This is a follow-up piece to a Medium article I wrote in March of 2022. The original piece can be found HERE

For folk who don’t want to click on the link above, in the previous article, I talked about how I received an email from an organization claiming to speak for rural women of the Global South and #BreakTheBias. The email was an invitation to participate in a “feminist” online event that featured a panel of (female) representatives from the likes of Corteva and SinarMas, both giant conglomerates responsible for, among other things, widespread deforestation in Southeast Asia, poisoning the soil with noxious herbicides and pesticides, and promoting a Green Revolution regime of plantation agriculture that devastates local biodiversity on one end, and poisons the end consumer on the other. I’ll go more into that in a bit, but let it suffice to say that I rejected the invitation.

The event marketed itself as a form of women’s empowerment, which honestly made me a little sick to my stomach. Even a cursory look into the backgrounds of the entities the panel members represented clearly showed that the event was a way of generating “virtue points” for their soul-eating, profit-hungry, ecosystem-destroying conglomerates. It was classic pink-washing, an attempt to co-opt the critical radicality of feminism and turn it into a Mickey Mouse caricature of itself. I wanted no part in it, and I made my displeasure clear in my 2022 article. 

But looking back at that article, because I was driven by such disgust and outrage, I didn’t adequately explain the context of how and why the invitation so revolted me. 

So let’s start with a bird’s eye view: the ideology of it all –the bootstrap-pulling, every man (and I emphasize man here) for himself, profit worshiping worldview encompassing the event, its organizers, the panelists, and the monsters they represented. This is the kind of perspective we see in boardrooms and corner offices. It worships the bottom line and believes everyone (for a given value of “everyone”) is a “rational actor” in a system that is regulated by the market’s “invisible hand.” It emphasizes self-reliance, hard work and the glamor of the frontier, where the Unknown is Out There to be conquered and brought to heel at the feet of the Masters of the Universe.

And make no mistake: the folks who ascribe to this worldview very much believe themselves to be the “masters of the universe,” conquerors and intrepid adventurers. There is no regard for what worlds “the unknown” might contain, only for how that unknown might eventually benefit them.

Obviously, I deeply, viscerally disagree with this perspective. It is willfully blind to the consequences of power, and it disregards everything that is not itself and that does not directly harm or benefit it. 

Underneath the event’s veneer of pink virtue and “empowerment,” because of the entities involved, the implication is clear that this is the worldview the event espouses.

But let’s zoom that lens in a little more, because the event had been about rural “women’s empowerment,” and agriculture. What is agriculture to a creature like Corteva? Bluntly, it’s a way of accruing profit.

Yes, the image of agriculture is that of the noble farmer sweating picturesquely in the sunlight as he walks through a lovely green field.

But the reality of “modern” farming in both the Global North and the Global South is starkly different.

Every crop season, a farmer has to purchase sterile, transgenic seeds. This is often the case because buyers will only purchase certain crop varieties; because they transport well and look attractive on the supermarket displays. Then petrochemical fertilizers must be applied to “maximize yield.” And to prevent pest damage and weed competition, these herbicide- and pest-resistant seeds require carcinogenic pesticides and herbicides. This is all made available through the efforts of big agricultural entities such as Monsanto and our old friend, Corteva. And if the farmer doesn’t have enough cash to cover the costs for seeds and other inputs, there are always crop loans and other financial products available. All to ensure that the farmer makes enough to make ends meet for a particular period of time.

The result is a farmer buried in debt and poisoned by toxic agricultural inputs, and a crop so full of poisons and devoid of nutritional value, that consumers may as well eat sand.

But it makes some folks very, very rich.

So governments promote and subsidize this form of agriculture, and people, pushed into a corner and exhausted by the constant bombardment of economic pressure, often feel that they have no choice but to ascribe to this agricultural regime. This often creates fatal cycles of debt dependency and poverty.

It’s really no wonder a lot of people don’t want to go into agriculture anymore.

But corporations continue to invest heavily in agriculture and profit substantially from this sector. So why stop?

And this is where the lens zooms in even further.

Poverty is often most concentrated in rural areas, and with a large percentage of rural peoples involved in agriculture, this means that very many poor folk are agriculturists as well. And among those impoverished agriculturists, women often endure the worst effects of that poverty. A variety of factors contribute to this fact, but let it suffice to say that there is indeed a need to empower and resource rural women.

So that event was pretty on the ball about that, at least.

But the organizers and panelists took that very real and urgent need, and twisted it to serve the ends of the corporations it featured, touting their female panelists as paragons of success for being upwardly mobile in organizations that actively seek to undermine local traditional communities’ ways of life to serve company profit motives and bottom lines.

And that’s the thing, whether we are working to protect trans children, defend Indigenous Peoples, or work towards racial justice in a deeply unequal society, the folk in high places are very very often one step ahead of us. They are aware of the things we are fighting for, and they have very many very clever (and often very misguided or very cynical) people thinking of ways to turn these causes into “win-win” situations for the powerful people and entities themselves. Ultimately, big companies taking up the banner for “women” or “LGBT rights” or “Climate” or what-have-you serves the needs of Almighty Profit and lionizes the ideology of self-reliance and conquest.

It doesn’t actually help.

P.S., For a better, clearer explanation of how rainbow “wokeness” still ultimately serves the powerful, I highly recommend THIS YOUTUBE VIDEO. You can also support him by checking out his Patreon.