Political Economy of Food

On young workers batch-freezing a week of meals, read as a symptom of overwork and the commodification of social reproduction.

Translated chapters of the World Inequality Report 2026 on North–South ecological inequality and unpaid reproductive labor, with a critique of its reformist remedies.

On Israel's war in southern Lebanon and a draft seed law that threatens farmers' right to save and exchange local baladi seeds.

Translated chapter from Julie Guthman's Wilted on scarce labor and disposable bodies in California's fumigant-dependent strawberry industry.

Edited record of a debate on how to analyze a war waged by imperial powers against a state with its own internal class oppression.

Interview with a Taiwanese public-health scholar on U.S. arms sales, the military-industrial complex, and Taiwanese politics.

Historian Behrooz Ghamari connects the 2025 strikes on Iran to a century of Western intervention, from the 1953 coup to 'maximum pressure.'

Interview with a Guangzhou social-work NGO on community meal programs, showing that organizing elderly villagers matters more than funding.

Argues that the U.S. AI boom is a speculative outlet for surplus capital under financialization, whose costs will fall on workers.

Field report from Brazil's MST camps on how landless farmers occupy land and rebuild communities through cooperative, collective, and ecological farming. Reissued in 2025.

Further translation from The Unknown Cultural Revolution on village enterprises, collective labor, and 'walking on two legs.'

Case study from northern Tibet of a collective herding enterprise and the leader it produced, arguing that collective and individual interests reinforce each other.

Year-end roundup of the network's most-read articles of 2024.

Analyzes the DPRK's rapid early growth, its petrochemical Green Revolution model, and the famine that followed the Soviet collapse.

Selected translation from Dongping Han's The Unknown Cultural Revolution on how rural education reform in Jimo County expanded schooling and linked learning to production.

Tricontinental dossier on the MST's tactics, organization, and 'popular agrarian reform.'

Nettie Wiebe, an early La Vía Campesina leader, on the origins of food sovereignty, feminist struggles within the movement, and agroecology.

Translation of Sigrid Schmalzer's study of the biological pest-control pioneer who combined peasant knowledge with formal science.

Reports on rural mothers recruited into AI data-labeling under poverty-alleviation programs, and their double exploitation at work and at home.

Selected translation from Elisabeth Armstrong's Bury the Corpse of Colonialism on the anti-imperialist women's conference held in Beijing.

Selected translation from Victor Grossman's memoir A Socialist Defector on the GDR's achievements in gender equality and education, and its crises.

Student volunteers run a reading corner for vendors' children in a Shanghai market, as a model of grounded cultural work.

Part three on the 'New Green Revolution' in Africa as agricultural financialization led by donors, foundations, and agribusiness.

Part one of Patel's history of the Green Revolution as a Cold War anti-communist project.

Part two rebuts claims that Green Revolution technology was scale-neutral, pro-smallholder, and market-driven.

Reflecting on a hospital research scandal, revisits Mao-era 'technical democracy' that pooled the knowledge of workers and scientists.

Interview on ecological Marxism, metabolic rift, imperialism, and the idea of an 'environmental proletariat.'

Profile of the anthropologist whose study of Bolivian tin miners, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us, founded the anthropology of labor.

Review of Robert Fitch's Solidarity for Sale on union corruption, business unionism, and labor imperialism.

Translation of Mamonova and Franquesa on how neoliberal restructuring fuels right-wing populism in rural Europe, and on the prospects for progressive agrarian politics.

Chinese-subtitled screening and discussion of a documentary on 1970s Minneapolis food co-ops, with two participants in those events.

A 1975 Business Week article on American 'food power,' republished with an introduction on China's food security.

Shows how an industrial powerhouse rebuilt grain self-sufficiency, and argues that food production and industrialization can reinforce each other.

Traces the politics behind the economics prize and its role in making market fundamentalism mainstream.

Translated Washington Post investigation into 'cattle laundering' and how Brazil's beef supply chain drives deforestation.

An HKU education scholar introduces the Soviet educator's collective, labor-centered pedagogy as an alternative to exam-driven schooling.

Tricontinental newsletter tracing the 2022 inflation crisis to U.S. military spending, U.S. consumption, and the Wall Street–dollar–IMF system.

Explains the controversy over cutting immature wheat for silage, and connects it to national grain security and farmers' low incomes.

On making Marxist and Maoist theory accessible to young readers through analytical language, practice, and dialectics.

Argues against the gendered division of labor and productivist views of work, and for recognizing social reproduction as social labor.

Joan Hinton's son recounts why his American parents came to China in the 1940s and stayed to work alongside farmers.

Excerpts from Zhang Huaiying's memoir of Chen Yonggui and Dazhai on how cooperatives countered re-polarization after land reform.

A dialogue on delivery riders' working conditions, debt, and gender composition, and on extending social insurance to platform workers.

A rebuttal of the novelist's account of Mao-era farming and of his celebration of large agribusiness landholders as 'new farmers.'

A Tufts professor compares films from post-1949 China and post-1947 India to ask how socialist revolution relates to women's liberation.

Portrait of the Party secretary who led Liuzhuang village in Henan from barren floodland to a prosperous collective.

After the discovery of children's remains at a residential school, an essay arguing that reconciliation requires decolonizing land, history, and knowledge.

A State Council researcher rebuts the idea of turning basic social services into engines of consumption and profit.

Sasha Breger Bush on drugs as both a source of profit and a form of 'insurance' that lets people endure the damage capitalism does to bodies and ecosystems.

Uses decades of Chinese geographical research to challenge media narratives that blame farmers and herders for sandstorms.

Land leasing in Argentina has concentrated farming in fewer, larger operations with heavy chemical use. The piece reads this as a warning for China's accelerating land transfers.

Memoir by a former Shanxi provincial leader on the 1951 debate over pilot agricultural cooperatives and the case for collectivization after land reform.

Collective investigation into Dabeinong, the company behind China's first approved GM corn, and what commercialization means for farmers and consumers.

My own compilation on COVID-19 outbreaks in U.S. meatpacking plants and the global cold chain that links them to China's dinner tables.

Case study of village cooperatives in Shandong that rebuild collective organization by empowering rather than subsidizing smallholders.

A Central Party School economist argues that fintech lending enriches capital rather than agriculture, and makes the case for credit cooperatives within village collectives.

A privatized wet-market upgrade squeezes vendors and shoppers alike, and exposes everyday age and class discrimination.

Explains the success of the schistosomiasis-control campaign through state funding and the flow of medical expertise to the countryside, contrasted with U.S.-led malaria eradication in Africa.

Lecture on the environmental crises of global capitalism and how green social work can respond, drawing on rural participatory action research in China.

Lao Tian reads Mao's commitment to flat, mass-line organization as a theory of management, and traces how its erosion after 1949 widened the gap between cadres and the masses.

Translation of the Harvard ecologist's lecture on how class position is written into the body, and a critique of reductionist epidemiology.

Amin on democracy, the peasantry, and ecology as the three challenges that contemporary monopoly capitalism cannot resolve.

Investigates why heavily funded small-scale irrigation works fall into disuse, linking the problem to weak village collectives and the absence of organized maintenance.

Excerpts Wang Hui's essay on the October Revolution, arguing for reassessing the achievements of twentieth-century socialism.

How an embroidered oral-history project helped rural women in Henan find voice, confidence, and a place in village public life.

Reads the cooperative spirit of Wuhan's temporary COVID hospitals as a case for public-interest health care over market reform.

Health economist Li Ling argues that treating hospitals as businesses drives runaway costs, and that public provision is needed.

Shows how the 2019 hog shortage and recovery policies accelerated consolidation, pushing out small and mid-sized farmers.

Bathsheba Demuth on the history of commercial whaling and how human markets shaped the fate of whales.

Links the 2019 pork price surge to slaughterhouse monopolies, the loss of native breeds, and lax oversight, not only African swine fever.

Chinese version of a documentary on peasant struggles across Latin America to protect native seeds against patents and GM seeds.

Translation of Bramall's account of 1963–78 as a coherent development strategy distinct from both capitalism and Stalinism.

Final episode of the documentary series, on a township whose collective economy became a model of rural development.

Transcript of the first episode of a documentary series on agricultural cooperation and collectivization in the 1950s.

On invasive species in China, most introduced by people, and the roughly 200 billion yuan in annual losses they cause.

A collective conversation among young members marking the centenary of the May Fourth Movement, sharing the words that sustained their commitment to social change.

Reviews repeated cases of spoiled food in school canteens and calls for parent oversight and limits on catering monopolies.

Contrasts China's food-safety scandals with the cheap, safe food in government canteens, and asks why ordinary people cannot have the same.

Argues that intensive livestock production accelerated the spread of African swine fever, and critiques capital-led solutions.

November 2018 roundup: counterfeit salt, rotten frozen meat, and plasticizers in liquor.

Traces the historical roots of U.S. agricultural industrialization and its environmental costs, questioning whether China should follow the same path.

On the millions of informal recyclers who sustain China's high recycling rate, and the evictions and stigma they face.

September 2018 roundup: additive disputes in the spicy-snack industry, counterfeit Yangcheng Lake crabs, and microplastics found in deep-sea life.

How chronic stress drives overeating, with the reminder that diet can ease stress but not remove its sources.

Three Venezuelan scholar-activists trace the country's food crisis to a colonial import dependence, U.S. sanctions, and elite sabotage rather than state failure alone, and document grassroots alternatives.

May 2018 roundup of food-safety news, led by fraudulent organic certification of vegetables and infant formula.

Translation of a Guardian investigation into hygiene failures at U.S. meat plants, framed as a warning about the industrial meat model spreading in China.