In the final part of his four part post on food production and just transition Mike Downham puts forward some ideas for the demands we should fight for and how to organise. We’d welcome comments and responses to this important discussion. You can read or download the full text here.
Demands
Choosing and formulating demands has to be collective. If a large number of people, all of whom can see the benefits of winning the demands, haven’t been involved in the process, the demands will fail. This is so obvious that it might not seem worth pointing out, but a lot of GND proposals have fallen into the trap of making detailed proposals drawn up by a small number of well-intentioned activists.
A further general point about demands is that addressing them to governments is only part of their purpose. Equally or more important is that they should reach the whole of society – workers, Unions, civil society organisations and the general public. It helps in formulating them to remember that. The purpose of demands, beyond whatever response governments make or don’t make to them, is to increase the size, diversity and solidarity of the mass movement, giving it something concrete and specific to come behind.
With regard to local food production, it’s enough for now to suggest that we need two sets of demands, one about making land available and one about educational opportunities.
Land demands will need to take land reform much further than the pallid 2003 Right to Buy Act. It’s common knowledge that land ownership in Scotland is more archaic and more unjust than in any other industrialised country in the world. For lots of reasons on top of local food production, any GND needs to confront that fundamental class issue head-on. It would not be difficult to construct an immediate demand that landowners should be compelled to relinquish tenure on a quota of their land for allotments or community gardens or educational gardens or farms producing for the local market, as long as each proposal fulfilled centrally specified conditions.
Educational demands will need to cover classroom and kitchen staffing levels in schools, teacher training, and higher education course choices and staffing, formulated in discussion with workers and their trade unions. Given the recent strong protests of unionised college and university workers, we are in a good position to discuss with these workers and their unions whether this is the moment to demand that higher education should be taken back into public ownership.
Both land and educational changes will have to be anchored by state intervention, and democratically controlled at a local level. Our demands must include these conditions.
Organisation
In considering how we should organise to achieve these demands the overriding point is urgency. The urgency of climate change is widely accepted, and we can’t afford to take our eye off the climate emergency just because air quality and carbon emissions have improved dramatically through lockdowns – though this does show what can be achieved by states when their backs are against the wall. The point is also being made by a lot of people and organisations that if we’re determined not to go back to the same normal once the pandemic is under control, we should start now to get together and say whatever it is we want to say about the new normal. It could take years, with further catastrophic waves of infection, before the pandemic is under control. We absolutely shouldn’t wait to act until then. Even these few weeks before the possibility of a second wave of infection in Scotland mustn’t be wasted.
An additional point argument for urgency in relation to Scotland’s food strategy is the growing prospect of a no-deal Brexit, which could leave the shelves of supermarkets empty again, and not just transiently.
But how do we get together? Building community knowledge, consciousness and solidarity in the context of neoliberalism can take years. In Jackson, Mississippi, they’ve been at it for 40 years. The poor neighbourhoods of North Edinburgh have been at it for at least 10. We don’t have time for that. But the pandemic has created a unique context, in which governments across the world are in a weaker position, and communities in a stronger one, than at any point in the history of industrial capitalism. One immediate opportunity in Scotland is to build on the mutual solidarity networks which have mushroomed during lockdown. Some of these networks are new, while some developed from previous neighbourhood organisations. Other groups are likely to emerge as the full economic consequences of the pandemic bite. As the structure of the economy has changed over the last 50 years, with workplaces that are smaller and often distant from where the workers live, some people working from home, and the predominance of services over production, it’s become clear that we have to organise not only where we work, but also where we live. So we need to join and become active in any local formations which are concerned about the future for working class people, and for most of us there are or will soon be opportunities to do that. And we shouldn’t see existing legislation, including the legal obligations of Local Authorities, as things which can’t be swept away by a mass movement.
More will have to be done about Scotland’s food than the development of local food production. That was illustrated by the traffic chaos in Glasgow last week on the day 31 Macdonald’s drive-ins opened. But development of local food production, as an integral part of a Green New Deal focussed on both a Just Transition and a Just Recovery, bringing with it jobs and training and neighbourhood solidarity, is a good place to start. We can take on Macdonalds and intensive farming later.
You can read or download the full text here.
Employment, Energy and Environment 