David Bollier

African Americans have long been victimized by the theft of their land, labor, and the ability to buy land as they wish. Following the Civil War, few former slaves actually received the 40 acres and a mule promised them, and in later decades, all sorts of discriminatory federal policies and bank lending practices made it harder for Blacks and other non-Whites to acquire land. This only served to make it harder for them to earn a decent income, amass household wealth, and improve their lot.

Following the Black Lives Matters protests there have been a spate of important proposals for addressing these forms of structural racism and inequality. One idea gaining momentum is to move more land into community land trusts (CLTs), making it easier for African Americans to gain access to land for farming, housing, and other purposes while neutralizing capitalism’s tendency to generate greater structural inequality.

Acquiring more land for CLTs dedicated to African-American cultural use would be a great way to address a colossal historic wrong.  It would serve as a practical and effective reparation that would benefit many African Americans and communities, and could at the same time reclaim land for ecological and socially valuable purposes.

Theft of Black land has been remarkably common over the decades, as a number of journalistic accounts have documented in recent years. In 2023, for example, p站免费加速器 and The New Yorker described how white developers and lawyers used legal trickery and corrupt judges to take over ancestral land owned by two Black brothers in Carteret County, North Carolina. The practices have been widely used in the South as a way to steal land from African Americans.

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It has been an awful and amazing two weeks – a time of reckoning that is long overdue, a time of coming together that, despite the tragic circumstances, has been enlivening. What is so remarkable is that the Black Lives Matter protests have been nested within a larger, unprecedented trauma, the pandemic. I have found the protests riveting and inspiring, and the brazen police brutality enraging.  The outpouring has issued a call to all of us, especially white people, to look beyond the engrained American norms that have made life so dangerous and demoralizing for people of color.

Anthropologist/activist David Graeber sees the spontaneous protests as part of a larger movement. As he put it in a tweet: “Direct action and social movement are about the re-creation of society. Society has been taken from us. There has been a 40-year campaign to destroy attachments unmediated by the state or capital. This is the only way to start rebuilding it.” We are witnessing a re-convening of the American people and their ideals.

However, the pain of history is not past, as Faulkner once said. That's because the past is not really past. It is very much with us, internalized, in the present. Thanks to the protests, triggered by a brazen murder carried out by an agent of the state and circulated on social media, a deeper shift in consciousness has begun. It is now clear that there are really no bystanders. We are all implicated, particularly those with white privilege. As the artist Banksy put it, “At first I thought I should just shut up and listen to black people about this issue. But why would I do that? It’s not their problem. It’s mine.”

This very idea enrages President Trump, whose denial is manifest in countless deflections and vile insults aimed at protecting white supremacy. Thankfully, history is not trending in his direction. Already major corporations and even the National Football League, the long-time nemesis of “take a knee” quarterback Colin Kaepernick, now publicly support Black Lives Matter. The burden has visibly shifted to white people to look within themselves and take affirmative steps for change.

How refreshing, too, to see ordinary people assert a new vision of history in real time! Citizens have spontaneously toppled statues honoring Confederate General Robert E. Lee and Christopher Columbus. In Bristol, England, a crowd threw the statute of 17th century slave-trader Edward Colston – responsible for selling more than 84,000 Africans into slavery -- into the harbor.

Language is surely one of the greatest political weapons ever invented because it invisibly defines the world in narrow ways and can impair our capacity to see and think clearly. This is one of the takeaways I had after looking through Sian Sullivan’s new website, “The Natural Capital Myth and Other Stories,” which collects twelve years of her writing (2008 to present) on this theme. 

Sian has long brought laser-beam clarity to the ways in which capitalism redefines the more-than-human world in financial terms. The investor class has not just introduced a handful of words; they have invented an entire worldview that erases nature and turns it into an essential element of capitalist production and profit. The natural world is re-interpreted through the scrim of money. That may not be pernicious in and of itself, but now that this perspective informs how the market/state order relates to the natural world, well….that’s a serious problem.

By “financialization,” Sullivan means the “revisioning and rewriting of the natural world in terms of financial terms and concepts.” She also means that banks and financiers regard “environmental conservation activities as new possibilities for speculative investments and products” – a new zone for profiteering and capital accumulation. 

This is deeply concerning because, as conservation itself becomes a way to make money, the line between “nature” and “capital” is starting to blur. The Orwellian term “natural capital” has become a way to justify a relentless extractivism, in the name of preserving nature!

The following essay is adapted from a talk given on May 5 at Radical May, a month-long series of events hosted by a consortium of fifty-plus book publishers, including my own publisher, New Society Publishers. My talk -- streamed and later posted on YouTube here -- builds on two previous blog posts.

As the pandemic continues, it is revealing just how deeply flawed our societal institutions really are. Government programs reward the affluent and punish the poor, and are often ineffectual or politically corrupted. The market/state order is so committed to promoting market growth and using centralized hierarchies to control life, that the resulting systems are fragile, clumsy, and non-resilient. And so on. It is increasingly evident that the problems we face are profoundly systemic.

After dealing with emergencies, therefore, we need to pause and think about mid-term changes in how we can redesign our economy and governance institutions. We need second responders to help emancipate ourselves from archaic, ineffective institutions and infrastructures. We must not revert to old ideological patterns of thought as if the pandemic were simply a temporary break from the normal. “Normal” is not coming back. The new normal has already arrived.  

The pandemic is not just about rethinking big systems; it is also about confronting inner realities that need to change. We need to recognize and feel the suffering that is going on around us. We need to understand our interdependencies so that we can build appropriate institutions to rebuild and honor our relationships to each other. Our inner lives and external institutions need to be in better alignment.

Our years of leisurely critique of neoliberal capitalism are over. Now we need to take action to escape from its pathologies and develop new types of governance, provisioning, and social forms. Fortunately, there are many new possibilities for institutional change – in relocalization, agriculture and food, cities, digital networks, social life, and many other areas.