WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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The 1980’s farm crisis defined an entire generation of farmers and the rural communities that surrounded and relied on them. Interest rates soared. Farm land value dropped. A decade of record-breaking production in farm commodities led to a glut, a surplus, that depressed prices. Exports declined as the U.S. imposed an embargo on the Soviet Union. Farmers went bankrupt, foreclosed on their farms, or sold them. They rarely made their money back on the land.
We know now that the farm crisis of the 1980’s can be traced at least as far back as the rising land values of the 1940s. The crisis, however, continues today. Since 2008, farmland across the world, and especially in the Midwest, has seen greater investment by financial actors such as hedge and pension funds, insurance agencies, and other private equity investors. This has led to a process of land consolidation that has increased the size of farms and shuttered family farms throughout the country.
Rather than bring investment to rural institutions, the neoliberal policies of the 1970s and 1980s combined with the financial crises of the 21st century to create a hostile climate for life in rural America, what our guest today calls “sacrifice zones.” In response, many people have opted to flee rural communities for the suburbs. In doing so, they leave behind them sometimes desolate small towns. Hospitals, post offices, mom-and-pop shops, even schools have closed their doors as rural communities have been hollowed out, abandoned to the forces of the financial sector. Despite the fact that many people who support today’s slide into authoritarian populism are wealthy suburban residents, a non-trivial portion are members of rural communities that have been the subject of multiple crises, from the loss of farmland and the shuttering of family farms to the opioid crisis.
Today, Bradi Heaberlin speaks with Marc Edelman, an Anthropology professor and affiliate of the Graduate Center at Hunter College in New York City. Though Marc Edelman’s work on land tenure, social movements, and agrarian issues spans continents, we focus today on Edelman’s work on the hollowing out of rural America and the rise of authoritarian populism. Edelman argues that the ways in which rural communities have been abandoned by capital have been a cornerstone in the rise of authoritarian populism and racial resentment.
Authoritarian populism, Edelman argues, cannot be defeated until and unless we address the ways that rural America has been abandoned.
GUEST
Marc Edelman teaches anthropology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is working on a project on the history of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), which the General Assembly adopted in 2018 after a seventeen-year campaign by transnational agrarian movements and human rights organizations. He was part of the convening group of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative, an international research and action collaborative on authoritarian populism and the rural world.
RELATED
How Capitalism Underdeveloped Rural America by Marc Edelman
Chris Hedges on Capitalism’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’
Mobile home parks move from mom-and-pop to corporate
The Rise of the Citizen Protector (Interchange)
Populism Against the “Center” (Interchange)
The Authoritarian Creep (Interchange)
MUSIC
“My Back Pages,” written by Bob Dylan, performed by Keith Jarrett
“Only a Paw in Their Game” by Bob Dylan
“It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) by Bob Dylan
“Quit Your Lowdown Ways” by Bob Dylan
“Chimes of Freedom” by Bob Dylan (with Joan Osborne)
CREDITS
Episode Producer: Bradi Heaberlin
Host: Doug Storm
Production Assistance: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
