forests of precious trees, impoverishing the earth in order to enrich himself”
(Wynter 1971: 96 cites Miguel Angel Asturias).
Taking the analysis further, Wynter identifies the clash of plot and plantation as a struggle
between use value and exchange value, in Marxist terms. The plot, providing a variety of food
for local ‘use’, is where biotic complexity is cultivated with combinations of crops in a life-
sustaining system which feeds back into the soil, maintaining the nutrient cycle. The plantation,
providing a single crop for exchange, instead serves “the demands of external shareholders and
the metropolitan market” (Wynter 1971: 100). This “exchange structure” provokes a “rupture”
in Wynter’s words, which anticipates the more recently revived Marxist frame of metabolic
rift
2
– a concept capturing the removal of physical material, usually from periphery to core,
breaking ecological cycles, leeching nutrients and depleting soil fertility. The distinction
2
See for example Foster (1999)

Lisa Tilley, SOAS University of London
Essay forthcoming in International Politics Reviews
3
between the use value structure of the plot and the exchange value structure of the plantation
corresponds to the fundamental distinction between metabolic repair and metabolic rift in
ecology.
In these reflections on plot and plantation, Wynter therefore anticipates contemporary
ecological urgency many decades in advance. In the opening guide quote reproduced above,
she diagnoses the problem of the separation of man from Nature, the powerful shift in European
ontology that enabled the modern mastery complex which, in turn, erased all humility and
accelerated ecological exhaustion. Wynter instead reminds us that “man is a part of Nature” –
a notion which Indigenous communities have always retained at the core of their ontologies
3
–
indicating that the nature-culture divide is a corrosive invention with grave consequences for
the biosphere.
Half a century later, the implications of what Wynter analyses in the separation of Nature
and culture, plot and plantation are becoming more widely confronted as the climate crisis
intensifies. Under the entwined power structures of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism,
agriculture has been transformed from the carbon sink it once was, to the source of around
23%
4
of total greenhouse gas emissions in the present (IPCC 2019). A couple of decades after
Wynter’s intervention, La Via Campesina (LVC 1993) would effectively call for a revolution
of plot against plantation, by galvanising the peasant consciousness into a unified struggle for
food sovereignty and agroecology on a global scale.
The relentless struggle of humanity-in-Nature, of the agroecological plot against the rift-
forming colonial plantation, is inseparable from class struggle in Wynter’s analysis. Reflecting
on the colonial “manager class” of planters, she argues: “This class and the labouring
indigenous class faced each other across the barricades that are in-built in the very system
which created them” (Wynter 1971: 100). Going further to stress the indivisible nature of
imperialism and capitalism, she continues: “And the forces that upheld the plantation were the
forces of the market. These forces, the forces of the emporium […] are the forces of the imperio
– the Empire. The emporialist forces and the imperialist forces are one.” Through this
breakdown of the plantation’s social relations and the broader milieu of power in which it is
set, Wynter extends at least two important lessons. One of these teaches us to attend to the
colonial plantation as a global, raced, and class-making project; the second reminds us of the
3
See, for example, Marisol de la Cadena (2010).
4
Including both direct agricultural emissions and emissions generated by land use, land use change and
forestry (LULUCF) in the clearing of land for plantation production and other activity.

Lisa Tilley, SOAS University of London
Essay forthcoming in International Politics Reviews
4
need for a combined analysis of imperialism and capitalism as inseparable and complementary
‘forces’.
The plot of the revolution
Contemporary movements embodying the value system of the plot – including the already
mentioned LVC, the Indian farmers’ movement (see Mehta & Sinha 2022), and other peasant
movements and organised plantation workers – evidence the intensification of various forms
of anti-systemic rural resistance and revolutionary consciousness in the present day. For
Caribbean intellectuals in particular, this radical political potential, and indeed the
revolutionary reality, of the plantation and the plot have long been obvious. For Wynter, the
plot itself contains the blueprint for resistance to “the market system and market values” (1971:
99). In the colonial context, the value system brought by the enslaved from Africa could be
“transplanted” to the plot in Jamaica and maintained by means of the cultivation of subsistence
crops. It was therefore also the site of keeping alive and cultivating ancestral skills and ways
of being in resistance against the totalising institution of the plantation.
As already noted above, the fiction of this coercive plantation value system, with its external
authors and beneficiaries, could only be made real through the revolutionary consciousness of
the plantation society. In Wynter’s (1971: 95) words: “it is only when the society, or elements
of the society rise up in rebellion against its external authors and manipulators that our
prolonged fiction becomes temporary fact.” With plantation societies caught between the
dialectics of plot and plantation, Wynter argues, the “ambivalence” between these contradicting
value systems has structured both the conditions of existence and the will to fight against it. In
the author’s words again: “This ambivalence is at once the root cause of our alienation; and the
possibility of our salvation” (Wynter 1971: 99).
From Haiti to Jamaica to the plantation societies of South and Southeast Asia, resistance,
rebellions and revolutions have overturned or troubled powerful orders. The Haitian
Revolution for example – the most audacious and definitive enactment of truly universal
freedom – begins with the destruction of scores of sugar plantations by enslaved and maroon
revolutionaries (Shilliam 2017; Eddins 2022). And yet, Eurocentred historiographies of
capitalism have overwhelmingly elevated Europe’s industrial workers as the sole source of
potential for systemic overthrow through collective action. In contrast, scholars working in the
Black radical tradition have long challenged such narrow political economic imaginations,
appealing for a Marxism remade to fit the contours of the struggles of the South. Most notably,

Lisa Tilley, SOAS University of London
Essay forthcoming in International Politics Reviews
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and in Cedric Robinson’s incisive words: “the European proletariat and its social allies did not
constitute the revolutionary subject of history” (Robinson [1983] 2000: 4).
Plantation workers themselves, along with the broader agroproletariat, deserve a special
place in the overlapping historiographies of anticapitalism and anticolonialism, as Caribbean
and Black radical scholars in particular teach us. The endurance of the plot alongside the
plantation in so many global sites of the South has meant that plantation workers have rarely
been fully proletarianised, instead retaining one foot in the peasantry. Holding on to the skills
of the plot and the connection with self-sufficiency and complex collective work has provided,
in Wynter’s terms, the means of confronting fictitious monocultural/monotonous life and
reaching for the real through struggle.
Plantations, as George Beckford (1999: 4) has emphasised, have been “a major target in the
independence struggle of many colonial peoples.” Coerced or otherwise exploitative conditions
for labour, the monotony of monocultural production, and the injustice of production for cheap
exports on stolen land, all generated the kind of collective consciousness focused on resistance
to capitalism and colonialism. This manifested variously in the forms of marronage, rebellions,
and the formation of labour unions and peasant movements across various historical moments
and geographical sites. Speaking of such unions and peasant organisations in plantation
economies, Beckford (1999: 4) argues that “these were the basic organizations which served
initially to mobilize the colonized peoples and ultimately provided the basis for the
organization of parties and revolutionary movements that whipped up the winds of change.” In
short, the dire conditions of plantations, as well as the fact that they brought huge numbers of
workers together and inadvertently facilitated collective consciousness formation, meant that
plantations were often key sites for the generation of anticolonial movements which ultimately
overthrew colonial rule, or otherwise at least improved labour conditions.
In many contexts, plantation resistance histories also trouble the analytical and political
segregations which have become so dominant in scholarship and organising, and which treat
Indigenous politics as separate from labour politics. Hawai'i’s sugar and pineapple plantations,
for instance, provided the rationale for huge population transfers from China, Japan, and the
Philippines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and sugar companies ultimately
pushed for the colonisation of Hawai'i by the United States in 1898. Against the rigid racial
labour hierarchies built into the structure of the plantation, labour organising worked
deliberately to overcome racialised divisions in order to forge a collective worker

Lisa Tilley, SOAS University of London
Essay forthcoming in International Politics Reviews
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consciousness across Indigenous and migrant workers from the 1930s.
5
By the mid-1940s,
estate workers organised across racialised lines could bring plantation production to a halt in
the 1946 Hawaiian sugar strike (see, for example, Trask 1996; Valdés 2011; Red Nation 2022).
This collective spirit also exceeded the plantation space and was cultivated in struggles
against state evictions of plantation communities from their homes too. To illustrate this
example, Maivan Clech Lam recalls the collective struggle of the plantation community against
Waimanalo Village evictions in 1973:
For about two years, the residents there would meet every evening to plan and
organize their resistance. I attended the meetings and saw a very vibrant community
at work. Multi-ethnic and local to the core, their ties to one another appeared to
have been laid down in plantation days. Folks there variously identified themselves
as Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese and, once in a while, haole
[…] The Filipino contingent appeared the largest, and counted several veterans of
past epic strikes against plantation owners in the outer islands. Yet, no one ethnic
group claimed or exercised priority over the others. The spokespersons who
emerged tended to be Hawaiian or Filipino. Disputes arose, of course, but were as
often resolved. All in all, the community presented a passionate, dedicated, and
united front in opposing the state’s eviction plans.
(Maivan Clech Lam cited in Kubota 2018: 204)
This account of plantation-grounded worker organising across racialised divisions provides an
important reminder of what has been cultivated on the vast plantation estates of the colonised
world. If a core contribution of racial capitalism scholars is to teach us that capitalism
relentlessly produces and exploits difference, generating divisions in the working class
(Robinson [1983] 2000: 3), real life examples of worker struggles show that collective
organising can, with very conscious effort, also work against this tendency.
More broadly, if the colonial plantation contained the seeds of anticolonial revolution, it
was logical to expect that independence, where achieved, would follow through to bring radical
reform of the plantation system itself. To draw again on Beckford’s words, bringing an end to
the foreign-owned plantation “was what independence was supposed to have been about” (ibid:
4). And yet, even 70 years or so after many countries achieved independence, this system is
not only still in place, it is also expanding rapidly across Indigenous lands in parts of the Global
5
For a brilliant discussion of this with Ray Catania see Red Nation (2022).

Lisa Tilley, SOAS University of London
Essay forthcoming in International Politics Reviews
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South, especially in Southeast Asia (Li & Semedi 2021; Chao 2022). Beckford draws on cases
from Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka) Indonesia, Guatemala, and parts of the Caribbean where
projects to overthrow foreign plantation ownership were neutralised, defeated or reversed after
being implemented after independence. Lamenting this unfulfilled revolution, the author says:
“Either the plantation was too solid an institutional structure for the force of the winds of
change or the winds were in fact only a breeze” (Beckford 1999: 5).
Beckford goes on to argue that the fact that ‘constitutional’ independence is combined with
“economic, social, psychological, and indeed even political dependency” (rather than true
independence in all of those areas) is largely tied to the institutional structure of the plantation
itself. Here, he echoes Wynter’s (1971: 102) concluding point that “a new Constitution, even
Independence, were changes which left the basic system untouched; and which only prolonged
the inevitable and inbuilt confrontation between the plantation and the plot.” And because
plantations maintained foreign land ownership over most of the decent arable land in
postcolonial plantation economies, this meant that a productive peasantry could not fully
develop in places like Jamaica. Foreign owned plantations continued to dominate the land and
resources, making it very difficult for local agricultural endeavours to get started. In short,
independence alone did not empower the plot over the plantation.
To shift to the Southeast Asia context, in the immediate aftermath of independence from
Dutch colonial rule and the proclamation of the Indonesian Republic, plantation estate workers
across the Indonesian archipelago organised, not only to secure labour rights, but also to
meaningfully fulfil the goals of the anticolonial revolution. The revolutionary consciousness
cultivated on colonial plantations facilitated a struggle against both the racialised labour order
of the local estates, which reproduced white managerialism, and against colonial extractive
tributaries which saw value drained to Europe from Asian plantations (Tilley 2020). Indonesian
plantation workers were organised into the union known as SARBUPRI (Sarekat Buruh
Perkebunan Republik Indonesia, or the Estate Workers’ Union of the Republic of Indonesia)
which was affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or
PKI). SARBUPRI’s 700,000 members organised across racialised divisions and brought
European planters to their knees during the 1950s through strikes and sabotage (White 2016:
3; Tilley 2020). However, the Western-backed anti-communist counterrevolution of 1965
killed many SARBUPRI members, brought the dictator Suharto to power, and paved the way
for Western capital dominance to be restored to Indonesia, where the plantation export
economy has expanded ever since.

Lisa Tilley, SOAS University of London
Essay forthcoming in International Politics Reviews
8
Over in Vietnam, after independence from the French, plantations were also central to the
revolutionary struggle against foreign dominance. The Việt Minh had originally endeavoured
to destroy rubber plantations as the definitive “imperial landscapes” through coordinated
sabotage actions (Aso 2018: 29). However, five years after independence, the Việt Minh had
turned to embrace the plantation as a site productive of value which could help their cause
through funding the provision of arms and food. In the words of Aso (2018: 29), the
“characteristics that made this region useful for anticolonial resistance arose from the colonial
refashioning of nature for rubber production.” In short, the colonial separation and domination
of Nature could be repurposed for anticolonial ends.
Closing on ecology and revolution between plot and plantation
When we zoom out from Wynter’s foundational text to consider the world between plot and
plantation, comfortable binaries are not always so easy to claim. The revolutionary spirit of the
plantation is generated in sites across the South, but political exigencies have also driven the
anticolonial strategic use of the domination of Nature. In Wynter’s terms, this necessarily
means the anticolonial reproduction of alienation and dehumanisation of humanity-in-Nature.
Reading ecology in Wynter causes us to turn back to the real and tangible use value structure
of the plot and away from the fiction of the monocultural/monotonous plantation regime which
we know leads to socioecological decay. Returning to the plot, as La Via Campesina and other
anti-systemic movements have done in recent years, is to reaffirm the (inevitably racialised)
class struggle when organising for ecologies of liberation. Returning to the plot is therefore to
consciously think through metabolic repair along with social repair, as well as to actively
organise against the ecological rupture provoked by the exchange structure of the plantation.
After all, the plot, as the basis for all socioecological reproduction, survives without the
plantation, but the plantation does not survive without the plot.
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Essay forthcoming in International Politics Reviews
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Essay forthcoming in International Politics Reviews
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