The most fundamental question in anarchist politics is not about the state or the prison. It is about food. Because the question of who controls the means of subsistence — who owns the land, who owns the seed, who decides what gets grown and who gets to eat — is the question underneath every other question. If you cannot feed yourself outside the terms set by someone who owns the earth you stand on, you will accept almost any condition they impose. Hunger is the oldest coercion. Enclosure is the oldest expropriation.

This episode centres the Global South, because that is where the argument about food and land has always been fought most clearly and at the greatest cost. The Zapatistas rising on January 1, 1994 — not against the government, but against NAFTA, which they called a death sentence for the milpa, the ancient polyculture Maya communities had cultivated for thousands of years. The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra in Brazil — the largest social movement in Latin America, which has won land titles for more than 400,000 families through direct occupation since 1979. The Dalit women of Telangana who built community seed banks to break their dependency on landlords and patent-holders. And Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers of 1649: the earth is a common treasury.

The concept that ties it all together: food sovereignty, coined by La Via Campesina at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome.

Topics: food sovereignty, Zapatistas, MST Brazil, seed banks, Deccan Development Society, Winstanley, Diggers, La Via Campesina, enclosure, anarchism, NAFTA, milpa, Silvia Federici.

Further reading: — Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004) — Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and Other Writings (1652, ed. Christopher Hill, 1973) — Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved (2007) — Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done (2017) — La Via Campesina, La Via Campesina: Globalising Hope (2013)

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