“We Don’t Feel Exploited”: Agroecological Exceptionalism and Neoliberal Subjectivity in Un(der)paid Agroecological Internships

Since the 1990s, rural social movements in the global South have used agroecology to describe their orientation against industrialised agriculture, common ownership of land and natural resources, cyclical farming systems and protection of non-exploitative relations between classes, genders, and ethnicities (Meek et al 2014). Despite positioning itself as a new and radical alternative to industrial agriculture, the UK agroecological movement does not incorporate the anti-capitalist stance of movements located in the global South, which challenge wealth accumulation and fight for land redistribution (Tilzey 2018). Instead, in the UK, agroecology has been used to describe a movement that seeks to re-embed social relationships between farmers and consumers, promoting small farms, short-supply chains and diversified farming systems (Laughton 2022). This key ideological distinction is revealed through the promotion of un(der)paid agroecological internships. For aspiring agroecological farmers across North America, the UK, and Western Europe, the lack of formalised agroecological training means that agroecological internships are the key route of entry into the sector (Ekers et al. 2016). Pedagogically, these internships are classed as experiential learning, with interns providing free, or below minimum wage, labour on farms in exchange for an education in commercial agroecological food growing (MacAuley and Niewolny 2016). Western agroecology’s pedagogical reliance on these internships creates significant barriers to entry for those who cannot undertake un(der)paid work, such as working class or racially minoritized people, and leaves those who can (white, highly educated women) vulnerable to the potential of super-exploitative and unjust labour practices. As a movement engaged in imagining new relationships with land and labour, this paper questions to what extent the language of agroecology in a UK context is being co-opted in the service of capital. I advance the novel concept of “agroecological exceptionalism” to conceptualize how the alternative, or radical nature of agroecology is co-opted, and used as an ideology to justify, or conceal, super-exploitation. In this paper, I ask, what motivates agroecological interns to undertake an un(der)paid internship and be satisfied with the exchange? To what extent are these internships training, or an exclusionary form of un(der)paid and super-exploitative work? I combine a Marxist approach to neoliberalism with a Foucauldian theorization of the subject, drawing on Harvey (2007) and Brown (2015), taking an intersectional analysis which centers race, gender and class as essential to capitalist accumulation (Bohrer 2018). Drawing from governmentality theory, this paper describes how interns understand themselves as consumers of education, responsible entrepreneurs. Neoliberal subjectivity and agroecological exceptionalism are described as obscuring the material reality of interns as super-exploited laborers. I offer a conceptualization of un(der)paid agroecological internships as a response to both an increasingly precarious and informal labour market, and the global demand for cheap labour under agro-capitalism, undermining supposedly ethical food-systems. As such, I contend that the agroecological movement in the UK is not based in class solidarity or radical politics. It is instead promoting a reformist mode of capitalist exploitation