Issue 18: Seeds of Struggle: Food in a Time of Crisis

The world we are living in is changing. The threat climate change presents increasingly hangs over our heads, with rising temperatures and ever-multiplying natural disasters posing existential threats to human infrastructure and global crop yields. State authoritarianism and far-right politics are on the rise, with the world’s elites embracing violent and racist solutions at the expense of the global working-class. However, in these trying times, strikes and uprisings are also on an upsurge globally. The necessity to transform society has never been more pressing, nor so complicated.

In this issue, we inquire into a commodity that will not only have an incredibly important role in the struggles to come, but also challenges us to think about what the re-organisation of production would look like in a future, communist society. Food is a commodity that, regardless of the price, we all have to keep consuming to survive. Those who control how food is produced and distributed therefore also hold major influence over how we relate to one another, and ultimately, how society functions. Yet workers in food production are often some of the most exploited across the entire world. Bringing together workers from across the commodity chain - from farmworkers to chefs, from HGV drivers to supermarket workers - we begin to collectively piece together in this issue how capitalist food production functions from a workers’ perspective, highlighting the strength they hold, and offering up potential flashpoints for future struggles.