Entangled Livelihoods in the Lincolnshire Fens: Agrarian Racial Capitalism, Supermarket Intensification and the Decline of ‘Council Farms’

This paper explores how the intensification of the capitalist food system has reconfigured rural livelihoods in the South Lincolnshire Fens. This region of eastern England is an interesting vantage point to think about contemporary agrarian politics and the production of rural economic life. The story of this flat, historic marshland on the ‘edge of England’ was one fundamental to the birth of capitalism, with the drainage, enclosure and privatization of land. In recent years, the region has become well-known for its overwhelming support for ‘Brexit’, most notably in the town of Boston. From 2004, a concentration of workers from Eastern Europe have come to work in Lincolnshire’s farms. Many of those came to work through temporary employment agencies, which scholars have argued should be analysed as a distinct category of migrant labour in a longer history of racial capitalism. While political scientists have come to survey anti-immigration voting patterns, geographers have paid careful attention to these forms of ‘spectral labour’ as a nexus of landscape and class. The area encapsulates what has been called the ‘migrant paradox’, where migrant lives are both required and refuted. I attempt to develop our understanding of this formation of racial capitalism by broadening our analytic lens to include the wider agri-industry, notably food factories and agri-logistics. This analytic move helps us to see how processes of racial capitalism are entangled with shifts in the economic life of English workers also. Since the 1970s, a process of ‘super-marketization’ and supply chain capitalism has reconfigured constellations of circulation as well as production. I show how many firms have become oriented to the ‘realization’ of value rather than production. This is exemplified by the growth of ‘packhouses’ and warehouses as key passage points for farms to sell into supermarkets. I also pay particular attention to the story of a rural petit bourgeoise. I show how the intensification of the capitalist food system has impacted small traders, both ‘council farms’ and family haulage firms. Owned by local authorities and let out at cheaper rents, council farms enabled working-class families to enter farming. My partner’s grandparents acquired such a council farm in the 1950s. In Lincolnshire, many small crown and council farms have been bought up by larger corporate farms; the acreage of council farms has halved 1977-2017. Haulage firms have experienced related processes of amalgamation and corporatization. Many of those who left farming entered other areas of local agri-industry, such as food factory work or lorry driving. I explore how these English ‘citizen’ workers have experienced related processes of labour intensification. I find that residual cultural sentiments of an older order of work – or a ‘structure of feeling’, of freedom, family and independence – continue to animate social life. This insight helps us understand how reconfigured relations of production and distribution might explain political life too. Agro-logistical landscapes can expand our understanding of racial capitalism, with retailer intensification producing entangled processes of dispossession of temporary migrant workers, a rural working-class, and even a petit bourgeoisie.