Land Back and Liberated Zones: Building Power and Reworking Relations through Community Land Trusts
/
**Becoming Human
by Boone Shear, Avery Conrad, and Juliana Greene**
Late February of this year Kali Akuno from Cooperation Jackson and Ethan Miller from Land in Common took part in a public conversation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. With over 200 students, faculty, and community members in attendance, Kali and Ethan shared with each other and the audience the history and politics of their organizations, the relationship between place-based and global politics, and the role of community land trusts and solidarity economies as part of a process of decommodification.
Community Land Trusts (CLT) take land out of the speculative market and away from individual ownership. CLT’s are most commonly discussed as a strategy for affordable housing. More fundamentally, CLT’s provide a means for communities to make creative decisions about how land is thought about, used, and developed. Land in Common and Cooperation Jackson both use community land trusts as a tool for decommodification—for stewarding, caring for and restoring relationships with and through land—as part of transformative politics of fighting for and building other worlds.
Cooperation Jackson uses their community land trust to help build a cooperative economy in Jackson, Mississippi that includes worker-cooperatives, community gardens, cooperative housing, a community production center, thing-swaps, and free stores and other forms of mutual aid; a growing solidarity economy that is part of a broader strategy for Black self-determination and collective liberation. Their community land trust is a means to meet needs of the community, build non-capitalist relationships, and build power. Land in Common is located on unceded Wabanaki lands in what is colonially known as Greene, Maine. Land in Common’s community land trust is designed to move land towards indigenous and other black and brown communities. Land in Common directly returns colonially occupied land to indigenous stewardship, creates land access and stewardship for excluded communities, and engages in public education and movement building.
A politics of land decommodification is integral to revolutionary struggle. As Miller relates, under capitalism, land—a living web of human and non-human relationships that sustain life—is transformed into an object and placed into a “hostage” situation through private ownership. Transforming this perverse formation into relational livelihoods involves both (re) establishing embodied practices through collaborative stewardship and carefully attending to the colonially structured relations and traumas that converge in particular places. “For [Cooperation Jackson]”, Kali explains, “a part of decommodification is figuring out and eventually creating a role where we can be stewards in the lands where Black people have become the majority but with the tacit recognition that we’re trying to work towards a larger project of Indigenous sovereignty. And we just need to play a particular part of exercising self-determination within a broader no-state framework.”
In April, Land in Common and Cooperation Jackson again came together as part of a Land Gathering in Grafton, Massachusetts to further build and deepen relationships along with leaders and members from Community Movement Builders, Cooperation Vermont, and host Global Village—about 25 people all together. Over the course of two days of facilitated conversations, shared meals, and lots of informal open space, participants began to get to know each other and build trust through slow, careful conversations necessary for real relationship building that too often gets subordinated in favor of felt urgencies to find shared values and theory, or to get into a coordinated strategic alignment. On the first night, this core group was joined by an additional seventy-five organizers and community members for a “fish-bowl” conversation, dinner, and singing and dancing before returning the next day for more small, intimate conversations. The organizations are continuing their conversations and collaborations through a nascent affiliation Northeast Solidarity for Land and Liberation and plans are being made for future gatherings and mutual aid.
Land Back and Liberated Zones: Building Power and Reworking Relations through Community Land Trusts Dialogue with Kali Akuno and Ethan Miller
Kali Akuno All right. First of all, thank you all for coming out on a Tuesday. And to me, a very cold evening. I don't know about y'all. But, to me, this place is pretty damn cold!
So to introduce myself–I’m evolving, growing, and changing. I think the things that I hold most dear about who I am now and who I am trying to become, is first and foremost, a father. I have two interesting little people that I’m working with and trying to help guide, and share lessons, but also who I am learning from. My oldest is leading a gender transition revolution in the house presently. And my son thinks he’s a pirate. He’s a ‘One Piece’ pirate, and has taken to pirating all of the spaces he’s in. So that to me is becoming much more of a central component of who and what I am and that really guides, to a degree, the urgency I feel and the work that I do everywhere else; you know, I come from a tradition that experienced a Holocaust–coming from enslaved ancestors. So I always hold a piece that the things that we confront now are kind of minimal compared to what other generations have gone through. And I don't try to erase that memory, but I try to actually use it as a strength. To know that folks have persevered through far worse and that the challenges that we are currently facing– when viewed with that depth, rage, and love–appear to me to be very minimal. And it gives me a deep sense of revolutionary hope and courage to know that these things are not insurmountable, right? I'm living proof. The fact that I'm even here, talking shit to you all, this is proof that the struggle is well worth all the sacrifices and the efforts.
I situate my work in Jackson and elsewhere, within an effort of trying to do practical things to bring about revolutionary change. This has had a whole bunch of zigs and zags and reversals and experimenting with things that worked one year and don't work the next. But to the extent that we are really building the capacity of those around us, I think that all the experimentation is well worth it. And to me the tools and techniques of the solidarity economy are central to the transformation that we need to make. But in and of themselves, they won't get us where we need to go. I’ll save that for dialogue around another question later on. But, [more importantly] I asked to be introduced as a grumpy, middle aged black man. You know, to like best situate myself, someone who's like trying to uproot and destroy all the different systems that currently structure our social reality. So if I had another way of describing myself, that would probably be it.
Ethan Thanks Kali, and so I have to confess that I asked to be introduced as a dorky white guy that wants to overthrow colonialism and capitalism. (See, Kali, we got it in anyway.)
It's really great to be here with you all. Thanks for coming out. And thanks, everybody who made this possible, especially to the Building Solidarity Economies class, especially the students in that class, who are incredible people doing amazing work in the world. I'm so excited that you're in this world and in the struggle. Thank you all.
I live in the Wabanaki homelands that are colonially known as Maine. I grew up in Lenape territory. I live with my partner, beloved kids, and a bunch of other great folks at a place called Wild Mountain Cooperative which is a land-based community, a cooperative land project, just north of Lewiston-Auburn. I’m a farmer. I grow fruit trees as part of a little worker cooperative nursery that's on the land. And I'm also a co-coordinator of Land in Common community land trust which I’ll talk more about. It all intersects; it’s all mixed together. There's no way to separate out, like you [Kali] said: our families and our land and our connections and our work. And our visions for revolutionary change. So, Land in Common is a community land trust and a land justice organizing project. We are very consciously working to remove land from capitalism, to return land to Wabanaki nations and communities, and also to put that land in the hands of Black, brown and other indigenous communities who have been dispossessed of land and who want and need to be using that land to heal, to grow food, to meet basic community needs. And to build a material base for the broader work of collective liberation.
One of my roles as a white accomplice in this work is to bring my skills in an accountable way to efforts that we all need. That I need too. And also to interface with the world of white-dominant institutions, white-dominant funding institutions, and particularly to deal directly with the “white knuckle grip”-- you know, a literal white knuckle grip that is on land and wealth. How do we work with folks to release land and wealth back into a commons so that we can all share it instead of just a few hoarding it?
That's a big part of our work. We have moved about 500 acres of land so far into some form of community commons. Close to 200 acres is now held by a Wabanaki organization called Bomazeen Land Trust. They do incredible work, I urge you to check out Bomazeen Land Trust, some of whose members are also part of our leadership council. We have a three person staff collective, organized horizontally. If we have an executive director, it’s the land. Our core operations and our priorities are shaped and guided by a Black, brown, and indigenous leadership council, made up of community leaders and organizers from a bunch of different communities and grassroots organizations. And so our work: we were born from the cooperative land project that I live in. It was originally a very white-dominant project. We grew over the last eight years in a very consciously transformative way, exploring the possibility of transforming the organization to center Black, brown, and indigenous communities and priorities, by making the organization radically vulnerable--understanding that we might actually need to abolish this organization and shift resources elsewhere. And we have made this shift in major ways, even as it’s always going to be an ongoing process. Now, really, all of our core work and resources are going toward projects that are led by and in collaboration with grassroots organizations led by communities most impacted by land injustice.
Kali I think in Cooperation Jackson’s case, it’s a constantly evolving dynamic. As we gain more experience, we learn more, and we try to refine more. So, let me back up just a little bit. This May Day will be the 10 year anniversary of Cooperation Jackson. But the idea of it is older. So, you have to situate us in an intergenerational politic and dynamic. So we very explicitly see ourselves–Cooperation Jackson sees ourselves–as being an instrument to execute a component of a strategy called the Jackson Kush Plan. And that plan comes out of a broader tendency within the Black Liberation Movement known as The New African Independence Movement, which is striving for self-determination and sovereignty for people of African descent within the United States–particularly those who have been enslaved within what has become the United States of America. But within that, the rallying cry of that tendency is “Free the Land.” And it's a slogan that has many iterations, but where we got it from, fundamentally, was from comrades in Namibia, in their struggle against all the European powers, but in particular the South African government in the 1960s.
So how we got into this particular piece was, you know, the movement I come from was–and members of my family come from—were engaged in armed struggle against the United States government, in the 1960s and 70s. We lost that round. We lost many folks who are still in prison or living in political exile. And so, you know my generation didn't shirk at that but tried to take some different lessons in a period where the Black Liberation Movement was not nearly as strong. And it hasn't been as strong as the movements of the 1960s and 70s, in some fundamental ways. I would say in some ways, it's more broad than it was then. But as an organized, concentrated, collective set of entities, what we have now does not match what we had in the 60’s and 70’s. For a lot of different reasons. That’s not necessarily a criticism of folks in this day and era. It’s a different era. It's a different period, with different conditions.
But learning from what happened in the 60’s and 70’s we said—a good number of us said— well, we're not going to [be able to right now] necessarily directly liberate land. We just don't have the capacity to do that. Can we pull our resources together to buy land and employ that in a strategic way to take it off of the commodity market? And those of us who would buy, we would make a principled agreement, that we would never sell it to any kind of commercial development, or whatever. And to use it for kind of reinstituting the commons, for a common, community use.
Now, I have to complicate this a little bit, because being the political subjects that we are, we are diasporic. Fundamentally, we are not race essentialists, we never were so it's not like, you know, Black is impermeable to other things. That is a very particular definition that has evolved within the United States. And so, primarily in the United States—not uniformly but primarily in the English speaking portions of the United States, basically since the 16th century—to be Black meant that you just had to have one drop of Black “blood”, meaning just one Black ancestor. And if you had any kind of phenotype that could be observed, any phenotypic trait, that appeared to be African, whatever the hell that might entail, you were designated as Black. But it was also directly associated with a certain set of property relations--that is, human beings as property, and it was a way to denote that this person is property. So that's part of the dynamic that is inclusive and important to us.
But there's also a kind of historic byproduct of that, which has a certain beauty to it, at least from my perspective. It’s that Black is an all-embracing category. At least it can be. So, it’s like, anybody within the general culture framework, if you want to be in, welcome to the club. But also understand that within this white dominated society, that comes with costs. That comes with penalties. And if you're willing to bear those with us collectively, it don't matter what your phenotype is. We can rock with you. We can get down with you. But you’ve got to uphold the value and the principle of African life, that's the critical thing.
But there's another set of contradictions we have to confront, and this is we are a people in diaspora who are making certain claims on Indigenous land. We can never forget that. Because from our vantage point, we don't want to be settlers. That's not how we came here. That's not how we were introduced to the society. But we could become that if we're not clear and not mindful of what our relationship is and should be with Indigenous people. And for us in the south, that's very complicated. Extremely complicated. Because among the Seminoles, the Creeks, some elements of the Cherokee, and some elements of the Choctaw, there was a degree of what was once called inter-racial marriage, or folks, you know, working with and being entangled with each other. And Indigenous people supporting maroon societies. But some of those tribes also practiced chattel slavery. Right? So there's a contradiction that unfortunately, we've never settled some accounts with each other, people to people, people to people, relative to relative. And the primary reason is the U.S. federal Government, the colonial enterprise that it is, has made sure that we are divided and separated and distinct and cannot really engage in a certain level of dialogue with each other. Because there are penalties on the Indigenous side as well for being too inclusive, in the way the laws have fundamentally been constructed around who is and who can be Indigenous and do Indigenous people even have the right to define themselves?
So, there’s a level for us…we are on Choctaw land. And we've tried to be in a place of like, we are purchasing land and our community land trust has acquired a lot of land, but we need to figure out a way—people-to-people–to be in right relationship with each other and fully reestablish the sovereignty of the Choctaw. But there's a complication with that. And I'm just going to speak plainly. Particularly since the “casino era” stuff has come, that has really complicated certain aspects of the dynamics. And there are now internal struggles within all the nations that have these casinos, about their own internal politics. And our politics, coming from The New African Independence movement, is that those are questions of self-determination that Indigenous people have to figure out, and we have certain questions about our own self-determination that we have to figure out, without really trying to interfere in each other's internal dynamics. So, for us, a part of decommodification is figuring out and eventually creating a role where we can be stewards in the lands where Black people have become the majority but with the tacit recognition that we're trying to work towards a larger project of Indigenous sovereignty. And we just need to play a particular part of exercising self-determination within a broader no-state framework.
Ethan I want to come back to this question of land justice on stolen land, because that's really important for our work, too. First I'll just step back and think about land decommodification in a broad sense. We're coming from a shared understanding that land is the source of all life. That land is where it all comes from and land is where it all returns to. Where we all return to. And so the process, the colonial capitalist process, of turning land into a commodity requires first that we turn land into an object-- that we break the relationship of kinship with land that Indigenous people around the world have understood for thousands and thousands of years, and still understand. That my European ancestors at one point understood and forgot.
So first, [colonial capitalism] breaks that sense of kinship and turns land into an object. Once it's an object, then it becomes something we can buy and sell. And when we're buying and selling land, we're buying and selling the fundamental means of life. And that means that the means of life is mediated entirely by money. Anything mediated by money means that those things are mediated by the fundamental power relationships that fracture our reality: all of the forms of power and oppression and exploitation: class power, white supremacy, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, all those things are now going to play out in our access to the means of life, right? So any work of collective liberation has got to start with the land in that sense, because there is no collective liberation if we don't have a restoration of that relationship with land as kin, land as a reciprocal relationship that sustains us and that we take care of in turn. So that, for us, for Land in Common, is fundamental.
But then we have a problem. We want to decommodify the land. It turns out it's illegal to decommodify land. I've only learned this recently. I think I went into this work with the starry eyed idea that somehow we could use the law to decommodify land. Well guess what? Modern property law was invented in order to commodify land. That's the whole point. So we're stuck in this position where we've got to figure out– in the absence of the collective power that we need to actually overthrow the state and institute an entirely different kind of regime– we've got to work with some tools that are fundamentally flawed, that are fundamentally colonial tools. So we've got to ask: what does effective decommodification look like in this context? Because this is still our strategy. It's a power building strategy to get to the point where communities are restored in relationship to land, and restored in access to the power that land gives. And that power is the only way we're ever going to even be able to imagine building the kind of power we need to undo the whole system and actually decommodify the land and everything else.
So the community land trust is a strategy for us, to do this work of effective decommodification. We spent a lot of time, early on, studying different legal structures and thinking about the pros and cons. Community land trusts felt compelling to us. For the reason that it's a legal structure that allows us to set up this commons where we have a community that's holding the “land in common” (hence our name). And then you have to confront all the questions of: who is that community of commoners? Who gets to common that land? And our structure also allows for people to build and hold some equity, some value, some wealth, in their infrastructure-- because you know, we're constantly putting in money to fix our houses and keep things from falling apart. You don't want people to lose that value, like we do in rent situations. So the community land trust structure allows folks living on the land to own their houses and the other infrastructure, but the land is held in common, by the wider community together. And we’re also trying to take profit out of the infrastructure: when you sell that infrastructure to the next person, the next generation, they're only buying it for basically what you put in. You can get back what you put in, but you can’t make a profit off others.
So that's kind of the basis of the community land trust structure. But it's also really important for me to say that there's a big community land trust movement that’s been going on for a long time. I think there are around 250 community land trusts in the U.S., probably more. But there's a dominant trend in the community land trust movement, which is what I think of as a charity model, where community land trusts are like: “let's build housing for low income people. So that this is a stepping stone towards real homeownership.” You see that a lot in the community land trust world. And I don't want to spend much energy critiquing that because that's not where energy needs to be directed.
But I do want to say that our goal is to decommodify all the land, and if we're going to decommodify all the land, we have to start with the people who are actually hoarding the land right now. And so I think for us, we want to shift that conversation from “how do we create stepping stones to ownership?” to “how do we create stepping stones out of ownership?” And we want this to speak much more loudly to people who already own private property. People with current access to substantial wealth who already hold land as private property (or who will inherit land). This is really a hostage relationship, as my Penobscot comrade Lokotah Sanborn likes to say. How do we help people release that grip? People who have more than they need, they need to be stepping up to the plate much more than folks who are just struggling to get along. So we're not going to spend time critiquing, you know, Black homeownership strategies. We're going to look at wealthy white folks and say, “hey, what are you doing to decommodify your land? What is your pathway toward saying NO to the system that is holding land hostage? To the system that is hoarding the means of life and keeping all the rest of our communities from having access to the ability to flourish?
So what does this all look like? I think that's our political question in a really broad sense. Because we can have all kinds of projects to decommodify land, and I'm very familiar with many white-dominant collective land projects who have in some way decommodified their land. But this can be just another form of what folks have called “colonial commons.” We can feel really good about ourselves, like, “wow, look at our anti-capitalist project with a bunch of white privileged folks who all live together on some decommodified land!” That ultimately transforms very little. I don't want to downplay the important ways that we can learn how to live together in these projects; I mean, there are real relational skills that I have learned in exactly this kind of situation. But at a structural level, when we're talking about shifting power, this kind of approach becomes another accessory to the colonial process.
So for Land in Common, the question is how do we decommodify land that's focused toward folks who are hoarding land, and then how do we then redistribute that land in a way that's building collective liberation, that's building community power among communities who have been dispossessed of that power for generations? For us, this starts with Land Back. That's fundamental. All land projects need to pass through Wabanaki nations and communities first. And we're in an ongoing, iterative, and really complex process of developing what that looks like. Because, then also, we want land projects to be shifted out to other dispossessed communities.
That's a real tension. And I think part of what we're trying to do internally, and what our leadership council is trying to do, is to have these conversations with each other in a really honest and often really difficult way. How does land justice for Wabanaki and non-Wabanaki displaced or dispossessed communities not come into competition? This goes all the way to dominant institutions who are ready to set up the competition, you know, by handing out money to whoever the favorite of the day. They're going to give the money to whoever is going to be easiest to be in relationship with, whoever makes white people feel best about themselves, and this fractures communities and movements, right? There re no easy answers here. But it feels like whatever organizing we're doing, bringing these questions into the center of the space is really, really crucial.
Kali Let me say this. I think the good thing is that our movements have matured enough that we can have this level of dialogue. I think we're starting to ask at the very least better questions. I'm not gonna say the right questions but better questions. And we are going to have to experiment towards finding solutions. And through that, there's going to be some pain. And I think we have to get ready for that. To give a real world example of some of what I'm talking about–about a decade ago, and some of it is ongoing - the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Seminoles, they all kicked all the Freedmen, Black people off of the rolls. And so there was a whole process around that, you know, which was about the allocation of resources.
And then also questions of definition [of identity] going back to some census that was taken by the United States government in the 1880s, or the 1860s or the 1830s, whatever the situation is, right? Without recognizing that a bunch of people who were hiding from chattel slavery or a bunch of people who was hiding from being catalogued, on both sides, if you want to call this a side, often chose not to be counted in the damn census anyway. Right, I know my grandmother until she died was like “baby, ‘don't ever sign nothing for the government. Don't tell them who you are, where you are, what you're doing, what you're thinking, you know, keep your good money in your pillow’”. It is these types of defensive practices that we have to take into account in terms of looking at well what is the actual documentation and then who's justifying what?
I'm not a deep fan of Foucault, but I will acknowledge that I have learned through hard practice, that power actually is everywhere, and that there are gradients of it. And to not delude myself that as a Black man, a male in this world, I have a certain degree of power, relative to other people who don't have my same subjectivity or positionality. That don't mean I'm calling the shots anywhere, you know, but I can exercise certain points of power and domination over other subjects and we have to recognize that if we're going to totally divest ourselves of a world where power is the mediating force. Right? And that's important. I'm gonna try to relate that to the present, to bring Palestine back into the equation into this conversation. Because, ultimately, let's be real. What that conflict has really come down to is: the United States government and Israel have more force that they can bring to the equation to kill more people and that is the final mediating part of it. They really couldn't give a damn about what the rest of us think. Y'all can't beat me. Right. So it’s might makes right. That is the way in which we are learning, for all of us who had some illusions that the 20th century got rid of colonialism. No, they just changed the form, it has gotten more sophisticated. We still got a lot of work to do to decolonize the world in the fullest sense. And to me, that means not in terms of nation states. I mean disaggregating that whole project in the first place, which is about just mediating capitalist relationships at its core anyway.
So there's a deeper set of work and if there's anything I think this present conflict should teach us, is to really divest ourselves from the last vestiges of bourgeois liberalism that we all hold in our heads. Because that world is crumbling, and we need to let it go internally as fast as possible. That doesn't mean we're very clear, any of us, about what should come after, right, or how will we get there, but we best be willing to experiment, to get dirty, to be honest and to be principled with each other in terms of doing that. With all the complications of state infiltration, which is a real, very real thing, which I grew up with, and I'm still a victim of, within all organizing work. So if there is a synthesis of the above, it’s [that we need to be open to more] experimentation.
Ethan [I want to talk about this] idea of global power. I think that that is a very alluring idea. Because it feeds the feeling that we have of, like, “this thing is out of control, and we don't know how to stop it.” But I also think that power doesn't really operate like that. I don't actually think there's such thing as “global power.” Power is always located. The power that is enacting genocide in Palestine is located, right? Raytheon has locations. You know, UMass and UMass’ complicity in that whole process is a located thing, right? I mean, that's what organizers who are trying to rise up and do something to stop this violence know, which is that everywhere there are points of intervention that we can make. So I think right there, you know, our organizing always needs to be connecting together in our places across our different movements. And that's where we can't have this divide between the folks doing the creative alternatives and the cooperatives and the folks doing the oppositional work, trying to shut things down. Those need to be the same movement. That's the same work. We cannot let that divide play out. The organizing of shuttling back and forth between those worlds, what my dear friend Boone and Penn Loh call “fight and build,” moving back and forth, that's crucial.
I'd also say that the work of land justice and land return is, on some level, the same work of stopping the genocide and the dispossession of Palestinian people. Because those are forms of work that are aimed at stopping and disrupting and transforming planetary colonialism and all of its forms, right? These are different manifestations of the same patterns of power that are playing out at different scales and on different timeframes. Land enclosure and occupation and dispossession are unfolding everywhere as part of this ongoing process of addictive capitalist accumulation, of Pathological Accumulation Disorder, whatever we might want to call it. And also of trauma response cascading down through generations. That's a very real factor in all this. We're also dealing with the ways in which bombing Gaza and hoarding private property are in some ways both illusions of attempts to create safety. You can pretend somehow you're going to eliminate the thing that feels threatening by killing people. But I mean, it's utter madness to think that I can bomb an entire generation and then somehow my family is going to be safe after that. You know, that's utter madness. But it's also utter madness to think that I can get my little spot of land and have it as my own, and somehow be insulated from the unfolding apocalypse that is upon us and that's been upon all the people who have been dispossessed of that land ever since the advent of colonialism, right?
So there's a way in which it's a bunker mentality where you're in your literal bomb bunker, but also suburbia is a form of bunker, and you might be safe for a moment. You might be safe for a generation. But I think we're learning that increasingly, nobody is safe anymore. There is no place you can run or hide. And so that for me is also where, in the work that I'm doing, it feels not like, “oh, I'm showing up to help other communities who are in need,” you know, it's actually like, this is work that we all have to do for our collective survival. There is no more “some people pretending like this isn't our work and this isn't our survival at stake too.” We're all obviously in radically different situations in this context, but yeah, I mean, for me, this is recognizing that we’ve got to come out of our bunkers and do our work together.
Kali Our project was designed to have as much strategic impact on disrupting Empire as possible given our specific locality. So what does that mean? It would be good if I had a map to show you, but I just want you to use your powers of envisioning right now. So, Jackson, Mississippi, and I'm just going to give this by way of example, we'll just try to make it concrete. So Jackson, Mississippi, to really understand what it is relative to capitalism and colonialism, it's a minor transport hub. That's what it is. That's why it was created. The original capital of that particular settler colonial state is Natchez, which is where my family is from. My family lineage goes back there since it was founded 300 years ago. But the planter ruling class of the state strategically chose Jackson. This was I think in the 1850s. They strategically named Jackson, in honor of Andrew Jackson, the great enslaver and Indian killer. They strategically chose it because it was at a crossroads between the two divisions of the state. And Mississippi is still divided between a western portion, which is dominated by the flood plains of the Mississippi river, which is where the delta is and all of that rich soil. And then the more bed-rocky part, the eastern part, which has poor soils for farming and still structures the social and economic divisions in the state to this day. So the eastern part of the state is largely white. The western part of the state is largely Black. Because the floodplain side, that's where you could grow cotton and sugarcane. And most everything else, and that's where they concentrated my ancestors.
But in this little place, they found this juncture of, how do we move goods and services that come from the Delta, that come from the extraction largely of timber, initially, from from the eastern part of the state, and how do we move it either down to New Orleans or up to Chicago? Right, to get to either a national market or international market, put it that way. So two port cities. And it may not seem critical to us kind of now. But you know, like New Orleans, people forget or maybe you didn't know, for about a good 150 years New Orleans was one of the biggest cities in the US Empire, and was more densely concentrated than Manhattan. And Mississippi was a dominant factor in how this empire functioned and worked. There's a reason why when the civil war broke out, the first thing that the North did was go capture New Orleans. That was the first thing on the agenda and as soon as the South lost it, basically the war was over, it just kind of dragged on after that due to the determination and desperation of the southern forces to protect their interests.
So put us in this context, both in history and the current trajectory. To understand Jackson, the modern infrastructure is laid out both by railroad and by freeway. We're at an intersection going north to south on the 55 freeway, which takes you from New Orleans to Chicago. And from east to west, there's the 20 freeway, which basically runs you from Atlanta to the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Right, those are the major hubs and we're just kind of a node in between. We can be very disruptive to a lot of things if we exercise our full power, as a working class force, around if there's certain things going to move between here it's going to have to move with our permission, and if not, there'll be some cost to pay. So it's not just abstract, I'm just giving you a snippet of how we thought our little local project could have a global impact.
And I want you to think about this because I’m sharing how we thought about it. One half of the world’s grain comes 40 miles away from Jackson, Mississippi, going down the Mississippi River. Now imagine if we could get port workers and truckers and the dock workers to say “we're not gonna load that today. Or we gonna move it in a different direction or maybe it is going to be applied, not going somewhere overseas but redistributed to hungry people here or we can appropriate that and do something else with it.” So, for us, we say being strategic about where we are, is understanding where we fit into the actual global system in the global modes of production. Not that we want to replicate it because we don't, but you know, the things that we are invested in from our labor that they dispossessed us of is also a form of power that we can use to transform things. And we have to remember that. And that is the piece that we're saying that we are trying to build an axis of power within our own community to be disruptive on that side. That's the fight side of things. The build side of things is, there's elements of that infrastructure which can be appropriated to do a different type of distribution, a different type of networking, and that's what we're fundamentally invested in but it has to be rooted in our own local community’s capacity to produce the goods and services it needs for itself. We haven't gotten there yet. But that's always been our aim and objective.
We want to be able to be self-determining. Including we want to feed ourselves and take care of ourselves and through being able to do that, like more localization, we reduce carbon emissions, we reduce all this waste, you know, that means changing some of our eating habits, but we're probably gonna change towards the better that’ll actually fit our bodies rather than all this other processed stuff that they force upon us. But on the defensive side of it, our community is very experienced with not only being burnt out by the White Citizens Councils in the Klan, but also, not too long ago–15, 18 years ago–watching food being used as a weapon to move Black folks out of New Orleans and other communities on the Gulf Coast to make it so that Black folks cannot return or could not return.
We know this from lived experience. I worked in New Orleans immediately after the great flood brought on by Hurricane Katrina, and learned some valuable lessons that I brought to the organization. The big thing was like “yo comrades, we got to take this food sovereignty question very seriously. Like it's been loosely kind of on our agenda, we got to put that front and center , because very clearly they let us die.” They could have stopped it anytime they wanted to. Right. So that was a strategic choice. To let that many Black people die.
I hope y'all really understand the gravity of that. So we took that and were like, yeah, let's get prepared to the greatest extent. And to be honest with you, we've been trying to prepare ourselves for a similar type of assault we see now in Gaza, no bullshit. You know, our movement has gone through things like that. One of the nearest things you all have here in living experience, if you're not familiar what happened to the MOVE organization in 1985, where in Philadelphia, which had a Black mayor, bombed them and burned down not only them, but like 14 blocks. So it's not speculation. It's not an exaggeration. There's other horrors, you know, being a child of those movements that I can tell you, which never got that much attention or fanfare for a number of different reasons.
Now to give a living example of understanding your positionality and using it to your benefit you know–and this is Kali speaking for himself, so you know, the sponsors, y'all don't get in trouble–but I want y'all to at least study what Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, what they're doing. Right. This is a group of folks who understand their positionality very well and are fighting a very asymmetric warfare. They know they can't beat the United States toe to toe. That's not even the objective. The objective is, I'm going to act in solidarity the best way I can with the limited resources I have, with the positionality I have to disrupt the system, and to highlight the contradictions. And the major contradiction that is being exposed is that the goods being moved on those ships is deemed to be more important than the people being killed up the Bay. Now, when you think about it, and phrase it in that particular way, like those shipping containers got more rights than the Palestinians. That's fundamentally the lessons that they've drawn and the message that they're sending to everybody. And I think hopefully, people see the resolve and understanding like, we got to interrupt this and we got to break this. Because it's not just solidarity in the sense of, I'm doing the act of charity for them. It's like no, U.S. Imperialism’s foot is on my neck too. And any and every place that it can be weakened, undermined, destroyed, is gonna give all of us more leverage, more maneuverability, more power, to not only envision but to practice what it is we want to practice and manifest in the world.
So you know, I think the answer that we would cite is– you have to figure out and really study where you are, and understand how important it is and there's no place which is not important. That's the critical thing. So you can kind of start something anywhere, but you got to just understand how it is connected and then how you want to relate to either undermine the dominant set of relationships and create new, alternate relationships to shift things in the way we want them to be shifted.
Ethan Thanks Kali. I want to build on what you're saying and amplify it because I think one of the things that I find most inspiring about your thinking and Cooperation Jackson's work is this really fine grained, strategic thinking that's also connected to a really big picture. And I think that's really rare. You know, to have that analysis of Jackson and how the work you're doing fits into that picture is not only crucial for a revolutionary pathway, but it's also crucial for a survival pathway in a collapse situation. I think it's important to see that a lot of the things that need to be done to set up the conditions for both of those things--revolution and survival--are exactly the same thing, right? But they're only effective if they're done with that kind of strategic thinking. We all need to do that a lot more.
And I see how our structures for thinking collectively and organizing collectively are thwarted from from that kind of strategic thinking by all kinds of forces. That's a place where radical academia could play a role, right? As many of us in this room know, there are lots of ways in which academia thwarts and prevents the kind of collaboration you would need to have with grassroots organizations and movements, to build that kind of analysis on the ground in an ongoing, useful, committed way. To be able to adjust to changing realities, those sorts of things. think that's part of the aspiration that I see you all doing with community collaborations like the Building Solidarity Economies class. And I think it's an awesome model.
I also see the way that the funding structure of nonprofits thwarts this. What foundation wants to fund us to do a strategic analysis of how to disrupt the Empire? You know what I mean? I mean, the whole structure of like, “hey, come up with a cool, cute new project that we can put on our website and we’ll give you money,” but if you come to us to say, “no, we actually need money to do long-term, slow, trust-based, revolutionary strategic relational organizing...”?
So you can see how both the structures of academia and the structures of nonprofit funding couldn't have been better designed to thwart that kind of strategic revolutionary thinking and organizing. And I think it's an interesting, open question whether or not it’s even viable to be imagining a revolution of the kind that any of us would actually want right now, given current conditions. Personally, I'm not so optimistic about that. But again, I also see it's the same work whether we're trying to build revolution or survive. I think it's more likely that we need to be building to survive and to survive in terrifying conditions. I suspect [Kali] your strategic thinking comes out of having a multi generational experience of being at war, right? And for communities that have not been at war, it's really hard for us to get our minds in that framework of what it means to take this seriously as if our lives depended on it, right? And they do depend on it.
Kali Can I say one thing though? All our communities [are at] war. But are we conscious that we are at war? I just come from a community that's been conscious that it's at war, right. But I think there's just a slight danger in what you say, “we're not at war”, right? Yes you are! Every day you go to work, you get robbed. You at war! Just flip it, so you really understand it, right? We’ve just been duped in many respects, you know, there's a logic that capitalism has imbued in us through its disciplining of labor. I'll just cite one and give it back, the crazy ass notion of a fair day's wage for a fair day's labor. That’s utter madness. Cuz you being robbed, that's just a catchy way of saying well I'm gonna rob you, but I’m gonna give you a little bit so you can feed yourself and your family. But I'm robbing you, as a capitalist I’m robbing you. But that's become a common sense knowledge that we perpetuate to each other. Right, “well, we need to be fighting for better wages.” To hell with a wage; I need to own and control the means of production. Stop having this conversation about better wages and working conditions because you can change that and shift that here and there, and still have no power to determine your own life and life circumstances. So we are all at war, let’s just all be conscious that we are at war.
Ethan Yeah, and that opens the question of which side are we on, right?
I think I'll just maybe close with this: this nonprofit structure of how we do our social change and organizing work has got to go. I mean, we've got to figure out other ways of organizing ourselves. And I say this as somebody who is part of creating a nonprofit. Land in Common is a 501c3 nonprofit and would happily accept donations [laughs]! And so I'm not saying this from a place of like, “Oh, I got it figured out how we need to organize ourselves”, but rather: we need to organize ourselves, as if we were, because we are, at war. And that's not a nonprofit. If you were like, “oh shit, we're preparing for the apocalypse and feeling the potential of armed struggle erupting in all of our communities, and we're going to have to survive in the face of that,” you would not create a nonprofit, right?
In the meantime, we're trying to experiment with how to use that nonprofit as a vehicle to do different kinds of organizing? And that definitely means creating radically different kinds of organizations. I could say a lot more about experiments that we're in the midst of, trying to figure out a really different model. How do we make sure our organizing is not dependent on the nonprofit? Are the things that we're helping to build on the land dependent on the nonprofit? If the answer is yes, then we're not doing our work. If the nonprofit is helping to build and support and grow autonomous projects that can self-organize and sustain themselves, then right on. Bring it on. And we'll keep on fundraising and doing all the stuff. But that also requires a really different mentality for how we think about organization building. Like, let's not create an organization that just needs to feed itself and grow. It's a whole different way of thinking about staffing, a whole different way of thinking about leadership of the organization. I just want to encourage everybody to be thinking really radically and boldly about different ways of organizing ourselves toward that kind of strategic work.
