A fundamental separation present since the beginning of capitalism has been the forcible dispossession of workers, peasants and indigenous people from their land. This has left us not only unable to walk on vast areas of land but also unable to produce our own food at scale outside the market and challenge the power of industrial agriculture. What is the relationship between the rural and the urban in relation to food production, access to the more than human world and subsistence ways of living for communities? And how has this division been racially structured by the forces of capitalism?

As the climate crisis intensifies and political tensions destabilise the current international order and the supply chains that the vast majority of the world is now dependent on, questions such as access to food, logistics and supply chains, labour exploitation of migrant seasonal labour are coming more and more to the fore. This can be seen both on global and local levels. The separation from land enforced by globalised monoculture agriculture and production, with the colonial empires controlling and extracting from the rest of the world, has over centuries decreased communities’ abilities to provide for themselves and is destroying the fabric of the earth, our water tables and biodiversity. What forms of resistance are being carried out by indigenous communities and land workers? Which collective and commoning practices can move us towards a direct and relational relationship with the more than human world as opposed to an extractive and destructive one?

Questions we want to answer to:

  • Why must we overcome the separation of workers, indigenous people, and peasants from the land? How do we take back the land in places like Britain? 
  • How ​​​​​can we imagine a communist mode of production that is not a return to traditional subsistence farming?
  • How do we make visceral the demand for reparations?
  • How can we challenge the dominance of exploiters of the land – supermarkets, aristocrats, and big agricultural companies?
  • How can we articulate the need for food production and food sovereignty without falling into nationalist tropes?