Politics Is Food Is Politics
By DE CLARKE and STAN GOFF
In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the devaluation of the dollar create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance. As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, “package” vacation resorts, etc. are considerable.
This is how one cascade pours into another, as the manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify. Tourism, which was supposed to be a relatively benign, non-extractive industry for colonized nations — an alternative to brutal extraction and cash cropping — turns out to have been just as extractive all along due to the climate (and cultural) damage done by commodified air travel.
The end of cheap air tourism may seem like a good thing. And yet the collapse of tourism, in economies where the culture and scenery have become a last-ditch cash crop, can have effects just as disastrous as the collapse of any other external commodity market in a country that has been sucked into the undertow of global capitalism.
How much more devastating is the catastrophic cascade of food price inflation? (It’s also directly related, by the way, to the plateau of global oil production in the face of relentless expansion of “demand” — more on this below.) They’re intertwined; the downsizing of air tourism reduces money income for populations dependent on the global capitalist economy for staple foods, just at the moment when scarcity, uncertainty, and rampant speculation are causing staple food prices to spike.
It’s not a pretty picture, and the mainstream media are reporting on it with breathless alarm and utterly unjustified surprise; commentators from various perspectives (left, environmental, anti-colonialist, even libertarians) have seen this coming for a while.
Why Us? Why Now?
The airline industry has been very forthright about their problems. They are saying, “We were neither tooled nor organized for $120-a-barrel oil.” Most of us get this, because we associate transport technology with fossil hydrocarbons. We drive cars; and we buy the gas to put in those cars. Planes run on No. 1 Jet Fuel and if oil prices go up, so does the cost of jet fuel. Most of us are less likely… FULL ARTICLE
Cliss:
FOOD –> the new wealth.
Forget Real Estate as an investment. Ignore gold, silver, precious metals, the stock market, T Bills. The commodity which will be most in demand in the next 6 months: Food staples, like rice, beans wheat.
I was at the local Winco yesterday, and the store was quite busy. All the rice was gone. This was a long shelf which held 20-lb. bags of rice. In the bulk bins, people were filling up plastic bags with all kinds of grains, legumes and food staples.
There was a certain urgency in the air, a certain rush to get the goods. Maybe people don’t trust this fragile economy?
I spoke with a food wholesaler, and he said he “fully expects food shortages, by this summer.”
He said he’s been hit with multiple price hikes, along with warnings that he may not get his products at all at some point.
When the local citizens get a whiff of trouble, they shift into high gear and start hoarding. At that point, the shortage becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and there won’t be any supplies left at any price.
At that point, I’m fully expecting riots at the local grocery store as people fight for the few scraps that are remaining in the bins. I expect gun fights to break out in the parking lot in a desperate food grab. Even here in lovely Portland where things like this don’t happen.
I fully blame the FED for creating a warped economy which can’t correct itself in situations like this. If we had had a more normal economy, these imbalances would have been corrected long ago, before we reach crisis situations like this. What do you think Stan?
24 April 2008, 6:27 pmVery good article, and recommended.
Stan:
Don’t know what a “normal economy” might be. This economy — any economy based on the expansion of “wealth” — has at its heart, in its genetic code, exploitation. Crisis is inevitable… not quite the same as a norm. It is the punctuation in the seeming equilibrium.
The byword of a New Life must be “enough.” It was that young preacher Shane Claiborne who said recently, “we need to do many small things, and do them with love.” That’s not what this system supports.
Capitalism has been touted as this thing where there is an open public market somewhere, and people are all equal, and they just do trades. Marx dexcribed it very well, however, even if he didn’t get the socialism part of it right (he studied capitalism and prognosticated about socialism). Capital — a unequal social relation — must expand or die. The historical reality, that amazingly gets swept up as if facts were far less important than abstractions, is that capitalism has been built at every single step of the way with corpses stacked over wastelands.
24 April 2008, 8:46 pmRobert Karaffa:
This is a very, very COMPLETE analysis. It needs to be posted on the lenses of special glasses that every human being needs to wear. Went outside after reading this, chased a couple of deer out of the garden, ducked from a few large bats, tripped over and backed away from a very large and pretty skunk, and picked up a generous handful of moist dirt.
24 April 2008, 9:30 pmLegume Sam:
Don’t forget my Pomona College Natural Farm essay:
http://www.docudharma.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2071
By the way, capitalism really is about to end:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/080401li.php
24 April 2008, 9:37 pmeoinmonkey:
“I was at the local Winco yesterday, and the store was quite busy. All the rice was gone. This was a long shelf which held 20-lb. bags of rice. In the bulk bins, people were filling up plastic bags with all kinds of grains, legumes and food staples.”
What is it with Americans and panic buying? I remember before the 1999/2000 changeover there being no batteries, bottled water and canned food in the shops in Buffalo, and that wasnt even a real crisis. I wonder if people think they can really hoard their way out of a real disaster? I suppose it depends on the duration, and the disposable income you have to spend on surplus food, etc.
25 April 2008, 9:27 amCharles:
By the way, capitalism really is about to end:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/080401li.php
which says in part:
“Fourth, the U.S. imperialist adventure in the Middle East has suffered devastating setbacks and there has been growing resistance to neoliberalism and U.S. imperialism throughout the world ”
^^^^^
CB: Which means that the Iraqi people have performed a service to humanity comparable to the Soviet people , who stopped the Nazi imperialist hordes, and the Vietnamese people who stopped US imperialism.
All hail the Iraqi People !
25 April 2008, 11:36 amgetaclue:
The “global” economy was doomed from the start and has served only to drive the entire manufacturing world into sweatshops.
A global economy without a global minimum wage and global employment standards was NEVER EVER meant to benefit people.
Only corporations. Soon, those sweatshops will return to the United States.
25 April 2008, 1:11 pmaudrey:
eoinmonkey - I don’t think it’s the hoarding instinct itself that’s the problem with us. It’s the way we do it, like you said, with panic buying, which strikes me as the exact opposite of how hoarding is supposed to function. We feed corn to the squirrels at my house, they hoard it by taking way more than they can fit in their bellies, and tucking the rest underground. Each summer, we have squirrel corn cropping up in the flower bed, the lawn, all over the place. If we did that sort of hoarding, taking the excess we can’t consume now and growing it into more, we’d be in a very different place. It’s a little discouraging when the squirrels are smarter than the people.
25 April 2008, 4:21 pmStan:
Will GM Crops Fuel GM Cars?
Aaaarrrgghhh!
25 April 2008, 5:45 pmLegume Sam:
No, Charles, the problem with capitalism at present is that what James O’Connor calls the “second contradiction of capitalism” has got the system totally boxed in. As the author said:
You seem to have gotten stuck on the idea that only some sort of popular revolt will end capitalism. Instead, capitalism is more likely to be replaced by what Kees van der Pijl calls the “struggle for survival.”
Is this to become a regular occurrence? Sam argues the Wallerstein hypothesis of the beginning of the end of the capitalist system, Charles says something silly about “popular resistance,” Sam refers once again to van der Pijl and O’Connor?
25 April 2008, 9:44 pmld:
If this is a genuinely self-reflexive treatise on how the global meltdown of the obessive-compulsive
26 April 2008, 6:22 amM-C-M’ circuit is pushing forward world-wide crisis NOW (and the evidence purveyed here and elsewhere suggests that the crisis IS here, however unevenly in the spatio-temporal sense), then you’d better get sincerely self-reflexive and begin to wonder how your far-flung propagandizing (and I mean this in the best sense of the term) for eco-localism will become increasingly circumscribed by intermittencies and crashes in the global communications network which your collaborative epistles (spanning North Carolina and Canada) take for granted. (After all, CPU’s and servers firing up burn so many lumps of coal.) I guess Stan has started the process in motion by getting active with his nearby Methodist folk and trying, by enmeshing himself in their lifeworld, to seize upon whatever radical millenarian strains rest latent in that community. But it does amuse (for lack of a better term) me that if what you say has veracity (and it very well may), then at some indeterminate point in the future the global communications network that is the hidden background condition of your political organizing will implode and become a luxury good, reserved for only an elite few who manage to command the loyalty of janissaries compensated with bread and water. Admittedly your realistic apocalypticism has spurred apocalytpic realism of my own, since my politico-material-moral survial depends on travelling from Japan to NYC to South Korea in the next few months without breaking the bank.
peggy:
Stan and De - You have put it all together in this article and I hope you publish it, or versions of it, as widely as possible. Start with Mother Jones - I have just read an article there about the energy crisis that completely misses the point. Send it also to The Nation, The Economist, The New Yorker, publications in India, publications in China, publications in South America, everywhere. Maybe I’m missing something, but I just haven’t seen this full case made in accessible publications by anyone but you. I guess “the mainstream press” is afraid to mention capitalism itself as a fundamental cause of food and energy shortages around the world.
26 April 2008, 6:31 ameoinmonkey:
“Each summer, we have squirrel corn cropping up in the flower bed, the lawn, all over the place. If we did that sort of hoarding, taking the excess we can’t consume now and growing it into more, we’d be in a very different place. It’s a little discouraging when the squirrels are smarter than the people.”
Im pretty sure the squirrels dont do that on purpose. Its just a slightly beneficial side effect of their bad memories.
26 April 2008, 10:08 amxenia:
“All hail the Iraqi People !”
Legume Sam, romantic projections aside, there is a sense in which Charles is right here (although really wrong on Obama). The world has changed because Americans are losing or have lost the war in Iraq. If they were winning it, the triumphalism would be unbearable, and the flow of Iraqi oil would be smooth, giving them an additional decade of expansion. Bush could have emerged as a hero instead of the universally hated figure. Americans love victories — they primarily hate the neocons because he lost, and not because the war itself was unfair. Ditto for Vietnam.
The soul-searching of the last years has happened precisely because Iraqis have resisted. Now it’s mainstream to be against the whole project. But I was finishing grad school on the east coast in spring 2003, not too far from New York. I remember how very few people actually protested against the war at the school, I remember Chelsea Clinton’s attitude, I remember that even lefty and progressive professors were shocked when Iraqi resistance continued into the summer. They did not expect that from those brown people.
Yeah, it’s not pretty, and much of it has devolved into disgusting civil war, and I doubt any real socialism is going to emerge out of it. But we should all be grateful to Iraqis for defending themselves — they are doing some real work.
26 April 2008, 12:52 pmxenia:
re rationing rice: it seems that a lot of small-shop owners in the us and the uk are buying a lot of rice in fear of another price hike.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23595722-2703,00.html
i’m bitterly amused because i remember milk shortages in 1980s yugoslavia. milk would suddenly disappear from stores right before it got more expensive, because people working at food stores would be informed of the price increase and they would buy up the lower-priced milk for their own families and friends. because the inflation was continuous, as soon as the new stock of milk came in, people stormed in, buying it like crazy, and so on it went. so, there is some similarity to Y2K hysteria, but in some ways this is typical for many people affected by inflation and/or food shortages, not just americans.
26 April 2008, 1:09 pmDeAnander:
Bernhard is commenting that the food crisis is not unrelated to the fancy fiscal footwork of the US Fed — i.e. “saving capitalism” means killing people.
@ld, I hear ya loud and clear. however, in defence of virtual organising I can make a feeble case… I am emphatically not flying to “global conferences on environment and justice” because the painful irony of burning jet fuel, polluting the upper atmosphere, and feeding the corporate hotel/convention machine in the name of ecology and social justice is — well, too painful. too ridiculous.
but the power used to keep the internet/phone/fax grid up is pretty small compared to the power used to keep planes in the air and cars and trucks on the road. I gave up the private auto more than 10 years ago, and no longer live in a full-sized house — my living space is now about 300 sf. I’ve just emigrated to a new country and am trying to get embedded as fast as I can in the local barter/gift economy. so, er, “I’m working on it.”
I guess an underlying premise of mine, which perhaps needs closer examination, is that if we give up the really wasteful technologies and luxuries — the long haul food, the airplane travel, the private cars, the endless round of disposable products — we can still afford communications technology. there must be enough old, recyclable cell phones for everyone to have one for free. ditto computers. but they are being shovelled into landfills and “recycled” by disassembly in toxic Dickensian scrapyards in Asia.
discussions of this kind — what can we keep, if anything, from the age of High Fossil Fuel Technology (or the Age of Being High on Fossil Fuel, take your pick), and what will we have to give up — have taken place over at European Tribune at some length. you could google for “Packing Light” and “European Tribune”, or “The Utility of Lite” (and ET), to read some of the (sometimes heated) debate on which bits of western industrial civ we can save as we run from its burning house.
here in affluent BC, conversations at the grocery store still revolve around “we just came back from Hawai’i” and “we are going to Paris in May because there’s a special round trip fare with hotel” and “I’m off to Dominican Republic to lie around on a white sand beach for a week, the ticket is only $450, who could resist.” it hurts my brain. and yet I can’t stand on too high a pedestal as I still eat organic grapefruit that came up from California by air. those grapefruit might travel just as well by train, but they still are very far from local. I’m still exercising my luxury options while I have them, even knowing that they cannot last long.
so yeah, we are all enmeshed in this fossil fuel machinery. we sup with the Devil every day, and no spoon is long enough. I hear ya, I do hear ya. there is not one day that my own conscience is easy, and nothing I can do is enough. aieeee.
26 April 2008, 1:17 pmStan:
I hope I don’t misrepresent the meaning of this remark, but…
I did not join my church as some SWP-style colonization strategy. I joined because two people I respect very much patiently talked me into it, because it s a local community, and because I am now a fully-baptized Christian… the latter I may explain some day, but that is a long and complex explanation that requires plowing through miles of misinformation and prejudice.
I want that understood. And the people who form this little church are not radical millenarians. At the risk of disrupting the thread (don’t go there… I just need to respond to this); the theology is pretty simple. It is coming up on Pentecost Sunday in a couple weeks, so I’ll use that.
This is not a debate (I will not debate my theology here). It is an example of how theology can be, and often is, done. I include it because I want to lay to rest the idea that I am just trying to manipulate Christians. I would find that absolutely unprincipled, not to mention arrogant beyond belief.
Pentecost relates to “sending forth,” the birth of the church. Jesus told the disciples, “I send you.” That’s about discipleship, becoming “Christians” (a diminutive meaning “little Christs”).
So there is the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the Old Testament is organized initially as three steps: creation, emancipation, and law-giving (social organization)…. content culturally specific over around 4000 years, with all patriarchal and warlike baggage… but with one kernal that will eventually become the essence of “the Jesus movement,” taking sides with the underdog.
And the law, in the form of the decalog (I won’t even begin with the Levitican 613), is
telling us how to be basic humans. Do this stuff and don’t do this stuff, and you can be a decent human being, living among yourselves as Israel. Then there is the New Testament, but it goes a lot further… beginning with the “abstract” of the gospels, the Beatitudes.
According to my quick lectionary research forf Pentecost, there is Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104:24-34, 35b; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13; John 20:19-23.
Remember, now, that the Beatitudes (below) are the core program, and remember that before we translate them to now, they were laid out in 1st Century Palestine under Roman occupation.
Also remember that “truth” in theology is not simply literal. In theology, there is literal, legendary, and mythical content, because grasping God (the ground of all Being) is not possible in a direct way (to assume so is the sin of hubris); it requires “glimpsing” through the mediation of nature (and for Christians, the mediation of the act at Golgotha).
Here is a quote from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Christian biologist Annie Dillard, re “glimpsing”:
Modernism, with its reductionistic insistence on only “literal” truth, will say that this is not “true.” I disagree.
Back to the Pentecost.
In John 20:21 (one of the texts for the lectionary), Jesus says, “I send you.”
Pentecost is the church’s “Big Bang.” The Jesus movement grows, gathers acolytes, goes to Jerusalem, has its leader executed, and the disciples are rendered terrified, skulking fugitives from Pharisees and Romans. The movement has shrunken down into a tiny “singularity” (abusing the astrophysical metaphor a bit more). Then, the serial reappearances, first through resurrection (the defeat of death-in-life and of sin as the trap of the human condition).
From Israel selected as a priest people (Old Testament meaning of “chosen people”) to show the world an example, to the degradation over time (brokenness creeps back into the world, to the apperance of Jesus, to his “movement,” to what seems the bloody sputtering out of the flame on the Cross… seeming hopelessness, creeping despair, the fear that the Empire has triumphed… BANG, the church bursts forth from the resurrection — not simply to save Israel — but to open the Kingdom of God to all of humanity (”catholic” meaning “universally” available to all). Little Christs everywhere! As Luke would so dramatically put it, “I saw Satan fall like lightning.”
An explosion of peace and mercy (the CORE of the Jesus movement’s message), the cosmic door splits open to reconcile humanity — embodied, physical, imperfect humanity… all of it — to God.
John 20:21 — (Jesus) said to them again, “Peace be with you. As God has sent me, so I SEND YOU.”
How does this happen, this universalization of the Word? Through discipleship. Jesus says to the disciples, “I send you” (to the whole of humanity).
From the lectionary for Pentecost Sunday:
Psalm 104: 24-34 — “How varied are your works, Lord! In wisdom you have wrought them all; the earth is full of your creatures.
Look at the sea, great and wide! It teems with countless beings, living things both large and small.
Here ships ply their course; here Leviathan, your creature, plays.
All of these look to you to give them food in due time.
When you give to them, they gather; when you open your hand, they are well filled.
When you hide your face, they are lost. When you take away their breath, they perish and return to the dust from which they came.
When you send forth your breath, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.
May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord be glad in these works!
If God glares at the earth, it trembles; if God touches the mountains, they smoke!
I will sing to the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God while I live.
May my theme be pleasing to God; I will rejoice in the Lord.”
God and humanity, in this OT passage, exist apart, with Israel worshipping and obeying a God who resides on the other side of infinity. They recognize God’s glory (in Creation), depending on God to care for the future, with 10 commandments to tell each person in Israel how to live, how to be a righteous person. The indivdual’s practice must strive toward RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Then there is the Incarnation. God inhabits human flesh, is EMBODIED, no longer above humanity, but WITH us, as us. With the Word, the New Being, another important thing has happened. The command of God to humanity has become both more explicit and more challenging. It has shifted from rules for being simply a RIGHTEOUS PERSON to bringing about a JUST SOCIETY. It is collective, and commands each of us (as Christians, “little Christs”) to not only not covet what belongs to our neighbor, but to LOVE (care for, act on the care of, and respect the dignity of) the neighbor… and the stranger, and the prisoner, and the prostitute, and the tax-collector (bureaucrat?), and the beggar, and the enemy (because when we succeed at that, they — we — no longer need be strangers, prisoners, prostitutes, tax-collectors, beggars, and enemies).
The Beatitudes are a call to action that makes the spirit collective, not simply individual. The Beatitudes are the field guide to discipleship… “blessing” meaning to “make whole” (that which is broken, shattered by the ambiguities of existence). Then Jesus goes on to Golgotha to demonstrate just how tough this practice really can be. Jesus as the Christ [annointed one] is anything but “balanced” or moderate.
The Beatitudes
Matthew 5: 3-10:
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
My good friend Barbara Zelter loaned me a book by our late fellow activist here in Raleigh, Sister Evelyn Mattern, where Sister Evelyn says that the decalog lays out the minimum (how to be a righteous person), but the beatitudes require the maximum (how to bring about a “just society,” ie, the Kingdom of God… an ironic term, used in the teeth of an imperial occupation)… even, if necessary, to the cross.
As the practice of the individual is directed to “righteousness,” the practice of the community is directed to justice. (roughly paraphrased from theologian Paul Tillich)
We are to be the hands and feet of Jesus, little Christs, the church (the people who are “sent”)… disciples. The basic text is the Beatitudes. That’s where the Pentecost begins, because it’s what Jesus told people before the crucifixion and ascent.
“I send you” — He says — to do what?
…to “make whole” the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemakers, and those prescuted for righteousness. In turn, and to remain faithful to Jesus’ ironic vision of “Kingdom” (a collectivity of faith), we must ourselves each BE these people and receive the blessing of others and God (be made whole, sometimes IN our poverty, mourning, hunger, peacemaking, mercy, et al).
Christians are not called to have faith IN Christ, but the faith OF Christ (and that ain’t sorcery… or a picnic).
The Big Bang doesn’t merely explode people across many social and geographic horizons; it has a specific content.
Acts 2:1 — “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.”
The Word becomes UNIVERSAL (catholic), all are now invited to be the children of God, to EMBODY the Beatitudes, to become little Christs… to bring the Kingdom unlike the unjust Kingdoms they had all know (and we have)… to earth… language, gender, race, etc, all immaterial. Paul says that we are “called to be saints”. This is a doctrine that in 1st C Palestine is deeply subversive (and still is)… one of spiritual equality for all human beings.
1 Corinthians 1:2-4 — “To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.”
The other thing I notice is that Jesus (upon resurrection) appears to women first, then male disciples. He is an “effeminate Jesus,” because what Jesus is calling for against (male) power is everything that has been rejected as weakness for men… caring, nurturing, tending, healing, loving. Jesus acknowledged that much of what was relegated to women, and therefore already part of their experience, were and are the most important things we can do.
This leaves men as the group most in need of moral guidance and his special pedagogical assistance. The women already “got it.” Women were certainly the only ones that didn’t scurry into the shadows to sweat out the crucifixion, as every male disciiple did.
So it goes… theology is not much different than how television affects us. We use stories to tell us how to feel about things, how to think about things, and what to do about things.
Reverend Rebecca Todd Peters has written a whole book, The Search of the Good Life, that explicitly describes Christianity, just as Gustavo Gutierrez did, using historical materialism as its secular ground.
Sorry to go on… but I am not putting myself above my fellow parishoners, nor trying to bend them to some alien agenda. My family is from Arkansas. God-bothering comes natural to us.
26 April 2008, 5:28 pmld:
Stan, sorry for my ill-chosen words. In the throes of my rambling I did not mean to imply that you joined your congregation “as some SWP-style colonization strategy.” Far from it. I read what you write fairly often, and I understand the centrality in your evolving world-view of becoming deeply rooted in local civil society (if I may use a much-abused term); these are the people with whom one must by necessity ride out the eco-social storms to come, and hence these are the people with whom one must build up trust, from whom one must learn and to whom one must teach, with whom one must co-develop practical self-sufficiency skills, etc.
Anyway, I apologize for misrepresenting you, even if said misrepresntation was not intentional and more of a matter of sloppy writing on my part (inflamed by a momentary panic attack, to be honest!) than anything else.
STAN: I apologize for having misread you.
26 April 2008, 6:42 pmDeAnander:
Infiltration… hmmm… [warning: random train of thought follows, definitely from the half-bakery]
This gets us back to this difficult-to-grasp distinction between communitarian activity as a “means to the revolution”, i.e. as a strategic move on the way to a future revolutionary state of affairs, and communitarian activity as worthwhile — also subversive of established power, which is part of “worthwhile”, since everything kindly, human, and genuine is subversive of established power — in its own right, i.e. as revolution. Which in turn gets us back to the idea of revolution and whether we define it strictly as a rapid usurpation of state power by (usually armed) popular uprising led by catalytic/charismatic figures, or as a nonlinear change in a complex social system catalysed by dispersed and difficult-to-quantify agents of change.
I’ve been mulling over this old-left notion of infiltrating existing institutions/communities in order to bring about revolutionary change (to “steer” them into a right way of thinking and doing, etc) and seems to me there is a built-in antagonism in it: the existing institution and its members are seen in a rather instrumental light, as material to be moulded… of course infiltration is a military/espionage metaphor, too, a metaphor of open and covert hostility/conflict.
Anyway, I think there is more hope and more integrity in solidarity than in infiltration, more hope in becoming part of something in the here and now than in trying to ride or steer it towards a deferred goal in the future. We could return, even, to metaphors of sexuality: the “infiltration” concept is rather like the “seduction” concept, in which a potentially unwilling Other is to be led and steered — by deception if necessary — to a goal set by the infiltrator; where everything that happens prior to the seducer’s goal is mere “foreplay”
to pass the time before the Big Event. This is quite different from a fully intersubjective encounter between equals, or so it seems to me…
There do exist overtly hostile organisations where infiltration seems to me like a valid strategy: the EPA for example
or e.g. meat packing plants, logging sites, sweatshops, places where witness cannot be borne without some form of smuggling to get observers and cameras in to document abuse 
and places/times where strategies of confrontation, espionage, covert antagonism may be useful and appropriate (resistance to occupation?). But in the particular realm of community building it seems to me that (as in lovemaking) adopting an agenda-driven, instrumental approach to the Other — seeing the Thou as the Other at all, as you might say, instead of the beloved Thou — kinda defeats the whole point, no?
Can we be truly in solidarity with people whom we’re infiltrating? Can we build a beloved community with people we’re trying to drive to a goal of our own, concealed from them? I often feel torn between the relationship of solidarity and acceptance with the people around me, and the relationship of persuasion or meme warfare or covert proselytising for my various causes; I can feel myself shift from simple, direct conversational mode to missionary mode at times, carefully choosing my words so as to woo them towards my point of view on some issue. But on the whole I think when we regard others as… hmmm… “potential material” to be converted into cadres for our Cause, we may be replicating the fundamental error of our civilisation: regarding the living Other as a resource to be processed…? Still mulling it over.
26 April 2008, 6:44 pmLegume Sam:
Xenia:
I’m not quite sure what you’re leading to here. The issue, both between me and Charles and in general, is this: Ecosocialism or barbarism. I don’t quite know where Charles is, on this, but he seems to be in sarcastic mockery of the idea that the Iraqi “resistance” is genuine (in reality it has devolved into a feud between al-Maliki and Muqtada al-Sadr, or at least this is what Patrick Cockburn says), and without a genuine resistance how are we going to get ecosocialism? So it doesn’t look like he can imagine the collapse of capitalism all by itself. Well, I can imagine it full well.
As for the Iraqi resistance turning the American public against neoconservatism, what does it mean? It may be “mainstream to be against the whole project” among the American rank-and-file public, but the political class still feels obliged to keep that project going. See Kees van der Pijl’s 1998 piece on The Aesthetics of Empire and the Defeat of the Left — it doesn’t matter what ideological stripe they claim to represent, because as a political class they have been made responsible for the neoliberal project because of the overbearing dominance of capital over the economy and over the political process.
I still don’t really see how the US is “losing” the “war” in Iraq. Don’t they still occupy Iraq with fourteen big bad bases? Aren’t they still pumping the oil? Isn’t the war still being paid-for by the proceeds of dollar hegemony? Maybe it’s all in public perception. Or maybe it’s all those troops tied down with no place to go, and with the Armed Forces looking less glamorous than before. (Oh, sure, “support the troops.” But why would you want to be one now, with the US in Iraq?)
I suppose if anything good can come out of the war, it’s that the US has been interrupted from its traditional war against Latin America, and so resistance has spread, from the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil to the Zapatistas to Evo Morales in Bolivia to Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
26 April 2008, 6:55 pmDeAnander:
Xenia, Charles, and Sam… This is an interesting debate: (a) is the US “losing” in Iraq? (b) if so, is this a defining moment in US imperial decline — as was, say, Afghanistan for the USSR or Algeria (or perhaps Viet Nam?) for the French, or Egypt for the Brits?
Or… is the situation in Iraq (civil war, but of an intensity not sufficient to prevent the extraction of oil and other imperial tribute like payments for US patented seeds and chemical ag supplies) exactly what the neocons had in mind all along, exactly what they have deliberately inflicted on Afghanistan and Sudan (also regions with oil-related strategic importance to the Car-Worshipping Nations), exactly what they have in mind for Iran?
(this is what Marc Herold suggests in his article series on geopolitical “Empty Spaces”). And if so, is this a new kind of empire, which doesn’t play by the rules of previous empires and doesn’t follow the traditional pattern of rise, occupation, colonisation, overreach and decline? Can the US “hold” these spaces empty on the cheap — cheaper than traditional occupation and imperial expansion? Certainly the monthly US troop losses in Iraq are significantly lower than those in Viet Nam, though the expenses in ammo and high-tech equipment — and corrupt civilian contractor rip-offs — are higher, and the number of permanently disabled vets being dumped back into homeland civilian life seems to be higher as well (but since health care is a private matter in the States, that doesn’t directly impact the treasuries of our overlords).
What relation does the Iraq invasion bear to US indebtedness and financial weakness? Is it a contributing cause, or a desperately-grasped-at solution? Is the US “bleeding” wealth and power as it tries to control an uncontrollable situation there, or is it successfully leeching resources (or leveraging control of resources) from a situation that has been deliberately engineered to play out exactly as we’ve seen?
26 April 2008, 7:22 pmStan:
Apologizing again to Id for misreading…
On “the war”… my own take.
The Generals at the Pentagon know the war is not being lost; it is lost. The occupation is thoroughly unsustainable, and they’ve been raising the alarm about this for a while now. Military success being determined by political outcomes, and this being a regional effort (the redisposition of the post-Cold War US military), what is the main and unequivocal outcome so far? It is that Iran is now clearly emerging as the most influential regional power. That is a defeat for the US, a big one. That’s why all the bluster about Iran (and the chicken-littling of the liberal-left that the US is about to attack Iran… for the last two years we’ve heard this). The US can not attack Iran without the very tangible risk of summarily losing Iraq… really losing it, ie, evacuation-of-the-Green-Zone-losing-it. So they huff and puff and scratch for survival over the next few months in Iraq… and a lot of folks like it just like that. Iran, China & Russia, eg. It’s a Lilliputian capture (apologies to Swift). Meanwhile, back on the issue of food… one of the key US Quisling governments in the region, Egypt, is now having to reckon with the political suicide bomb of mass hunger.
26 April 2008, 7:50 pmpeggy:
De, I think the answer to your second to last question above is yes. I also think that some are using that war to amass vast personal and corporate fortunes, and I think that BushCheney&Co started the war exactly for that purpose. But I don’t think anyone engineered it to play out exactly as it has done. Nobody is that smart, and nobody is in control of what is happening there now. Just my opinion. That war is just one of many crises facing the American people, and yes all those crises are connected, although in no simple way. The most obvious material connection between food and the war is oil, as you and Stan have pointed out in your article at Counterpunch, with energy and its uses being the larger problem, that no amount of oil will fix.
26 April 2008, 8:43 pmPeople will do whatever they see fit to solve their personal problems. Many Americans solve their food problems by eating currently cheap junk. Very few would consider eating squirrels, pigeons and weeds to nourish themselves, and still fewer know how to forage for and prepare those things for consumption. Those who live out in the country can grow, forage, and barter for food, and some do. Some decades back, in the New Yorker, I read of a young woman in the southern U.S. who lived entirely on road-kill, as a matter of principle. I wonder where she is now, what she is doing, if I could find her. These days one could Google for eat road kill and see what comes up. I am not being frivolous here.
It could be a good project for some food activists to join people at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, among urban and rural foragers in North America and elsewhere. Learn how they survive, do it and spread the word. Of course it will not be easy. But some people can do it. Some people already do.
Whatever happens to human beings in the world of the near future, I gather just by reading that it is going to be horrible. Already there are massive die-offs. And this is not even counting the ethnocidal and genocidal practices happening all over, and the terrible poisons humanity has created. Will there be a massive, global revolution of the kind Charles imagines? I doubt it, I wouldn’t want it, and I think if it happened it would just make things much worse.
But what might happen is a series of small inventions or rediscoveries of rational ways of life that could catch on and spread, especially if they offer well-being of a kind that is not currently available to, say, America’s struggling middle classes. We literati could contribute by learning from those at the bottom. Theorizing is fine but it’s not enough, not nearly enough. I say this in all humility and sincerity. And please accept my apology for just adding more words.
We Can Change The World:
A few of my thoughts on the article (cross posted from my blog).
“The worldwide population explosion which we have seen in the last century or so seems to me to be an issue which is directly related to the “green revolution” and did not seem to be sufficiently addressed in your article. Growing vegetables through localized permaculture is a great step in the right direction, but the planet has never before tried to meet the minimum daily protein requirements of 6 billion+ people through such practices. Human beings now constitute the largest species by biomass on the planet with cows coming in at #2. So, while growing “victory gardens” is an admirable and necessary step in the right direction, it is probably insufficient in terms of meeting protein requirements- which is a large part of what the mass produced grains and legumes of the “green revolution” have done, while allowing the population to expand at an unsustainable exponential rate.
Eating lower on the food chain to meet protein requirements is certainly a step in the right direction which would be helpful; another is looking into neglected alternatives such as localized spirulina cultivation, for example. Due to its quick rate of growth, spirulina can optimally provide forty times the protein yield per acre of the next highest (soy) source.
On my blog @ http://wecanchangetheworld.wordpress.com, I provide some links for things such as How to Grow Your Own Spirulina, Mud Pot Spirulina cultivation, etc. Unfortunately, until peoples’ awareness shifts towards thinking about alternatives such as this, finding sources of live Spirulina cultures (aside from miniscule starts from algae collections such as the one at UTex, that is) seems to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks. Not being a chemistry expert, I can’t guarantee results, but it looks to me as though an appropriately measured mixture of wood ash, drug free urine and water (with a bit of iron added) would provide a good (if perhaps not ideal) culture medium for homegrown Spirulina. Not exactly expensive, in other words.”
26 April 2008, 10:39 pmBench:
Thank you De and Stan for such a dense, nourishing and tasty essay. I generally shy away from sending “you should read this!” links to people, but this is one that I will pass on. At this point almost nobody in the “West” dares deny that we have energy and climate “issues”, however muddied their understanding from watching CNN, or reading the New York Times or just plain denial. This seems like a good opportunity to expand their horizons, if only a bit.
Stan, I am interested in reading about your personal theology and journey should you choose to write about it at some point. I was surprised at first when you started writing about Christianity — or maybe it was just that I started noticing — some months back. A few years ago when I was watching Democracy Now! regularly I learned quite a lot about MLK, most notably that what we were presented in school as his legacy had its roots in southern churches and wasn’t the work of politicians wanting to do the right thing.
Being a die-hard atheist (by that I mean only that short of a booming voice from the sky, I am unlikely to ever acquire the faith that any deities exist; my reflexive disdain for religion has, thankfully, subsided) it occurred to me at that time maybe there was a possibility for connecting with believers in order to do good things as part of a group. After all, my one measure, I have more in common with them that they do with people of other faiths; i.e. we only “disagree” about the existence of one god. Much more recently I have attended a couple of events about community gardens, local food production, forming CSAs, and providing for the “food-insecure” in our community (as though those of us privileged enough to have stable, well paying jobs ARE food secure) at, coincidentally or not I did notice the denomination, the local Methodist church. I don’t know if it even makes sense for a non-believer to join a church, other than the Unitarian option, but it’s a possibility I am pondering. I want to find community; I am looking for my tribe, as some put it. Perhaps I share too much.
Off-topic general site question: Are the rand-o-quotes that appear on the upper right of this site available in one place? I can’t find a link anywhere. I recognize some but I still see new ones regularly. Short of repeatedly hitting refresh, I know of no way to see them all, which I would like to. There are some gems in there. I’d gladly receive a zip file via email if that’s the only way to get them. I’d also offer to help make a presentable, searchable way for others to read, enjoy and digest as more than a passing corner item.
Take, for example, the one I see at this particular moment: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
WOW. Must sleep now.
26 April 2008, 11:43 pmxenia:
Legume Sam, I’m quite surprised…to me, it has seemed obvious that the US would have to retreat eventually from Iraq after the first summer passed (summers have always been worse for the US military and for the morale). So, I stand by every word above, I don’t even know what to add…
Iraqi hatred of the occupation is too deep for it to last, especially in the manner that the American political class intended it. They have successfully muted some of the resistance into a civil war, but I think the agency is still with Iraqis and even with Afghanis in ways that may not be perceptible from the US. Even those of us who like the Iraqi people may not like the results, Iraq may become divided, new coopted classes may reach a kind of neocolonial modus vivendi (which is implicit in Deanander’s comment, and very true), but I am absolutely certain that the war is lost.
In contrast, my people, whether in Bosnia, Serbia or Croatia, are completely colonized and compliant, but they get more rewards for cooperating than Iraqis do, probably also for being perceived as “white” (which I do not think we are, but that’s my take). That’s where the American racist fantasy of converting Iraqis into Native Americans by taking their land and resources went awry: they did not take them seriously as an adversary, and they did not dish out enough candy for them to like the occupation.
And Stan is completely right on Egypt. Historically, whenever Egypt shakes, the rest of the Arab world starts trembling. Much of the neocon effort is only possible if Egypt is “pacified.”
27 April 2008, 12:11 amxenia:
sorry for adding a second post…
I’m still not sure what to make of Iran, and what the expansion of its influence might mean for Iraq. I genuinely mean it. I could write up some historical precedents from Iraqi history (after all, parts of Iran were also historically called Iraq), but that would be another topic, not entirely relevant to the US-Iran dynamic, which right now depends in great measure upon Russian geopolitical decisions.
But Stan’s comment about Iran, as well as the theological argument, reminded me of something else:
“Marriage of the Blessed”, a movie by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Its depiction of a veteran from the Iran-Iraq war and his search for spiritual and material justice deeply affected me. It shows the nastiness of a state which pretends to be theocratic as well as the cleansing of the soul that reflecting on religious matters may bring forth. The figure of emulation is ‘Ali, not Yehoshua of Nazareth, but the spirit is similar. Including the food angle, in a key (wedding!) scene: “Eat the robbed food from the poor. Robbed food is delicious.”
For all that’s worth!
27 April 2008, 1:07 amStan:
I’m not sure, but I think ants still constitute the greatest biomass, though not by any individual species.
On the war, oil, and food again. One thing we did not emphasize was that with the latest cornucopian idiocy, ie, biofuel, food crops and land that was devoted to food crops (if you can call corn and sugar that now) has been diverted from production of food to the new windfall (heavily subsidized alcohol — or “ethanol” if you prefer).
There is no way to make a linear regression from the gas pump to hidden costs, because so many practices are the utcome of multiple, converging interests and intents. But I’d feel very safe suggesting that gasoline actually costs Americans at least $100 a gallon right now, once you figure in these subsidies, paying off the financial collapses (like S&L) that prevent system collapse, paying for the US Navy to patrol sea lanes, et al.
The “hook” is food, even though middle-Americans — cyborgs from birth as we are, who will have a very difficult time as individuals adjusting to dramatic changes in lifestyle — don’t know that food is the issue. The issue for most of us (the exception being the millions of poor and non-white folk who are already “food insecure” to homeless) is like that indefinable sense of unacknowledged dread that breaks into our consciousness when we can’t distract ourselves with addictions for a moment… the dread is abated, also, when we are dealing with real immediate crisis (illness, accident, relations disruption, etc).
One reason De and I wrote this (at least speaking for myself) was that we want to pull this amorpohous anxiety out of the shadows and demystify it. Saying it directly is one step; but just as importantly, it has to be said with some ideas about how to fill the knowledge/skill void… else people will run off to some authoritarian father figure to wield the state as a weapon against a symbolic Enemy.
Harry Numa, a Haitian radical with whom I shared much and disagreed just as much, said something pretty sound to me some years ago. [Haitians use the term “bourgeloisie” routinely to describe the rich.] He said, “People think we can make the revolution while the bourgeoisie is asleep. But the bourgeoisie never sleeps; so we have to make the revolution right in front of them.”
Additional Notes: Nader on Food and Whitney on Food, finance, and exterminism
27 April 2008, 7:20 amLegume Sam:
I don’t think that what’s happened so far counts as any sort of “win” for the Iraqi resistance or “loss” for the US side or its proxies. The bases are still there, they’re still pumping the oil. The oil will will only become more and more valuable as world society descends from the production peak of 2005. Maybe “stalemate” would be a good word for it, at least as it stands right now. The US could probably break the stalemate by another broad, vast war of extermination there, if the neocons in power wanted it; I suppose the warnings they’ve received from all the generals they’ve fired have frightened them a bit, though. And dollar hegemony continues to pay for everything. So, no, I don’t see why the US “has to retreat.” At least not yet.
Oh, sure, I don’t count out the possibility of a “loss” in Iraq, eventually. But I think it will be far more disastrous than anyone wants to imagine, something along the lines of a total entropic wink-out. Remember, capitalism, if unopposed, will at some late date bring about total civilization-wide collapse.
27 April 2008, 9:08 amDeAnander:
@Bench — there is a quotes database. I have been meaning for some time to make it available as a (dynamically updating over time) file for download, thanks for the reminder. I’ll add that to my list of little evening projects for next week… Stan and I have compiled the quotes database over time and every now and then add a new one. FS readers are of course invited to send in pithy, fairly terse, relevant quotes, but (equally of course) we’ll exercise our own judgment on whether or not to add them to the db
27 April 2008, 10:17 amDeAnander:
@LS — even if “opposed” — heck, we few, we stubborn few, are opposing it right now — capitalism may still wreck human civilisation and the biosphere. it needs not only to be opposed but to be successfully opposed. discredited. dismantled. consigned, in the triumphalist language of the present-day victors, to the dust-heap of history — but I’d prefer the compost heap, since a compost heap actually transforms toxic things into useful topsoil instead of leaving them lying around intact for someone to dig up again for later misuse… sorry if my metaphors are a bit strained, it’s early…
27 April 2008, 10:20 amxenia:
Don’t want to strain the discussion, since it is actually heading the intended way on topsoil etc.
But I’m starting to wonder whether our differences in perception re the war in Iraq are actually ideological and cultural…and I do not mean Marxist vs. non-Marxist, as I do not think the US defeat in Iraq is going to usher in socialism. I’m just wondering how it can be completely crystal clear to me and obscure to others here.
Arguing that the US political classes are too strong and that they did not lose the war in Iraq is similar to voting for the Dems, i.e. it actually tells me more about the consciousness of leftist helplessness in the US than about the war in Iraq.
As for the reality of someone still making money off the war: I am so deeply pessimistic about any change in upper and upper-middle classes in the US that I expect them to be making money even if two-thirds of their own population died this very moment, including all of us here. Whatever happens, they’re going to continue making money. That’s their very nature, even a minute before doom hits. They’ll kill all of us unless they are resisted. Of course they’re still getting something out of it — but this did not go the way they planned. Iraq did not turn into Puerto Rico.
It took a long time for Algerians to get rid of the French, and the French were far more rooted ideologically and materially in North Africa than Americans are in Iraq. Yet I have no doubt that Iraqis are going to do it, the way Algerians did it, even if the occupation were to last for a 100 years. I’m much more certain of that than of my own survival.
27 April 2008, 12:10 pmStan:
Hear hear, xenia.
War is not an empirical practice, nor one in which “success” that can be determined by selective criteria that apply to both, or all, sides.
In the American Civil War, the setbacks of the North — which involved sanguinary mass tactical defeats — did not change the outcome. And the criteria of success were vastly different for each side. The South merely had to survive. The North was required to utterly defeat the South, to include the post-battle period of occupation (Reconstruction).
The Iraq occupation is part of a larger strategic initiative, one endorsed by necessity by all political factions in the US — the redisposition of the US military, post-Cold War.
This is an important word, with important implications: redisposition.
The disposition of the US military until 1991 was centered on the strategic imperative of Soviet containment — the centerpiece of US geopolitics. With the abrupt defeat/collapse of the USSR, the entire disposition of this imperial military machine became obsolete.
That it took just over a decade to get the ball rolling, and that it has resulted in a terrible false start, doesn’t change the fact that, for a number of reasons, control over SW Asia — to include a lasting US military presence there — is the logical sequel.
What’s important to distinguish is the difference between “control” and presence. Presence is required to accomplish regional control… presence (military bases) is not synonymous with control. In fact, regionally and globally, US allies (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, UAE, etc) have been sidelined; The Enemy, Iran, has risen to prominence; Pakistan and Afghanistan are becoming the locus of an asymmetric nightmare; and China (the one to be contained by aforementioned control) has increased its flexibility to act, allied with a resurgent Russia, both of whom are building a counter-hegemonic bloc (SCO) that will draw in the Caspain states.
Nothing like control there that I can see. In fact, seems like a net loss of that; with the US “global” military force now bogged down in a place the size of California.
27 April 2008, 12:56 pmjack:
stan:
a little off topic from where this thread has been headed, but related to the article you and de wrote, my partner and i just got a plot in our local urban community garden in our quest to further join the food underground. our plot is only 10×10, and we want to get the most out of it. that being said, what is your favorite book on permaculture? we already have a copy of square foot gardening, which is a good start, but doesnt have much in the way of what to grow together to maximize output and sustainability while minimizing external chemical inputs. what do you suggest?
jack
27 April 2008, 5:15 pmLegume Sam:
Oh sure, the US hasn’t gained any sort of control over SW Asia. I agree — the imperialist utopia has not come to pass.
The problem with analogies to previous imperialist wars, though, is that Algeria and Vietnam weren’t sitting atop 10-15% of the world’s highest-quality oil reserves, and neither country was being occupied in a post-peak-oil economic context.
Thus the enormous incentive to maintain the stalemate in Iraq for as long as possible. Maybe it will end when the oil reserves have been drained.
And, btw, re:
No, I do not imagine that the “the US lost in Iraq” line counts as any litmus test for genuine anti-imperialism. I hardly see, moreover, how agreeing with Kees van der Pijl’s position on the defeat of the Left in the current political era counts in any way as “voting for the Dems.”
27 April 2008, 6:00 pmDeAnander:
@Jack: Lasagna Gardening in Small Spaces comes to mind as a potentially useful title for planning your small plot. (Doncha love how a bit of land for a garden is a “plot” — as in “a cabal dedicated to the overthrow of central constituted authority”!)
27 April 2008, 6:59 pmRobert Karaffa:
This whole thread is so good for so many reasons and this is a little out of the context of most of the discussion; But…….Just got two-tenths of an acre of east central Ohio land dedicated to whatever I want to grow for the next six months. Do I pick up a shovel or cave and use a rotatiller? (sp?) Already planted peas, lettuce and other rather insignificant stuff at home base. Time for summer and winter squash, beans, peppers, corn and who knows what else. Any good suggestions from the seasoned planters among you? I gotta get movin’. Can add chickens at this location if I can keep the coons/coyotes/foxes out. Deer will be a huge problem at this location as well. Fencing ideas?? What are anyone’s favorite varieties of chickens in terms of survivability and productivity. Have already raised Buff Orpington, Rhode Island Red, Silver Laced Wyandotte (my fav.) and Australorp and Ameraucauna, all very hardy. Sorry for the enthusiasm here but it kind of is appropriate. Lucked into this land by accident, my folks actually own the land and I never thought to ask. Didn’t ask, just started talking. I would like to take advantage but I’m an idiot at gardening (I will probably skip the shovel since Petro-world can still provide.) Once again, I’m kind of bubbling here, but excited at the chance for action. Going to go back and review that rooftop stuff for anything appropriate. Will check out “Lasagna Gardening” as well. Thanks!!
27 April 2008, 9:43 pmDeAnander:
@RK: everyone loves Wyandottes
With 2/10 of an acre it might be worth reading This Organic Life by Joan Gussow… Also Lee Reich on Weedless Gardening. For deeper perspectives, longer term planning (if you can have access to this land for an extended period), Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden is a must-read for inspiration and how-to. Jeavons on How To Grow More Vegetables is interesting, but he’s a big fan of double-dig French intensive beds and I am much more drawn to no-till. Noah’s Garden by Sara Stein is a lovely book and has a lot of practical how-to about making your garden produce both food for humans and habitat for wildlife. And for philosophical background there is my personal favourite, Agri-Culture by Jules Pretty. A standard book on companion planting might also be very helpful… Carrots Love Tomatos is a classic, a very good intro to the subtleties of companion planting.
As far as chickens, I think Salatin probably is the best current source on organic chicken raising. His video is kinda pricey but imho worth it — the Polyface Farm Video. It contains enough practical ideas to keep your brain humming for a year or two
I find myself hesitating to recommend Salatin because of his ultra-rightwing, dominionist politics; but the lateral-thinking brilliance of his farming techniques, and the soundness of his land stewardship, I think have to outweigh my ideological distaste for his patriarchal/fundie side… yeah, it’s worth buying his DVD or at least one of his books on “grass farming” and “chicken tractors”.
[in-joke for Salatin appreciators: “but how do you harness the chickens to pull the tractor???”]
27 April 2008, 10:15 pmRobert Karaffa:
Thanks!! Got a lot of reading to do. But I asked for it! And so glad to get so many suggestions so fast. I’ve seen the “Tractors,” and understand the actual “Drive Mechanism” that moves the tractors. That’s pretty damn funny! I’ll do more squats and bicep curls, or just move more tractors instead maybe, at least the small chicken tractors that I have seen. That’s pretty damn funny! Thank you again.
27 April 2008, 10:37 pmJonathan:
Jack - although not specifically oriented toward small plots, I found Gaia’s Garden (Toby Hemenway) a good intro to permaculture for small scale North American gardens.
Stan “Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share.”
You might also want to consider adding two other classes of plants to your polycultures besides aromatics.
One class is what some call “dynamic accumulators” which are plants that are particularly good at pulling up a range of micronutrients necessary for healthy plants (such as calcium, copper, magnesium etc) from deep in the soil which then accumulate in their plant bodies. These can then be periodically chopped down and added to the soil around your other plants. (Why buy fertilizer when the plants will do it for you?) From my research two of the best are comfrey and nettles which between them accumulate almost every essential nutrient. Both comfrey and nettles can be dispersive from seed and nettles are expansive by rhizomes (terms many think better than “invasive” as they take out the threatening connotations) so look for the Russian comfrey cultivar which is sterile (so no seeds - although it is persistent so even a little rhizome will spawn the plant again, but as long as you don’t mess with it - ie tilling it up - it will stay put) and nettles might be best in a pot and chopped down before setting seed (have yet to confirm their ability to be potted but this seems reasonable). Both can be chopped down a few times a year and will sprout right back, making their “weedy” qualities quite beneficial. Both have stacked functions in that they are excellent medicinals (other names for comfrey are knitbone and bruisewort) and nettles are incredibly delicious and nutritious if steamed for a few minutes to remove their sting (harvest with gloves!) Both are great for making compost tea for use as foliar feed.
The other class are what are called “specialist nectary” plants. These plants have small flowers that attract tiny parasitoid wasps that feed on the nectar and then lay their eggs inside and kill the larvae of many garden “pests”. Many of these plants are from the Apiaceae or umbel family like dill, fennel and carrots. If you can plan it out so that you have several of these plants flowering throughout the entire growing season it will increase the likelihood that these parasitic insects will hang around your garden. I am currently trying to grow a plant called skirret, which is an old cultivated perennial that is now rare, which grows parsnip like roots and is also a specialist nectary.
If you are going to intensively use the dynamic accumulators as mulch plants they are probably best designed as patches (not mixed about your other plants), which could be placed anywhere near the garden. The specialist nectaries are also best in patches but placed throughout the garden (depending on how much space you have) so that the insects they attract are also near the insects feasting on your veggies.
While I am here I thought I would also bring to the attention to those here about the potential of edible forest gardening. See here for a good intro: http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/about_gardening. Although by no means a replacement for more traditional annual vegetable gardens, I think perennial food polycultures have an immense potential for fertile resistance - the main reason being that if properly designed they are largely self-maintaining and can provide food for years and years. In temperate regions, if you were to leave your lawn alone (or vegetable garden for that matter) it would eventually become a forest. Edible forest gardening keeps this in mind by choosing edible perennial plants (trees, shrubs, herbs etc.) that support each other in a forest like system.
I am currently helping to start a project in Cleveland, Ohio to convert abandoned urban lots into food forests using permaculture methods. The hope being that unless they are bulldozed down these gardens will be producing food for years to come and will do so even if there are periods with no human imput. If interested here is an intro to our vision: http://www.thegreentriangle.com/gardens.html
Sorry for going on for so long and for being a bit off-topic in the discussion.
Thanks De and Stan for a great article!
27 April 2008, 11:18 pmStan:
Wow, go to bed around here and you wake up to presents under the tree. Thanks for all the great posts!
Woke up thinking about some comments De and I hear fairly regularly that we are suggesting a return to the past; and the experience of many people — myself included — that rural third-world folk sometimes want the things that we technodrones already have.
First of all, I’ll point out that while we said fighting for land is an old story; we did not say we wanted to “return” to some utopian mythical past. That’s simply not possible.
We say that many techniques from the past hold the answers to the technical issues we are facing or soon will in the future.
There is a big difference between a planet that has half a billion humans beings and one with almost 7 billion… the first being space.
And I, for one, am a big fan of science… the systematic process of discovering how things behave… not the philosophical error (imho) of “scientism,” the implicit claim that analytical reduction and atomization — a type of empiricism — represents the highest, or only, truth. Scientism also includes the very male-gendered approach of conquest of or control over nature.
The science that is being done by relocalizers, permaculturists, et al, is not pre-modern. It’s just not atomistic or conquest-memed. And here is an important point that might pass in conversation as a throwaway: the people who are doing this are not the products of peasant or archaic societies.
The people who are doing this are mainly those who have passed through, lived in, been immersed patriarchal industrial capitalist modernism. We know, from deep experience of it, what is wrong with us, with our society, and how that wrongness manifests itself in the captured psyches of the metropole. This is almost a requirement to get to where we are, for a couple of modern white Australian men to write up a book on something they call “permaculture,” or for a modern Black woman in Brooklyn to fight for guerrilla gardens.
We are not the products of some other culture; and we are beginning from where we are, in whatever local conditions are expressed within the metatrends of 2008 imperial exterminism; but also with our analyses of those trends that allow us to read the signposts of those local expressions. We are cosmopolitan sojourners, modern-day Candides, who have traversed the world and tasted its tumult, and are coming home with a lesson rendered into the sentence, “We must cultivate our garden.”
We are not arguing for return to past patterns of land-hollding (for 7 billion!?)… we are arguing for taking the land under your very feet and becoming a cadre of healers… healers of the soil, and a cadre of midwives… midwives of new soil, and a cadre of scientific McGivers who learn to purge the term “waste” from their vocabulary.
My experience in Haiti — limited as it is — with the peasantry is that peasants are no more moral or wise than we are. Idealizing peasants is a fomr of metropolitan exoticism (”noble savage” stuff). They will kill off birds of prey to protect their chickens in a heartbeat, for example. And none of them is immune to the shine and glitter of modern gadgets and commodities. There is not some inhering folk-wisdom that lights up red and tells them “this is bad for you,” any more than there is for us, ourselves fascinated by what the ad-men and marketers and packagers know fascinates us… and ourselves curious about widgets far earlier than we are able to re-think them through a meta-analysis. The machines don’t come with a sign hung around their necks that gives their productive history and ecological impact.
What the peasants do have, that their urban counterparts don’t, is food and flexibility. Once they spend a year in the city, having their fantasies dashed, they’ll run-not-walk back out to the land… if it’s still there.
At any rate, how other countries and peoples deal with the emerging crises is their affair. That’s the part we can’t “help” with… and shouldn’t unless specifically asked (and then find out who’s asking and why). Our job is to take the cetripetal pressure of the metropolitan-consumer core off of them. We deal with our bosses; they can deal with theirs. Their bosses work for ours.
In my early morn, scattered way, I guess I’m just saying that this is not some reactionary, new-age fantasy we are proposing (if proposal is not too strong a word). This food-praxis, or nascent food-centered movement, is not pre-modern, but post-modern (in the best sense).
28 April 2008, 6:21 amLegume Sam:
I am being told to “soak beans before planting” — they need a lot of water, like cucumbers and peppers… water can be an economic matter out in semi-desert southern California; water bills can get high. I was once told that it “didn’t make economic sense” to grow vegetables in backyard gardens here because the water bill didn’t justify all the vegetables…
28 April 2008, 8:43 amLegume Sam:
Stan says:
I will be discussing it more or less along these lines in my book, From Capitalist Discipline to Ecological Discipline: the scientific model that informs capitalist discipline is that of mechanics, whereas the model that informs ecological discipline will be that of thermodynamics…
28 April 2008, 9:56 amStan:
Sounds warm. (:
28 April 2008, 1:03 pmCharles:
And I, for one, am a big fan of science… the systematic process of discovering how things behave… not the philosophical error (imho) of “scientism,” the implicit claim that analytical reduction and atomization — a type of empiricism — represents the highest, or only, truth. Scientism also includes the very male-gendered approach of conquest of or control over nature.
^^^^^^^
This error is also termed positivism, basing fundamental thinking in individual observations rather than social communication.
Valid scientific theories are more than the sum of the observations by individual scientists. Scientific theories are emergent levels from the observations of individuals, and individual brains. Theories are socially constructed. Sociality is the central human principle.
^^^^^
I will be discussing it more or less along these lines in my book, From Capitalist Discipline to Ecological Discipline: the scientific model that informs capitalist discipline is that of mechanics, whereas the model that informs ecological discipline will be that of thermodynamics…
^^^^^
You’ve probably read _The Dialectical Biologist_. The theses of that book might suggest the scientific model for the ecological discipline.
Nostalgia: In ‘72 , I wrote a paper that used the historical thingy that the thermodynamic gas laws (Charles or Boyle) were reducible to mechanics, with the introduction of the particulate ( atomist) assumptions. However, sociology-anthropology cannot be reduced to individual psychology or biology. Human society is an emergent level from biology. Biology is an emergent level from physics-chemistry. Emergent level means the new level is a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
Organisms are wholes that are more than the sum of their physical-chemical parts.
Humans are beings-wholes that are more than the sum of the biological parts of their organism. They are essentially social beings.
28 April 2008, 2:55 pmJonathan:
RK - I’ve done double dug raised beds, stripped sod with shovels and used a rototiller (aka weed spreader) at various times to establish garden beds but after my back yelling at me for several days afterwards and a lot of hard work I’ve got to go with De and found the no-till gardens the way to go. It takes a little pre-planning and perhaps a little money to get the materials (with a little searching I’ve found people on craigslist giving away horse manure) but by far the easiest.
Its all about sheet mulching: http://www.permaculture-exchange.org/sheet.html (see the Permaculture Activist guidelines)
Robert, where abouts are you in Ohio? If your within a drive from Columbiana county I might be able to come out for a day and give you a hand setting up…
28 April 2008, 3:36 pmRobert Karaffa:
Jonathan - Thanks so much, and thanks to everyone else for the wealth of info. and suggestions. Have much to read and need to start soon, though it snowed here last night(probably on you too.) I’ll probably combine conventional and other more innovative methods that you, De and others have provided me access to. I can get plenty of chicken/horse/bovine manure. Really like the edible forest concept. I live in Granville, contact me at [private email suppressed to protect RK from spam storm]. Busy this weekend with our Non-Profit’s Annual Silent Auction (see healingartmissions.org) but if I can really get this project going soon the help of a real pro would be a very good thing.
29 April 2008, 9:07 amDeAnander:
A good analysis of the “overnight food crisis”
and here’s more on the IAASTD:
In other words, called on their BS they walked off in a huff.
Hat tip to Bernhard at MoonOfAlabama for these links. Thanks B.
30 April 2008, 2:34 amLisa:
Western excess is the Earth killer
By Chan Akya
…A journalist friend who attended some recent meetings of green and environmental lobbyists described a strange scene in the gents toilet. No, not anyone adopting an extra-wide stance in the stalls, but rather the significant use of paper towels to dry hands. In the middle of a meeting on the environment, this behavior struck my friend as particularly stupid, but it also highlighted the deep cultural traits that have to be reversed in Europe and the US before any meaningful progress can be made.
Think about that for a second: if you pull out five hand paper towels to dry your hand every time in the toilet, the “footprint” of a single Westerner would be one tree every day. Multiply that by European and American populations and suddenly it becomes all too clear why Brazilian rainforests disappear at the rate of a few thousand acres every week.
Read the entire article at: http://atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD26Dj08.html
1 May 2008, 2:22 pmStan:
FULL
1 May 2008, 5:02 pmJames M:
I think this video of Eric Holt-Gimenez speaking at the EcoCity World Summit provides a great A/V complement to your article. It’s a very timely speech about the real reasons for rising food prices and the resulting food “rebellions” (a term he prefers to “riots.”)
1 May 2008, 7:24 pmStan:
The Schwarzenegger/Snow “portfolio approach” ignores the states largest “reservoir” – upland forest soils - and its biggest water user – irrigated agriculture. FULL
15 May 2008, 6:25 amLisa:
May 15, 2008
Food for Thought
by John Mauldin
What countries are truly the have and have nots of the world? Good friend and business partner Niels Jensen of Absolute Return Partners suggests we look at the old equation in a new way? Food and energy resources may be at least part of the definition in the future. In this week’s Outside the Box we continue a them I mentioned a few weeks ago: agricultural needs are going to be a new and important force in the world and when coupled with energy may shift the balance of power in the world in strange a different ways.
When, as Niels points out, Afghanistan poppy farmers are shifting to wheat farming, the world is truly a different place. I think you will find the research he has done to be truly worth a few minutes of your thinking time.
And as a preface, I was reminded a little while ago that a Financial Times headline story last Friday mentioned that China is buying African farmland and building massive amounts of railroads and infrastructure to get grains to the market. I have long been bullish on African farmland. This week’s OTB will tell you why.
John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box
Food for Thought
By Niels Jensen
The Absolute Return Letter
May 2008
“There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.” ~ John Maynard Keynes
You just know that something is astray when Afghan poppy growers begin to switch from opium to wheat. According to the Independent newspaper here in the UK, that’s exactly what is now happening. I have no desire to enter into a pound for pound risk/reward analysis of producing wheat versus opium. However, the consequences of the rapid rise in energy and agricultural commodity prices are far reaching and perhaps not as well understood as they should be. That is the content of this month’s letter.
Read the rest at:
http://www.safehaven.com/showarticle.cfm?id=10253&pv=1
18 May 2008, 11:12 pm