A Million Gardens (for the 99% of the 99%)
I Love OWS and the Slogan “99%”
It is a great slogan that puts in bold relief the immense power of the one percent of humanity that exists parasitically on the rest. “We are the 99%.” It is a declaration that in some significant way, people are more awake to their circumstances than they were. Around this slogan, we have seen courageous and principled people take to the streets in a great shout of “No!” at the powers and principalities of late neoliberalism; and we have seen that this outburst resonates with far more people than the ruling layer of society expected. We have seen the protestors demonstrate with their bodies that under their façade of civility, this ruling layer relies in the last instance on truncheons, teargas, guns and jails. This unmasking is more important in many ways than what will come afterward, because without it, we accommodate – and we all accommodate in one way or another, even those protesting – without any clarity. Let these thousand flowers bloom.
Still, the 99% are not actually protesting. 99% of the 99% are just doing what they do to get by in the world the best they know how, far from the demonstrations. We know this is true, and we know the reasons are as numerous as the people who do not protest in the street. And so we are required to acknowledge that the movement, such as it is, is representative of its claim, not the number 99’s actualization. And therein is one seed of mischief.
In Latin, it was once said, perversio optima quae est pessima. The perversion of the best is the worst. Some protesters will come to believe they are representative of those they do not know. Some will try and formalize that representation as power. Many are already spinning out programs (God, save us from parties and programs!) that purport to represent the 99%, though they are mostly utopian projections cobbled together by handfuls of people who still believe something called the “future” can be subordinated to human management schemes. Some will begin to articulate what it means to be an “authentic” representative; and the divisions will begin. Nothing stays the same, and this won’t either. Lord, have mercy.
I am one of the 99% of the 99% this time around. I had my day in the sun as a protestor; and if I’d have stayed a day longer, I would have taken up more room than one person should, because movements privilege clever talkers and angry writers more than they ought to. Now I am one of the 99% of the 99% who is restricted in my movements by personal duties and obligations, the lack of money, and the lack of time. I am far from any urban center, far from the big schools, far from the cohorts and committees, far from those places where people debate social theory and movement strategies. And I love it out here in the sticks.
I love the Occupy movement, too. I repost everything I see on Facebook that is not downright offensive (thickheaded sexism in this movement is alive and well, sorry to say). I promoted the movement in my church with a supportive article in the bulletin, which generated a whiff of controversy that promises a dialogue about this thing we have named “economic inequality.” I attended a rally in Lansing, though the mayor there agreed with the protest, so we didn’t generate any hostility from the police. Sherry sports bumper stickers that say “OWS” and “99%.” This is what we can do right now, so we are glad the demonstrators (I like the Spanish term “manifestantes” better) are out there keepin’ on. In so may ways, you are speaking for us. I get a little giddy at how long it has already lasted.
I love the movement’s sense of satire. My favorite video was a bullfighting spoof around the Wall Street bull statue, with two capering clowns and a matador who mounted a police car and snapped his cape at the 7,100 pound bronze bovine.
I love the energy, and the courage, and the general understanding that the power of the movement is pacific. Movements succeed when they inspire violence, but only when they inspire the violence of the oppressor that accomplishes this unmasking.
Whether the vandalism and violence of a few protestors is from fools or police provocateurs (probably a measure of both), it has been thankfully minimal. Those youngsters who got pepper sprayed at UC Davis were more morally effective in their non-resistance than 10,000 macho-boys throwing rocks and setting fires.
I love the way OWS stays unpredictable. That is absolutely this occupy-thing’s greatest strength.
I have questions, and ideas, however, about what happens next, about follow-up, about what the 99% of the 99% can do and, more importantly, should do. I’m not proposing, as many leftists will, that the movement “get itself organized,” select leaders, develop a strategy, etc. In fact, I vigorously oppose strategies on principle, because I believe most of them are simply designed to put a few people in charge of a lot of people who are then charged to carry out the strategy. More on that further along.
Before I can explain myself, I need to at least describe the premise for these ideas.
Premise
The premise begins that all the changes that are implied in the demands – such as they are – of the movement are not applicable to all people in all places at all times. The greatest value of this movement is not in its ability to expose certain sufferings and change certain policies, but in its ability to expose – with no unified intention to do so – all the reasons we need to abandon the entire system of which “policy” is only one essential working component.
This is an argument that is not won in this movement yet, because many people who are supportive of OWS et al still maintain the sincere and good-willing belief that governments and other policy-making institutions are somehow independent of their actual actions, like machines, and they can be taken over – like exchanging a bad driver for a good one in an automobile.
I respect that belief insofar as it is a belief people cleave to out of genuine good will. These people are not collaborators or sheep; and those who characterize them that way are both wrong and mean. I love the people who want to change the policies, because I am convinced that they want to do it out of a genuine sense of care about others.
My argument: Even machines cannot be made independent of their makers and users. The problem with the system is not the driver. It is the car.
This is my premise. If I am wrong, then ignore everything hereafter.
Failure of the Future
I think this car that is breaking down might be named “The Future.”
The deeply-parasitic infrastructure of society is coming apart, not temporarily, but in the face of some real trends that put real limits not only on the autocratic futurism of the right, but the “progressive” futurism of the left, too. I ripped off Ivan Illich above with his reference to perversio optima quae est pessima. I’m quoting him again when he said, “To hell with the future. It is a man-eating idol.”
I agree with that. A lot. This car is breaking down and there is going to be a wreck.
Illich wrote in 1973 about the energy infrastructure crisis. What he said has proven prophetic in both senses of the word. Prophets are wrongly believed to be people who simply foretell the future. In fact, prophets are those who speak truth to power and who have visions, not predictions, that forewarn us of dangerous possibilities in the future.
Every generation has some. Illich showed in 1973, in a pamphlet entitled “Energy and Equity,” that our faith in technology as redeemer of humanity is a terrible mistake. Now we see the big secular trends that prefigure the collapse of many infrastructures. Climate change. Peak resource extractions. The very economic crisis that spawned OWS. War for the fuel to make war. That’s next, and not far off either.
This crisis is not short-term, and it will force people to adopt new tactics for everyday life. It represents both a trauma and an opportunity; but that opportunity, in my opinion, is not available through policy. Policies may alter and change in response to material changes. What has to change is not policy, but our entire built environment based on some more personal and less abstract narratives than Progress and The Future.
This is where the 99% of the 99% can do something, and they can begin doing it right now, without leaving their hometowns. Let’s put this in another context before explaining why and how the 99% of the 99% can make some of those changes.
Devolution & Design
All social orders eventually devolve and are forced to reorganize, and the globalized world we live in is witnessing the devolution of the social order. These periods of discontinuity never last forever, because society eventually self-organizes out of these devolutions, and a new order is established. When an order collapses, there is an accompanying crisis of ideas. More and more in our own period, we are seeing the de-legitimation of our ideas not only about capitalism and socialism, or their ugly merger into neoliberalism, but about what they held in common that have proven to be dangerous idols. Progress. The Future. Technological Salvation.
When I was part of the organized activist left, I cooked up an alliterated recipe for resistance: de-legitimate, disobey, disrupt. For the present, I will add a fourth D. Design.
We are not going to force policy-makers to remake the world. We have to do it ourselves. We have to take our entire built environment, one piece at a time, and re-design it. This will take everyone, because where you live is different than where I live; and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. To hell with policies. They are people-eating idols.
The Money Grid
One nub of the whole situation at the end of 2011 is a longstanding fact. People have been captured by their dependency upon a vast, technocratic apparatus that has de-skilled them and rendered them 100% (not 99%) dependent on money. The technocratic apparatus makes all our stuff, controls our climate, fixes our boo-boos, educates us, feeds us, moves us around, lights our homes, and puts us to work – all inside our most excellent technocratic life support system – and the only thing that makes the system respond… is money. As it is in 2011. As it was in 2010, 2000, 1990, 1980… it just got worse with time.
Money is generated by banks and printed by the government. It is designed to work a certain way to benefit governments and banks, which are run by the rich. Governments and banks are never going to be the ally of any movement like OWS, so there is little likelihood that activism will change the nature of money any time soon. Money is designed to transfer power; and it does it very well. Money is not a morally-neutral sign any more than a gun is a morally-neutral tool. Each is designed for a purpose. Guns are designed to kill. Money is designed to commodify, that is, to make everything into a thing for sale. Including you.
The anthropologist Alf Hornborg said that money dissolves cultural and natural systems in an ecosemiotic process. “Viewed from outer space,” says Hornborg, “money is an ecosemiotic phenomenon that has very tangible effects on ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole. If it were not for money, nobody would be able to trade tracts of rain forest for Coca-Cola.”
That’s a lot to think about. Think about it.
The Institutional Grid
Institutions are required to administer the technocracy upon which we all abjectly depend. Institutions are always somehow imbricated within the system of money that benefits banks and government. There is probably nothing controversial about saying that institutions can be corrupted by money. What I am about to say is that institutions – all of them, even your favorites – are inherently and unavoidably corruptible.
If OWS develops “lists of demands” and programs and the like, there will be predictable appeals to target institutions for particular policy changes. Money controls the institutions. Money controls the policies. Money will come to control the institutions that are created to fight the institutions. As it ever has been and ever shall be. The movement will become “focused,” it will deploy a strategy, and let the games begin. The movement will be placed under management to oversee and coordinate the strategy. The movement will come to depend on money.
Policy games controlled by money will be able to frustrate the original objectives of activists, either by crushing them or co-opting them. Then the demoralization will start anew, amid more nihilism because the devolution will have advanced throughout the process.
If OWS itself begins to unravel over time, which it hasn’t so far but certainly may eventually, the follow-up options may appear to be (1) play by the rules for scraps or (2) to argue for more direct force against the system. The latter will increase the probability of outright destruction, and the former might lead people to believe that nothing, in fact, can be done.
Welcome to the institutional grid.
Relations On and Off the Grid
I believe there is a way out of that impasse. To explain it, I need to make reference to an anthropologist named Robin Dunbar. He calculated that human beings have the cognitive capacity and the time to sustain a very finite number of caring relationships. His guess was around 150. I give this a lot of leeway, but I accept the general idea. Finite brain. Finite time. Finite capacity. Got it.
These primary relationships are built on trust and empathy, requiring no formal agreements, no contracts, no administration by a third party. Most close family relations fall into this category, as do friends. My own trick for categorizing these relations is to think of them as covenantal as opposed to casual or contractual. Your relation to your boss is contractual. Your relation to a grocery clerk you see once a week is casual. Your relation to your friend, lover, child, mother, etc, is covenantal. These covenantal relations are built on care, on trust and empathy. They imply certain non-monetized, highly personal duties and obligations to one another that are accepted out of love. These relations do not require formal rules; and in fact, formal rules would have a deleterious effect on these relations.
“A contract is an agreement made in suspicion. The parties do not trust each other, and they set “limits” to their own responsibility. A covenant is an agreement made in trust. The parties love each other and put no limits on their own responsibility.”
-Wambdi Wicasa
Once a group exceeds this fuzzy cognitive limit, this “Dunbar’s number,” it begins to require third parties to administer, manage and resolve conflicts. This is the genesis of administration and management, and it becomes inevitable with greater scale, more people. This new layer of relations is more impersonal, first by some small degree. With more people and more administrators come greater degrees of impersonality. The uprooted impersonality of administration is inevitable. The tendency of these social formations is summed up in the way we can refer to administration as an “apparatus.”
A remarkable moral shift occurs with the emergence of this apparatus. Doing the right thing because you care for someone is superseded by doing the correct or legal thing because of an impersonal rule. The rules are necessary because the third parties of these apparati have to be seen as disinterested parties. In this single moral shift, those who administer the rules gain a new kind of social power that makes them inherently corruptible.
This applies to a corporation, a club, a rifle platoon, a progressive non-profit, a church, a school, a hospital, a town, the water supply system, the food system, everything… because our technocratic society is administered by an apparatus that is approaching perfect impersonality. Plain size can begin this pernicious process, so small “organizations” beware. Simply calling yourself an organization carries this risk of impersonality. The corruptibility of these institutions inheres in the enormous power they accumulate purely through the authority to administer and manage.
The Fetishism of Bureaucratic Competence
So while we are unmasking ideologies – those constellations of ideas that simultaneously conceal and reproduce power – let’s look at this ideology of “progress” and the “future.” It is entirely built on force, and that power has accrued to the one percent, and we have not unmasked what Alasdair MacIntyre calls the “fetishism of bureaucratic skill,” part of the ideology of progress that both reproduces and conceals this administrative power. Most of the left and the right have fallen prey to this fetishism.
“The modern American is culturally conditioned to think of nature as nothing more than matter-in-motion, as a standing reserve that through technological and entrepreneurial prowess is converted into a consumer’s cornucopia.”
To this adds MacIntyre:
“The fetishism of commodities has been supplemented by another just as important fetishism, that of bureaucratic skills… the realm of managerial expertise is one in which what purport to be objectively grounded claims [e.g., to the knowledge of the good society and how to achieve it] function in fact an expression of arbitrary, but disguised, will and preference.”
Power. His qualification is at the heart of it, “to the knowledge of the good society and how to achieve it.” This is a delusion of the ideology of progress, this notion that people can render the future predictable and manageable. Experts, managers and administrators take full advantage of this ideology to exert will and preference behind a mask of special competence.
MacIntyre continues, in 1984, that “we know of no organized movement towards power which is not bureaucratic and managerial in mode, and we know of no justifications for authority that are not Weberian.”
As the power of administrators grows, an ethic of care becomes more and more antithetical to the rules-regime of administration. Impersonality metastasizes, and we wake up to find ourselves not living in the world but moving plugs around on a switchboard to get what we need from the technocratic grid.
Management makes rules that help management. Management is the administration of administrators. Administration makes rules that benefit administration. As Haitians say, ti tig se tig. “The child of a tiger is a tiger.”
The original purpose of a rule – often created out of good will – is subverted by the administrative application of the rule. In common parlance, “the tail starts to wag the dog.” The letter of the law is administered against the spirit of the law. This dog-waggery leads to the incomprehensibility of the rules and resentment of administration and management, which in turn becomes defensive, setting up a power struggle in which administration is already advantaged by the growing dependency of the administered on administration. Remember that Stalin accrued his immense power through control of an administrative apparatus.
One of the reasons we have so little power to act creatively in the face of so many crises is not just that we are fragmented, but that we’re cut off in a much deeper way by the lack of social cohesion that can only happen in the small, intimate group. Covenantal relations are strong bonds. Contractual relations are weak bonds.
Every infantry squad leader knows that. Every good mother knows it. The rest of us ought to, too.
Management is the enemy of social cohesion, because it substitutes secondary (weak) bonds for primary (strong) ones. By re-strengthening primary bonds, we develop a greater capacity to resist power, but also to creatively adapt to (without direct resistance) rapidly changing circumstances.
Strategy and Tactics
Strategy and tactics as they are commonly understood are war terms, and they can’t escape their conflict implications. Michel De Certeau, however, draws a distinction between them that leaps over some of the martial interpretations of these ideas.
In military parlance, strategy is the identification of key campaigns that are necessary to accomplish the main objective – in most cases, winning the war. Operations is a level of planning that determines key battles necessary to win campaigns. Tactics are those techniques that are required to win battles. So the tactic is subordinate to the campaign, which is subordinate to the strategy. In other words, “In the beginning, there was Strategy, and without it the world was shapeless and void.”
De Certeau wrote about people in their everyday lives, not conditions of extremity and conflict, in a book entitled oddly enough, The Practice of Everyday Life.
Strategy, notes De Certeau, is always the purview of power. Strategy presumes control. Strategy is self-segregating, in the same way administration and management is self-segregating, setting itself up as a barricaded insider. The strategic leaders become the Subject; and the led become — along with any enemies — the Objects. Strategy presumes an in-group that executes the Strategy.
“Strategy is the calculus of force-relationships; when a subject of will and power can be isolated from an environment.”
-De Certeau
The financial masters of the universe at Wall Street oversee the strategy. They are the institutions. In many ways, the rest of us cannot escape their Grid. They are the subject, and the rest are the object. They are inside; and we are outside. They live behind guarded walls.
De Certeau calls tactics, on the other hand, the purview of the non-powerful. His version of “tactics” is not as a subset of Strategy, but adaptation to the environment (which has been structured by A Strategy).
The city planning commission may determine what streets there will be, but the local cabbie will figure out how to take best advantage of lived reality of those streets. This making-do is what De Certeau calls bricolage, and it often implies cooperation with others as much as competition with others.
While the masters of the financial universe at Wall Street protect their guarded walls and ensure the system keeps paying the imperial tribute, we are making do. We do things that they can’t control or fully account for. We barter, clip coupons, work under the table, trade labor, share tasks and expenses with friends… all those little cheats to bypass the more disadvantageous routes along the Grid. Making do. Bricolage.
Bricolage is so detailed, so numerous in instance, so adaptable, that much of it escapes the notice of the Big Strategists; more importantly, it is beyond their power to control.
Agility
Strategy makes two presumptions: control and an in-group. The contradiction of strategy is that the control is never perfect and the situation upon which the strategy was constructed is always changing, making aspects of the strategy obsolescent. The self-segregation of in-groups magnifies these myopic aspects of strategy, because the walls that keep others out also obscure their view of the outside. Strategy becomes self-referential.
Tactics, on the other hand, or bricolage, is action in a constant state of reassessment and correction based directly on observations of the actual micro-environment. Tactical theorist John Boyd rather schematically diagrammed this process as an OODA-loop, meaning people observe their surroundings (O), orient on the most important developments in the environment (O), decide on an immediate course of action (D), take that action (A), then revert immediately to observation (O) of the environment to see how their last action might have changed it (orienting again, deciding again, acting again…and again). There is no presumption of how things will turn out, as there is in strategy. There is, in fact, readiness to take advantage of unpredictable changes; this is called tactical agility.
Ignore that Boyd studied aerial combat for a moment, and we see that this is sense in many other scenarios. It just requires recognizing the radical limits on our ability to control something called “the future.” That future has always and always will remain unpredictable. As it should.
Strategies are undermined by unpredictability. Tactics (bricolage, OODA-loops) can make an ally of unpredictability.
The intrepid street manifestantes of the Occupy movement can benefit from the OODA-Loop. They are in a tactical contest with the authorities to perform their prophetic tasks. For those among the other 99%, what kinds of bricolage can begin to directly and intentionally reduce our degree of dependence on the technocratic grid?
Strategic Without Strategy
Nero – both an emperor and a sadistic misanthrope – is said to have wished humanity had one throat so he could have the pleasure of cutting it. This is the statement of a strategic principle. The centralized structures of one’s enemy are considered strategic targets.
Sherman’s great arson campaign was principally aimed at Atlanta, where both the railroads and telegraphs of the Confederate forces converged. His march to Atlanta prefigured what would later become strategic bombing.
As the United States Armed Forces, to their chagrin, discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan is that when there were no longer centralized political structures to attack in Iraq, there was a complete loss of tactical initiative. The US forces were metaphorically reduced to fighting off a swarm of hornets. Their strategy became incoherent. The problem was further magnified in Afghanistan, because there even the material infrastructure lacked centralization. Rumsfeld’s first complaint about Afghanistan, when the Bush administration was preparing its war, was that Afghanistan presented the US with “no good targets.”
One thing this might be telling us, if we are listening, is that we are safer from the strategies of ill-wishers in decentralized groups. The more the merrier.
In nature, decentralized diversity generates resilience. Centralized monoculture, on the other hand, is vulnerable precisely because it is centralized. One electrical failure can plunge 50 million people into opaque helplessness. One new fungus can wipe out a monocropped food staple.
I bring this up, because I want to suggest a mode of strategic decentralism. Being strategic without developing A Strategy. The 99% of the 99% need to have some answer to the question, “What can we do?” My answer is make new facts on the ground. Start re-designing the built environment, especially in those spaces that are being ignored or abandoned during the process of devolution.
I want to propose a strategic goal without any general staff, without any hierarchy of any kind, part of which almost anyone can accomplish. No requirement for management, and no implied requirement for conflict (some will always find you), and no one-size-fits-all instructions on how to get it done.
I want to propose that we begin a systematic effort to reduce our dependency on the technocratic grid, by a lot of people working at or near their homes. One of the most powerful dependencies we have on the grid is food. The power of the food institutions is already well known and well understood, from Monsanto, to ADM and Cargill, to the Food and Drug Administration. Our very survival has been lashed to this grid by food-production monopolies. The entire world is groaning under the depredations of the food giants.
I have witnessed food riots firsthand. It is an unforgettable experience. Our dependency on food is a terrible weapon in the hands of the one percent.
I want to propose we build a million food gardens. Two million. However many. However many conditions. However many designs. There is the strategic direction: make food, and not just for the same reasons Gandhi made salt. Make food because it puts that much of our lives back into our own hands, and the hands of our communities. Into the hands of our friends, our families, our covenantal relations. We can meet one of our own needs without any bureaucratic apparatus.
Making Food
In the town where I live, with around 20,000 souls, we built a garden this year. A group of people built the first of several food donation gardens on what the city has called “orphaned properties.” The city owns them, but they have no particular use for them during this devolutionary contraction. Next Spring, we want to make two more gardens. A friend from church just offered the use of a portion of her country property for garden cultivation. We have around a million maples worth of leaf mulch and compost, mountains of chipped wood (from ice storm damage last year), and those long Northern summer days of sun. We have barely begun to learn how much food we can grow here… off the commercial food Grid.
I, for one, do not intend this to be some strategy to force new policies into the commercial food grid. Speaking for me, I see this as a way of serving divorce papers on the commercial food grid. And no one has figured out a way to call helmeted, militarized police out to stop anyone working in the gardens. The cops I talked to this year said it was a good idea, the garden.
Multiply this by a million, then instead of a quarter acre of re-designed facts on the ground, you have 250,000 acres of re-designed facts on the ground. These are easier to defend than a policy, and it presents no strategic targets. Certainly there are threats and potential threats, but there is no one neck so Nero can have the pleasure of cutting it. Instead there is an accumulation of intimate victories, accomplished by convenantal communities, communities made that much stronger by the reduction of their dependency on the technocratic grid and the recognition of their very personalized interdependency on each other.
Walking on Two Legs
Demonstrating in the street, this unmasking work that OWS has done so incredibly, inspiringly, lovingly well, is not done yet. I am not by any means arguing that anyone ought to return from the street. Those of us who can’t be there do need you to represent. You are the allies of unpredictability, the agile OODA-artists of the street, the magicians who can abracadabra bits of stunning clarity out of your hats. Your job is exhilarating, exhausting and crazy risky sometimes. If you can do it, that is where you need to be.
There will never be more than a fraction who have the flexibility at a particular time to be manifestantes. We love you, and we want you to go on, and we have been both instructed and entertained by your courage, creativity and endurance.
When you can no longer do it, there is something you can do, and so can the 99% of the 99% who can’t be those shock troop manifestantes, right now.
What can be done, and without any strategies involved, is a straightforward and strenuous effort by 99% of the 99% who are at home to make food. If there are 500,000 OWS protestors, then there need to be 1,000,000 more people who are making food in their yards, their neighborhoods, their churches, temples and synagogues, their workplaces, their schools, their land trust plots, their fallow fields, their empty lots, their apartment decks, their patios and their kitchen windows.
Even when the demonstrations end – and they will end – we are not left with nothing to do to continue dissolving that power. Every square yard of land recovered for food is a material victory in the face of little resistance, and that same square yard is a square yard of independence from the Grid.
Do not pit your weakness against their strength. Exercise your strengths where they are weakest, where you live. The system is falling apart, and nothing will stop that. More and more niches will appear.
Even more important to me personally: gardens are peacemaking. Peacemaking is still the most important form of resistance.
Let a million gardens bloom.
Swadeshi.
Shanti.
Winston Warfield:
The Occupy emcampments, what little I know from my local one which, being a part-timer (part of the 99% of the 99%), I visit fairly regularly and have defended, is a model of this Covenant-based society you describe. The actual working individuals who keep the thing going are well under Dunbar’s number I estimate, and it’s like a big, raucous family. Yet it is amazingly resilient, even with harsh winter winds and the dreaded Nor’easter in the cards. It won’t last forever, as its grip is tenuous and the Policy Bureaucrats are growing impatient, but the bonds and the lessons have already got life and will not be swept away. It doesn’t matter in terms of tactical agility, as the Occupy Movement has already got its collective mind around. The rousting of a camp is angering, but for every one that is torn down, a million spectators are converted. The “agilists” are already figuring out that the neoliberal Masters of the Universe cannot win a “Whack-a-Mole” game, and so this is the next phase, already underway. It’s a brilliant, creative OODA loop going on, a kind of turning the Society of the Spectacle on its head, where the new generation of actors now have everyone’s attention and are conducting the University of Freedom in the streets and in the suites. Meanwhile, my back and front yard gardens are resting, and the compost heaps are bulging with this year’s fallen leaves and kitchen scraps. Thanks for the analysis and perspective in this article; it contributes a lot to the understanding of what’s going on, and that makes everyone stronger and tougher and more confident. We are unstoppable. Another world is possible.
24 November 2011, 12:23 amKeith Shaljian:
Stan this is an excellent post with your characteristically sharp analysis and perspective. To me, it gets to the heart of what several of us in NC have been calling ‘the morning after’ the amazing moment that is Occupy; you hit it on the head with this:
“In Latin, it was once said, perversio optima quae est pessima. The perversion of the best is the worst. Some protesters will come to believe they are representative of those they do not know. Some will try and formalize that representation as power. Many are already spinning out programs (God, save us from parties and programs!) that purport to represent the 99%, though they are mostly utopian projections cobbled together by handfuls of people who still believe something called the “future” can be subordinated to human management schemes. Some will begin to articulate what it means to be an “authentic” representative; and the divisions will begin. Nothing stays the same, and this won’t either. Lord, have mercy.”
I think the two biggest schisms that OWS have unleashed is the slowly simmering frustration that people have with the collapsing system and more importantly breaking down the individualistic based strain of protesting (a trend that has been happening for many years and all over the world before OWS). But people are coming together, despite all of the distractions and real ‘stuff’ (our embodied racism, imperialism, chauvinism) to not do that. You are right, not nearly everyone is there and as many Native Americans are saying, the land has been occupied for half a century. OWS is trying to galvanize against the current of 550 years of the plague of European civilization and the planetary psychic mindfuck that it is.
At BB we’re still stepping but have also realized the immense importance of the cooperative movement’s 6th principle, cooperation among cooperatives. This is creating space for building coalition beyond the mostly white local food movement. Local food is a huge and important breach in social consciousness here supporting all sorts of wonderful things. But like a lot of other movements, it often sees itself on a very essentialized plane. Individually and in isolation, movements are never going take the money or the power, so we need the numbers of people in agreement on how to step democratically across multiple issues and that is going to take a lot of work. OWS is also creating that space in people’s MINDS as power becomes ever more naked and people realize as Kirsten Ross said about the Paris Commune, that “political emancipation might just mean emancipation from politics as a specialized activity”
Like you and Sherry I have been somewhat on the sidelines of the Occupy movement, not for a lack of empathy, but because the terrain of the jugular, New York City are so much different than where we live in Durham. At BB the anticipatory political framework is working 6,7 days a week; to encamp would seriously disrupt the alternative energy we’re co-creating with our community by growing food. You were a great inspiration in helping us see that the niches which are systematically ignored by Empire can be filled with plants begins to allow people to take a measured step away from Empire. We’re also continually learning about the thousands of people outside our everyday space that we want to walk with, and all that it’s going to take to build autonomy within the cascading rubble of civilization: much, much, much more than any one organization.
In September I was lucky enough to go to a CooperationWorks! training in one of the hubs of cooperative activity, Madison, WI. Iwas amazed at the seemingly simple bonds that worker cooperatives have created in that city. Obviously, Madison has a lot of other strongly principled groups creating alternatives in that city and cooperatives are just one hub among many. But along with credit unions and the support of the community because they are the community, these Madison co-ops are amplifying each other and serving their community by working through organizational ego and communicating in a ‘normal’ way that appealed and was part of the mainstream there. On the last day of this training, Madison mayor Paul Finley came in a very normal way and vouched and waxed ecstatic about all that cooperatives do for the city. In these days of pepper spray and Robocop SWAT teams in almost every city in the US, you would not see that from many mayors!
So how to continue to get there from here with full realization that the future is now? Cooperating along tangible economic lines seems to be an easy place to start. Last weekend, a group of 40 people from around the Piedmont involved in cooperatives and community based enterprises met to discuss ways that we can begin to determine our own destiny, and help each other in a more cohesive way. It was a meeting that will hopefully lead to greater coherence, and some decentralized, parallel, mutually supportive grassroots economic activity and solidarity. This meeting was not directly inspired by OWS, but cooperative economics–and its emphasis on ecological regeneration, community service, direct worker control, sovereignty over the practices of everyday life (food, energy, housing, etc), and communities providing directly for their own needs is one of the many directions that this will all go, as you anticipate in the article above.
Your article above just moved in to a tie for 1st place in my reading on the Occupy movement, this is also excellent:
http://www.geo.coop/node/719
24 November 2011, 10:28 amSteve Bean:
Well, that was almost overwhelming, and still you brought it “home” in the end. Bravo.
Re: “without any clarity”
Having searched for clarity for many years, I finally found it through The Work of Byron Katie. I so appreciate your clarity, Stan.
“The premise begins that all the changes that are implied in the demands – such as they are – of the movement are not applicable to all people in all places at all times.”
Might it be worthwhile to consider what is applicable to most people in most places at most times? I’ve been focusing on our use of money in that regard. Are there other concepts or practices that are similarly ubiquitous which might prove worthy of consideration? Perhaps more so than exposing what the 1% are doing, exposing what the 99% also do but could do without (or do and can’t do without, like eating, but could source differently as you suggest) can offer direction.
Re: The Money Grid and “That’s a lot to think about. Think about it.”
Yes it is, and that’s what I’m up to. While we won’t change the nature of money, we might find that we can live without it (perhaps after we’ve sufficiently reduced our dependency on the technocratic grid.)
Re: “institutions – all of them, even your favorites – are inherently and unavoidably corruptible.”
Is that true? Or is it only true within a system of money use? How we answer that might help us determine the new path. In particular I wonder about the role of government. Could we have non-corrupt government if we didn’t use money? Or would we find that we don’t even need that?
Re: “They imply certain non-monetized, highly personal duties and obligations to one another that are accepted out of love. These relations do not require formal rules; and in fact, formal rules would have a deleterious effect on these relations.”
That’s a somewhat contradictory set of statements, Stan. I find the latter to be more true in my experience as well as logically. Do “duties and obligations” exist? What if we realized that they don’t and behaved as though they didn’t? What would be left? Just the love and whatever came of it. (Hat tip to Byron Katie here.)
Might the key to peacefully living with the limitations of Dunbar’s number lie in creative networking? (I’m about a hundred pages into Steven Pinker’s, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and non-violent coexistence is on my mind.) Certainly the groups of 150 people (I won’t say members) overlap to varying extents. Could a non-programmatic, non-institutional practice or custom be developed (designed?) wherein connections between groups are more covenantal? Or can we trust that we will simply work it out (bricolage?) after removing the barriers (money use, lack of clarity, ?)
Re: “This is a delusion of the ideology of progress, this notion that people can render the future predictable and manageable.”
Yes. As Katie notes, the future doesn’t exist. How can it possibly be managed?
Re: “if we are listening”
Ain’t that always the question?
Thanks again.
24 November 2011, 11:18 amThank you:
I will join you as a manifestante.
24 November 2011, 11:41 amDeAnander:
I see this as a way of serving divorce papers on the commercial food grid.
very nicely put! the power of the patriarch en famille is the power of the man who controls the food supply, literally “puts food on the table”. the power of the oligarchs is the power of the food monopoly (and the fuel monopoly, and the water monopolies that they are now building), is the power of the authoritarian husband, the power to with-hold food, shelter, water, protection.
the whole wage-slave thing started with the enclosure of land… the prohibition of subsistence activity. one of the ironies of the last few decades is that the rush to automobile-centred life subdivided the land into tiny individual plots — a kind of land reform really — even while the knowledge of subsistence gardening was systematically devalued and erased, land ownership (or usage) was being fractalised and diversified… sorry, I am tired and distracted and not being as clear as I would like. I’m trying to say that the burbification of the middle class inadvertently handed a kind of subsistence potential back to large numbers of people — if not to a majority, at least to a meaningful percentage. and so did the gutting of US industry and the creation of “waste” lots and acreage within urban boundaries. every suburban back and front yard, every site of a derelict factory or razed dwelling, is a land “parcel” too small to be integrated into a vast monocrop ag plantation. it’s an opportunity for subsistence gardening. the system has, accidentally, sown the seeds for its own replacement… or divorce.
I write this from the awkward position of having just acquired (joint) title to 5 acres (only one arable) — moving in at the worst time of year to start a garden (is it too late for garlic, I wonder? only one way to find out) and in a winter of back2back violent storms (which may well become the new normal). finally confronted with the opportunity and obligation to walk my talk, but so tired from moving and reorganising that I can’t even take pleasure in reading a seed catalogue (and that’s saying something). with stewardship comes responsibility: after years of theory I’m facing an imminent obligation to begin praxis. wish me luck eh.
24 November 2011, 3:26 pmStan:
Luck! And no matter the time of year, there is always time for mulch and compost.
The beds become an in-ground, unsupervised worm bin if you stack two or three feet of mulch on them, then push your daily kitchen scraps under the pile at different places.
Five acres. You have a farm. A food forest. Congratulations.
Peace
25 November 2011, 7:57 amKim Sky:
Speaking of — power to with-hold food, shelter, water, protection.
In Greece, on top of everything, they’ve imposed an “emergency tax”. To enforce payment of this tax they are going to withhold electricity!!
All electric power to the people! Electricity trade union occupies office for disconnection orders in Athens.
http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/2011/11/21/the-trade-union-of-greece%E2%80%99s-public-power-corporation-genop-dei-has-occupied-and-holds-the-building-issuing-electricity-disconnection-orders-%E2%80%93-full-statement/
25 November 2011, 12:47 pmChris Harrison:
Stan,
As usual, you take a lot of seemingly disparate points and bring them together with striking clarity in the end. What seems to start out as a political piece ends up channeling Sharon Astyk in the end.
Perhaps my enthusiasm in support of your viewpoint expressed here is explained by the fact that it very much falls in line with my own personal version of “what is to be done”. While I’m still stuck in the institutional hive-mind for another 3 years or so, leveraging the blood money they give me in exchange for my soul to pay down debt and establish a modest level of savings, at the same time I’m moving toward the exits. The home garden is in and soil is growing. Compost piles are turning food scraps into soil-building black gold. Fruit trees are started. And, if all goes according to plan, I’ll be taking a Permaculture Design Course this coming Jan-May. All of this is aimed at divorcing from the corporate world and using the extra time to become more integrated into my community — something that is difficult when I currently spend 60 hours a week dedicated to my job and have two little ones at home. Anyway, I think that that following quote taken from Geoff Lawton on Paul Wheaton’s Permaculture Podcast sums up where I’m trying to get to better than I can myself:
“I know people who survive on their permaculture systems with 12 hours work a week. Twelve hours. The average industrialized man works, you know, works a 40 to 60 hour week. And what do you have to show for it? Gadgets. You’ve just got gadgets. You haven’t got that clean air, clean water, clean food, sensible housing, warmth, friendship and community. You haven’t got that wealth. You’ve got gadget wealth. And you’re time poor. You’re completely time poor. Your clock, your time density is really, really weak, and your time quality is really low. When you work in these (permaculture) systems — it’s so meaningful — your time density is extreme, it’s an extreme time density. And your time quality is very high. And if you only have to work 10 hours a week, look at all that extra time you’ve got for family, for community, you know, for helping other people, for returning your surplus to your local community. That’s wealth. That’s real wealth. And that’s what we have to explain to the children.”
26 November 2011, 10:50 pmRobin Datta:
The puissance of the state is at its kernel the threat of tho initiation of force against peaceful non-compliers. Wthiout this option there can be no “enforecment” and consequently no state power and no state.
The condition can pensist as long as a venerr of moral rectitude is appliec throuhg specious justifctations to the retention of that option. The situation can only be rectified when the rank and file of society withdraws their sanction frem the state’s claim to such moral rettitude. This would result in the The Sunset of the State
27 November 2011, 3:04 amvera:
It seems to me also that the changes begin with size. I remember reading about those small New England towns that used the town meeting to govern themselves.
Then, the community grew, and it just became too unwieldy. People stopped coming. And a mayor and later town manager replaced the people’s self-organization. They could have split up into two neighborhoods instead. The tribes divide when the size becomes unwieldy. I am not sure why this solution was not used instead in the colonial days.
“We are not going to force policy-makers to remake the world. We have to do it ourselves. We have to take our entire built environment, one piece at a time, and re-design it. This will take everyone, because where you live is different than where I live; and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. To hell with policies. They are people-eating idols.”
Yes! Except I am not sure about the design part. It presumes we can design the future. We cannot. This mischief maker meme is part of the problem, along with the planning meme…
Excellent essay, thank you.
27 November 2011, 12:04 pmShaun Chamberlin:
Brilliant piece. Have you heard of Pierre Rabhi? Campaigning without candidates through ecological agriculture:
27 November 2011, 2:36 pmhttp://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2011/11/i_am_compost_1.php
Jon:
It has been several years since I Googled your name Stan to find what you have been writing, but something rattled my brain to do so tonight. I was curious to find what you had to say about Occupations, and was right on time with your post of 4 days ago). Like you I am thrilled with this innovative, timely, and appropriate response to the Empire’s obsessive control. I met you a few years back with you gave some talks here in Maine via Veterans for Peace.
27 November 2011, 10:57 pmI have taken some food to Occupations in Portland and Augusta, both of which are are under deadlines suddenly imposed (the rumor is via Homeland Security, not the local police or political figures) and have given moral support and dialogue with those stalwart souls. I too live in a rural area so my role is more that of enthusiastic cheerleader than participant, and I do a modest amount of organic gardening as you have proposed. I concur fully with your point about the value of decentralization and have proposed that maybe it is time to advance to some “guerrilla occupations” at relevant sites, with the aim of mere hour long or so “occupations” and then leaving to avoid busts and their encumbrances.
With End The Empire as the guiding theme, again fully in accord with your point about avoiding the paucity of value of mere “programs and policies” it will do us well to recall and to study the abrupt end of the Soviet Empire in our lifetimes (most of us who would be reading these words and yours. The issue is not “and then what happened” but rather , how this abrupt end occurred.)
Many are thinking hard about “Another World is Possible” and we need to be open to many possibilities, including the fragmenting of this empire into component parts, likely by bio-regions. I would commend to this audience Ellen LaConte’s recent book: LIFE RULES, with Rules being BOTH a noun and a verb. (In the latter, it signifies that it is not we humans who rule, much less the empire, but Life itself.) She consults the history of life on Earth and then asks the question: “What do we need to learn here about survival?” It is a masterful work, well researched and presented. Jon in Maine
Rhisiart Gwilym:
Hi Stan! Just reposted this piece at Medialens Message Board:
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1322464909.html
Best regards, RhG
28 November 2011, 2:23 amRhisiart Gwilym:
De! Never too late for garlic. Just putting another batch of mine in this morning. Mind you, this is mild Britain, and at the moment the ‘late Autumn/early Winter’ (alleged) weather is like Spring here. (But of course, there’s no such thing as global warming, as we know) Your weather may be more threatening. But garlic can stand it!
28 November 2011, 2:54 amStan:
@ Vera, and thanks. Design is not the attempt to design the future (which might be a metaphor), but discrete problem solving. A single rain garden. Redirecting the downspouts into a swale full of leaf mulch. Heating a shower with compost. Exchanging a lawn for vegetables. Sharing a large kitchen to can once a week. A hugelkultur berm. Practical design to address practical problems.
28 November 2011, 7:57 amStan:
Here it comes. A program.
http://michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/where-does-occupy-wall-street-go-here
28 November 2011, 8:32 amMichael Anderson:
I think he’s (MM) been owned for a while. Very restricted parameters, lively debate within. Pointless…
28 November 2011, 9:33 amStan:
We are on Club Orlov. Thanks Dmitri!
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2011/11/million-gardens.html
28 November 2011, 11:07 amStephen Bach:
I basically agree with Stan.
I do think that in terms of food production, people who don’t know what they’re doing can waste time, energy, and “resources” starting out to grow their own food. (Even after 35 years of organic gardening I’m still learning.)
Therefore those of us who have been doing it for a while must mentor those who are starting out,so that newcomers do not have to re-invent the wheel.
In so many places topsoil is minimal, or gone completely. In many sufficient water is a challenge.
People who are starting out would do well to investigate permaculture. It has lots to offer beyond ‘simply’ organic gardening.
28 November 2011, 12:56 pmStan:
I’m a big fan of Ruth Stout’s methods for starting out. Broadfork it. Mulch the dickens out of it. Throw rotting stuff into the mulch. Do this year round. Plant in Spring. If you get weeds, you need more mulch.
28 November 2011, 2:06 pmEllen LaConte:
My son just sent me this because he thought it synched so well with my new book and thought process and teaching. He’s right. Beautifully written and spot on. The book (self-published for speed and control) is now under consideration by New Society Publishers. You could check it out in a matter of moments at my website. If you’re at all interested, I’ll send you the pdf.
28 November 2011, 4:46 pmColin Donoghue:
Yes more gardens are the answer, but how do you expect these gardens to be made? On what land? Shall we beg our city councils to build a couple more community gardens? You actually think that will be enough? The root problem is being denied our birthright to our fair share of the Earth’s resources to live naturally on, to grow gardens on, without being forced into monetary dependency through taxation and land cost. I explain this more in depth on the top two posts here:
28 November 2011, 4:56 pmhttp://colindonoghue.wordpress.com/
Please read and share the FULL solution, rather than just an idea (grow millions of gardens) with no way to make it a reality.
Peace
lenya:
Nice essay.
28 November 2011, 7:07 pmDespite myself, I started out being very critical of the Occupy movement–they have no politics! Where’s their list of demands?–before I realized, slowly, that what I thought was weakness is their great strength, and by extension ours is also ours, which is genuinely hopeful.
The other hopeful thing is that, quixotically, as part of the 99%, long before anyone identified me as such, I purchased as day-old bits of fluff what are now gargantuan turkeys. They are really overwhelming, but being reminded that they are not just Christmas dinner but a small band of 40-pound revolutionaries has restored my ability to find joy in their presence, at least until I take them to the slaughterhouse next week. I really love them, they are gregarious and curious, but they shit like cows and have brought the Occupy movement to my back deck. We have been exploring the outer limits of suburban backyard farming.
I intend to share them with the neighborhood and with the local community kitchen. So thank you. I had seriously forgotten where the real politics are.
Stan:
Thanks for all the notes.
There is land. Starting with millions of suburban yards. This is one where you don’t have to envision the big picture, or do something horrible to yourself bay taking responsibility for the big picture. This is the little picture. Where is there one place where I can make a garden, the another? Where is there a place where you can make a garden, just one, then another?
28 November 2011, 8:36 pmMichael Anderson:
Just watched the Ruth Stout movie….great! I’m open to anything that honestly saves unnecessary work—-the plague of our so-called “modern” existence. But, on a practical level, it’s so simple….and you have time to think. God forbid, we should think….(smile)
28 November 2011, 11:09 pmRaging Ranter:
Any reasonable method by which one can uplug oneself from the grid is worthy of pursuit. Growing your own food is a great way to start. And I hope that it is indeed only a start. The whole idea of living “off the grid” or “unplugging” is a new concept for me. Had I heard of it even 2 years ago, I’d have sneared at it and dismissed it as nothing more than sour grapes uttered uttered by some hippy malcontents. Not anymore.
I’ve only very recently come to the realization of just how corrupted we’ve all become by consumerist society, and the merchants of debt misery who can only prosper if they keep us enslaved and indentured for life. Thus, they push the bigger house, the new car, the bigger TV, the new credit card. Whatever it takes to get us to A) borrow, and B) spend. They start pushing this mindless consumption agenda on us as infants, and the marketing onslaught just never stops. It can’t stop, because governments and businesses alike all depend on the system for their very survival.
So we are kept distracted by the mindless 24 hour news cycle, and equally mindless “entertainment”, where various celebretards put their own dysfunctional lives on display because for some reason we are supposed to find them interesting. And millions of us do. So instead of meaningful relationships (‘covental’ to use the author’s term) we focus on total strangers who won’t ever know us or care about us. I’m reminded of the ancient Romans attending the gladiator matches in massive amphetheaters, oblivious to the signs that their empire was crumbling all around them.
Worst of all, neither the right nor the left has any clue what the problem even is. Both ends of the political spectrum focus on “institutional” fixes. Progressives want more big government. Right wingers want more big business. Centrists believe some balance can be achieved between both. I’m quite convinced the answer does not lie on the standard political spectrum at all. To think in terms of the standard right-left model is to accept the system as legitimate. It is not legitimate. It is becoming utterly devoid of humanity. This system cannot be fixed. It is far too massive to kill. It must be starved of its power, a little at a time. We, each one of us, can do our part. Unplug.
29 November 2011, 2:42 pmStan:
Radical Homemakers
29 November 2011, 5:22 pmvera:
I see, Stan. It’s the doing part. Yup. Let’s live it already.
I am with the Ranter: UNPLUG!
29 November 2011, 5:34 pmBruce F:
This is a terrific piece Stan. Thanks!
My friend Nance Klehm, who is profiled in the Radical Homemakers book Stan linked to above, has an interesting website, Spontaneous Vegetation.
Take a look at some of her projects if you’re looking for more ideas on how to get to a million gardens.
29 November 2011, 6:55 pmRaging Ranter:
I can’t really see the “wasted energy” that would result from attempting gardening. Put some seeds in the ground. If something comes up, eat it. If not, you learned what not to do next time. No harm done. Nothing wrong with a little failure.
With the Internet, you can quickly become an expert in almost anything you want. That would include gardening, small-scale animal husbandry, whatever. Those skills of self-sufficiency which our grandparents and great grandparents had, were nearly lost. Can you imagine if we had another full-scale depression today? Would people in 2011 be able to muddle through the way most people did in the 1930s? I suspect society would very quickly descend into rioting, looting, and chaos. People in wealthy countries today have no clue what real survival is, because they’ve never had to do it. Food comes from the store. Heat from the utility company. Gas from the gas station. In a severe depression, I don’t think we could take any of those things for granted anymore. Being “unplugged” might be the only way to survive.
We’re lucky the Internet came along when it did. Ironically, the whole concept of unplugging could not have really taken root without the Internet. We’re all plugged in enough now that we can help each other unplug. Perhaps this movement – if it can be called that just yet – simply could not have happened before now. Maybe its time has come.
Funny, I grew up on a small farm where we grew what we ate. Milked a cow. Raised chickens for eggs and meat. Huge garden. I hated every minute of that “antiquated” existence. I couldn’t wait to move to the city. Now, in my early 40s, I’ve spent half my life in cities. I live in the burbs and bus downtown five days a week. Can’t complain. Good job. Renting a nice home in a nice suburb of Ottawa, Ontario, where there’s lots of green space and nature is never very far away. But I find myself resenting the traffic and emptiness of city life more and more. I wish I had my own little patch of land and my own little farm again. Someday I will.
29 November 2011, 8:53 pmRaging Ranter:
My apologies for the long winded posts. I’ve never really had conversations about this stuff with anyone before, so there’s a lot to get off my chest.
You know how vacuous most suburbanites are. Their eyes glaze over as soon as you try to discuss something more in-depth than their Mexican resort vacation or what they watched on TV last night.
29 November 2011, 8:57 pmJake:
Sir,
As a Republican and an engineer – we invented power generation and transmission. I have a Garden that spans Avocados, Apricots to Verbena. My democrat friends with larger yards like to come help themselves to my fruit, and I offer it to them if I have more than I need.
We make more than most people – so engineers supplied these very goods/resources that you say are monetized.
What you may mean by your article is that we should make more than we consume…. And the US has been consuming alot and making less every year especially since NAFTA.
30 November 2011, 2:14 amMichael Anderson:
@ Ranter:
Wasted energy is unnecessary work to do a specific task, or tasks. Most modern methods and products that are “convenient” waste more time than they save (I’ll specifically say post-WW2), along with natural resources and making a bigger mess in the process. Many times here it’s been remarked that a subsistence style of living takes up LESS time in your day than pushing paper across a desk. Ruth Stout demonstrated this. Scott & Helen Nearing (authors of “The Good Life”) demonstrated this.
What robs time is money.
30 November 2011, 10:17 ammichele:
@Colin Donoghue In lieu of personal space; usufruct is worth exploring. Sounds like Stan’s town has taken that idea to heart. There are lots of public spaces. i suggested to my daughter a few years back to get with a friend who had a front and back yard and create a shared garden. He addressed this up in the post too. Water always finds a way through..we must be like water:)
30 November 2011, 11:53 amCharles:
The Occupation demonstrates a favorite idea of this blog: self-organization. The response to Occupy Wall Street in hundreds of other locations nationally and around the world was spontaneous,not planned by the originators on Wall Street. OWS has spontaneously rediscovered class struggle in its 99% vs 1%. Its profound innovation in protest is to demonstrate at a private, not government institution , Wall Street. The private sector is the location of the real ruling class in capitalism. This is why I have been calling for a March on Wall Street for about eight years. OWS is my dream come true ( smiles). A new working class/99% party has been founded ( sorry Stan). The struggle continues; victory is certain, as we said in the Anti-Apartheid movement.
30 November 2011, 5:15 pmCharles:
The greatest value of this movement is not in its ability to expose certain sufferings and change certain policies, but in its ability to expose – with no unified intention to do so – all the reasons we need to abandon the entire system of which “policy” is only one essential working component. ///// I am one of the 1% of the 99% who has been at the Occupy Wall Street in Detroit regularly. It is clear that the core group of organizers and Occupiers have a definite anti-capitalist, i.e. anti-system consciousness. They are deeper than “policy” changers. Now their idea of the system is not the same as yours. But it is not certain that their theory of the system is less accurate than yours.
1 December 2011, 10:05 amCharles:
The Money Grid //// One thing we can be sure the OWS is fully aware of is “The Money Grid”, because of their focus on Wall Street, the Center of the Money Grid, and the fact that the 1% have a disproportionate share of the total money in existence. The common name of the Money Grid is Capitalism. Money did not play the same role in systems prior to capitalism. OWS by my observation has an amazingly high level of anti-capitalist consciousness. The great thing about OWS is that it demonstrates that a lot more American one would have thought GET IT: that the system of capitalism is the problem.
1 December 2011, 12:52 pmCharles:
The movement will come to depend on money. //// The idea that OWS is not now still on the Money grid is to romanticize it.
1 December 2011, 12:57 pmStan:
No one said that the individuals aren’t entrapped by money. The grid is pervasive and all-encompassing; it reflects the successful war on subsistence of modernity. The danger of that is apparent now, moreso as the more-universal euro threatens to pull down the whole eurozone.
But becoming more organized, ie, more managed, privileges “fundraising,” and therein is the slipperiest slope. The quest for funds opens the door to gradual co-optation. When policy battles become battles of money, money becomes the prime directive.
The problem is not simply maldistribution of money. General purpose money makes that gross wealth-gradient both possible, and inevitable. As a student of Marx, you know that capital is a social relation for which money is the essential facilitator.
But money did play many of the same roles prior to capitalism. Biblical writers decried the way money lent at interest created the debt that led to the appropriation of smallholders’ land. That’s why early Hebrew law called for Jubilee. The system you name as capitalism now is hardly recognizable as the one Marx wrote about. No one ever anticipated that the world’s most powerful nation would wield that power by virtue of its status as a debtor. Moreover, money has an ecological dimension that ultimately undermines the material basis of whatever system it is embedded within.
“Without general purpose money, people could not trade tracts of rain forest for Coca-Cola.”
1 December 2011, 1:32 pmAnonyomous:
I was going to comment, but then I heard what I needed to hear….http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/f-word/2011/11/feminism-and-occupy-wall-street
7:35 minutes…”…there has been reports of sexual assaults at some of the occupies unfortunately…there was a rape at occupy Cleveland so it makes me sick to think that these men who clearly feel they are progressive continue to believe women are there for sex…”
I can’t fucking tell you how offended I was by that comment. I am a men, and I am progressive and…….forget it. Sorry I wasted my time.
1 December 2011, 11:32 pmStan:
Money, debt,pre-capitalist economies:
FULL
2 December 2011, 3:41 pmCharles:
Capitalism changes the role of money qualitatively from its role in previous exploitative systems. In all previous exploitative modes of production, most of the “economy” was not commodity production and exchange and labor power was not a commodity. Commodity exchange , the only location of money, was on the periphery of societies and between them. Ancient merchants and traders were not the main economic activity in slavery and feudalism. The mass of workers, slaves and serfs, were not paid with money. There was no mass supply of money in paper or cheap coin form. There was not _wage_-labor. Wages are of course paid in money. Secondly, the M(oney)-C(commodity)-M(1) accumulation of capital gives money another qualitatively different role from previous modes. There is also M-M(1) in the finance capital sector. These are the essentials of the “money-grid” in capitalism. All of this agrees with the point of the centrality of money in capitalism , and even says it is more important today in capitalism than it has ever been.
2 December 2011, 5:15 pmCharles:
Notice in the quote above money dealings are among the upper classes. The masses of the people didn’t do their economic living based on using money to buy commodities. The bulk of the economy in Aristotle’s time was slaves. The market is a small aspect of the economy. Same with the other periods referred to In capitalism , the whole of society is on a money grid. This is the qualitative difference today.
2 December 2011, 5:21 pmCharles:
Jesus throws money-changers out of the Temple. So, there is money around the year zero. However, the bulk of the population under Roman rule and even the Jewish king are slaves. Christianity starts out as the organization of a slave revolutionary movement. This is why Jesus was literally a revolutionary, no quotes. The slaves themselves are bought and sold for money,yes. So, masters have money. Roman soldiers were paid with money. ( They were also vegetarians; I learned that in my Roman history class in 1970 ;giggles)
2 December 2011, 5:25 pmCharles:
here has been reports of sexual assaults at some of the occupies unfortunately…there was a rape at occupy Cleveland so it makes me sick to think that these men who clearly feel they are progressive continue to believe women are there for sex…”
^^^^
2 December 2011, 5:28 pmThere were lots of “street” people around the Occupations. Lots of “homeless’ in and around Occupy Detroit, and a small percentage were not there to demonstrate but to live off the Occupiers , including stealing from them. I wonder if this rape was done by a lumpenproletarian, not an actual political activist.
Charles:
The problem is not simply maldistribution of money. General purpose money makes that gross wealth-gradient both possible, and inevitable. As a student of Marx, you know that capital is a social relation for which money is the essential facilitator.
^^^
I’d say the existence of private property -slave, feudal, capitalist forms – make the gross wealth-gradient both possible and inevitable. There were rich and poor in slavery and feudalism , too. There were not rich and poor in the societies before slavery, which had existed for at least 200,000 years. Private property arises about 8,000 years ago. So, most of human existence there have not been rich and poor. Human nature is communistic.
Money is more important in the capitalist system than any other.
2 December 2011, 5:34 pmCharles:
The system you name as capitalism now is hardly recognizable as the one Marx wrote about.
^^^^
2 December 2011, 5:37 pmI respectfully disagree. I’m posting Marx quotes straight on to Occupy Wall Street because they are so pertinent to today. Lenin , too. _Capital_ is fresh as a daisy, especially updated by _imperialism_ and thinking using basic Marxist concepts to develop the history since 1918 and the facts of today. Even bourgois commentators keep saying “wow so much of what Marx said jumps right out at u as whats going todya…EXCEPT OF COURSE MARX WAS WRONG THAT THERE WOULD BE A WORKERS REVOLT” Oh he was ? ha ha ha. What was the Russian revolution ? What is the 99% vs the 1% ?
Charles:
even the Jewish king are slaves. ///not the Jewish king was a slave but slaves were under him.
2 December 2011, 5:45 pmCharles:
WE ARE THE 99!
2 December 2011, 5:48 pmvera:
“EXCEPT OF COURSE MARX WAS WRONG THAT THERE WOULD BE A WORKERS REVOLT” Oh he was? ha ha ha. What was the Russian revolution? What is the 99% vs the 1%?”
I would disagree. The 99% in Russia at that time were the muzhiks, peasants. And they did not revolt. I would guess that Lenin was very much part of the elite; if not 1% then close. Given his horror of actually being out there working (which would qualify him as a “worker”, no?), he can hardly be counted. Lenin mooched off relatives. Marx mooched off Engels.
Looks like Marx was right about the inner contradictions of capitalism ripping it apart, though.
Look into it. These “revolutionary vanguard” struggled with the fact that Marx was wrong, and the revolution happened despite there being only a tiny urban working class.
2 December 2011, 7:35 pmStan:
Charles, respectfully, let’s not do the carpet-bombing commentary. Please consolidate your replies. We try not to let one person hijack threads. This thread is not about Marxism, and I don’t intend to let it go very far afield in that direction. People might want to exchange information and ideas on gardening.
Marx explicitly predicted that the industrial working class would be the vehicle for revolution. Your own party used to have a policy of industrial concentration (that progressively marginalized it) based on this idea.
On 1st Century Palestine, you have no idea what you are talking about. The Romans were military and merchants; the whole region bustled with international trade; the Hebrews were not primarily slaves, but overwhelmingly a peasantry. Debt enclosure was a common practice to take land from peasants, who were then forced into wage labor in the cities. Jesus was very likely a construction worker in Sepphoris, where Herod had a huge urbanizing project, financed by tax monies. The large landholders were very like a comprador bourgeoisie, and their large-holdings produced food not for subsistence, but as a commodity. The New Testament is full of references to money, not of them very salutatory. The money changers exchanged Roman money for Jewish money (because Roman money had graven images) so people could buy sacrificial animals, and they charged a fee (rent). Romans had slaves as personal servants, but they were not big economic drivers. Palestine was a colony in an empire, with a core and periphery, that exacted tribute from margins to center. The status of “slave” among Hebrews was one that people fell into when they faced starvation, often because they had lost their land through debt foreclosure; and slaves (people who worked for room and board without wages) worked alongside wage laborers in many cases. Marx’s slave-feudal-capitalist schema has always been a gross oversimplification; and a highly teleological one. Quite a few people have studied history since Marx, and undermined this schema with a lot of inconvenient facts.
Your mini-lecture on MCM+ has nothing to do with what I or Hudson said. Both of us are aware of commodification as the predominant process in early capitalism (the predominant process is now rent-seeking). He (and I) are referring to how money makes debt possible, and how debt has been consistently wielded as a weapon for thousands of years to take property from small-holders to aggrandize large-holders. Hudson said that debt-leverage was “turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, also communal infrastructure and extract tribute.”
This is demonstrable.
The thesis here is that a universalized dependency on money has trapped people within a system that deskills them and cuts them off from the option of subsistence. Lenin embraced Taylorism, which leads precisely to deskilling.
A related thesis, one which I believe you find most problematic, is that centralization caries an inherent tendency to domination and corruption. I find it irresistible to point out that while I was a member of your party, I saw this autocratic tendency in action at every turn… with incessant monitoring of everyone’s speech and a series of ossified gerontocracies that were propped up by a fawning, hand-picked staff. Democratic centralism is an oxymoron. Will the last Marxist-Leninist please turn out the lights.
Sorry Comrade Lenin.
The CPUSA believes that electoral politics is the vehicle for this change, and that support for Democrats is the key… a longstanding notion that has discredited them even among the “democratic centralized” left.
I’m recommending locally autonomous initiatives that don’t bend the knee to some centralized management outfit.
The suggestion at the heart of the article is for people to grow gardens. There is a “food sovereignty” issue here; but it doesn’t require ideological conformity or administration. It is local, and the emphasis is on friendship and practical ingenuity, not management.
3 December 2011, 9:09 amStan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmJFMbyP84E Urban permaculture
3 December 2011, 12:03 pmaskod:
And here I thought that the Marxist interpretation of Stans post is so clear that it hardly needs to be spelled out: OWS fights to change the superstructure, Stan proposes that in addition the base should be changed. Since base and superstructure affects each other, these two approaches are not oppositions, but complimentary.
Or at least that is how I understand Marx model of society.
4 December 2011, 2:44 pmShaukat:
Stan, with due respect, I think your history of the Roman period, 1st century Palestine, and the social relations and dynamic driving the economy during this period is misinformed. I realize you may not want to stray too far off the subject of gardening, but I would be interested to know what your sources on this topic happen to be.
The studies I have read on this subject, such as Perry Anderson’s “From Antiquity to Feudalism” and “Lineages of the Absolutist State,” which are among the best in this area, make it very clear that the main driver of the economy within the Roman Empire and during the entire period was slavery, and predominantly slavery in the countryside. The towns and urban centres were fragile and extremely precarious, completely dependent on the surplus pumped out from the slaves in the rural areas and mines by the landed oligarchs. In fact, the towns and urban centres that developed under feudalism, which was a mode of production that emerged through the synthesis of Roman slavery in the countryside and the settlement patterns of the Germanic tribes that invaded (again, see Anderson), were far more advanced and independent than the cities under antiquity, which completely lacked an independent economic base.
It is certainly true that food and other products produced in the countryside, during the Roman period and feudalism, were treated as commodities and sold on the world market, but this does not bring a society close to capitalism, since Merchant and Finance capital (the latter defined in this instance as usury) existed independently well before the advent of industrial capital. You are also certainly correct in stating that the Romans were Merchant and Military, but again mercantalism in this context depended on an unproductive circuit based solely on absolute surplus value secured in the countryside through slavery (and on the rare occasion through craft production in the towns).
Other studies that deal with this topic are Ellen Wood, “The Origins of Capitalism,” Maurice Dobb, “Studies in Capitalism,” and the numerous articles that emerged from the debate on the transition from feudaism to capitalism between Paul Sweezy and Dobb, as well as the rich literature emerging from the “Brenner Debate.” As far as I know, none of these works make the claim that wage labour was well developed or widespread during antiquity and the Roman period.
On the other topic, I am in complete agreement with Hudson’s thesis on the use of finance capital as a tool of political statecraft.
4 December 2011, 8:05 pmStan:
The book n front of me right now is Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations, by Martin Goodman. Other books I have read on the subject include Binding the Strong Man, by Ched Myers and everything by John Dominic Crossan. Among them, there are very numerous citations.
In Philip Harland’s “Economy of First Century Palestine – The State of the Scholarly Discussion,” he quite plainly notes “First, the ancient economy of Palestine was an under-developed, agrarian economy based primarily on the production of food through subsistence-level farming by the peasantry. The peasantry, through taxation and rents, supported the continuance of a social-economic structure characterized by asymmetrical distribution of wealth in favor of the elite, a small fraction of the population. Peasants made up the vast majority of the population in the social-structure of Palestine (over 90%; see Kreissig 1970:17-87; Fiensy 1990:155-76). The peasantry included small landowners who worked their own land for the subsistence of their families; tenants who worked the land of wealthy landowners and paid rent; and a variety of landless peasants who either worked as wage laborers on large or medium-sized estates or resorted to other activities such as banditry. The elites, consisting of the royal family, aristocrats, religious leaders and some priests, drew their primary source of income from medium-sized and large estates. Absentee landlords, living in the cities and benefiting from production in the countryside, were common in this social-economic structure.
“Production in Palestine centered on the labor of the peasant household to produce essential foods. The principal products included grain (wheat, barley, millet and rice), vegetables (onions, garlic, leeks, squashes, cabbages, radishes and beets), fruits (olives, grapes, figs and dates), legumes (lentils and beans), spices (salt, pepper and ginger), and meat (fish, cows, oxen, lambs, goats; cf. Klausner 1975 [1930]:180-86; Hamel 1990 [1983]:8-56). The peasant’s diet consisted mainly of bread and salt, along with olives, oil, onions and perhaps some grapes (Hamel 1990 [1983]: 34-35). Distribution of produce and wealth was unequal. And, as emphasized by Oakman (1986) and Halvor Moxnes (1988), the type of exchange or distribution within the economy of Palestine seems best characterized in terms of Polanyi’s model of redistribution through a central institution. That is, wealth in the form of rents, taxes, and tithes flowed toward urban centres, especially Jerusalem (and the Temple) and was redistributed for ends other than meeting the needs of the peasantry, the main producers. The city’s relation to the countryside in such an economy, then, would be parasitic, according to this view.
“This overall agrarian quality of the Palestinian economy coincides with the general character of economies in other parts of the Roman Empire as portrayed by ancient historians. According to Rostovtzeff (1957 [1926]: 343) one of the most striking features of the economic and social life of the Empire…”
FULL
While Jerusalem was the center of most comparatively local trade, the coast — especially Caesaria Maritima — was the site of international trade, as well as a port to repatriate goods back to the Roman core. Peasantry, not slavery, was the principle means of production, with tenancy replacing smallholding where land had been enclosed by debt. Jews were not Roman slaves. Palestine was a Roman colony.
Marx’s schema of the historical ‘progress’ has always been oversimplified, and often just plain wrong. In particular, Marx did not identify or explicate the core-periphery dynamic (present in Egypt, Babylon, et al, far before the advent of capitalism). Rome was not capitalist; but it was imperialist. Imperialism here defined not (a la Lenin) as a late stage of capitalism, but as extraction from expanding peripheries to support an increasingly parasitic core.
Also recommended is Clive Ponting’s Green History of the World, where he describes the ecological dimension of the fall of the Roman Empire, wherein this extractive model developed into destructive monocultures (for export) that wrecked land and watersheds, forcing the empire further and further afield to secure more arable land to feed the urban political base in Rome.
What capitalism introduced that was unique, imo, is what Polanyi identifies in The Great Transformation as progressive disembeddedness resulting from the co-emergence of modern state-modern market-modernist philosophy (facilitated in large part by money that became more and more universal, and thereby a solvent that dissolved the bonds of embeddedness).
5 December 2011, 8:41 amRichard:
As I mentioned in another thread, I’ve been reading Immanuel Wallerstein’s multi-volume work, The Modern World-System. I’m finding it very useful, as it helps explain for me why and how capitalism emerged (which I find useful for thinking about how we move on from it). Anyway, he explains the differences between world-empires (like Rome, Egypt, China) and a world-economy (which is what capitalism is). It’s no use thinking of capitalism in one country, which is what it seems to me Marxists too often seem to do.
I try to combine Marx himself with feminist criticisms (e.g., Mies, Federici, other wages for housework writers), with world-systems analysis (Wallerstein, Arrighi), with anthropology (James C. Scott, Polanyi), with updates to Marx from the likes of Harvey (cf. his “accumulation by dispossession”), and others, to get a holistic view of the problem. I have come to the conclusion that modernity itself is (overall) a disaster, but a seemingly inevitable one, given all the factors involved.
I should say, Stan, I loved this post. Thank you.
5 December 2011, 11:03 amStan:
CALL FOR CITATIONS: Having read in several places that both factories and public schools were organized on military models, and having just noted that the word “strategy” comes from the Periclean title of stratego, or general, I wonder what other folks may have read on how many ways military models have infiltrated other practices and institutions. Links if you gotem. Thanks in advance.
5 December 2011, 2:52 pmShaukat:
Thanks for the sources. I should point out that I certainly did not mean to imply that slavery, as a mode of labor control, enveloped the entire jurisdiction of the Roman Empire. In fact, the Romans were unique among the empires that prevailed during antiquity in that they allowed the prevailing social conditions in the areas they acquired to remain intact while siphoning off the surplus from the direct producers through a centralized state-office-tax apparatus, which distinguished it from the hyper militarized slave society of Sparta, and even from Ancient Athens (Wood’s “Empire of Capital” provides a good elaboration on this point).However, it is also the case that what seperated the Romans from previous empires was their reorganization of slavery on large estates with slave overseers which increased productivity in the countryside (slavery was expecially important and dominant in the mines). This complemented the peasant based economies that prevailed in the colonies they appropriated, and I don’t believe the Empire would have been possible without slavery. For example, Anderson (1974) writes: “From 200 to 167 B.C., 10 percent or more of all free Roman adult males were permanently conscripted: this gigantic military effort was only possible because the civilian economy behind it could be manned to such an extent by slave-labour…Victorious wars in their turn provided more slave-captives to pump back into the towns and estates of Italy. The final outcome was the emergence of slave-worked agrarian properties of a hitherto unknown immensity. Prominent nobles like Lucius Ahenobarbus could own over 200,000 acres in the 1st century B.C. These latifundia represented a new social phenomenon, which transformed the Italian countryside” (61). Elsewhere he writes, “It was the Roman Republic which first united large agrarian property with gang slavery in the countryside on a massive scale,” and that “external and internal wars accentuated the decline of the Roman peasantry, which had once formed the robust small holder base of the city’s social pyramid” (63). In fact, the emergence of feudalism, with its fragmented land owning patterns and parcellized sovereignty arose partially as a result of the modification of the slave social relation by the Roman oligarchs in the face of growing rebellions (see Federichi on this), and partially from the synthesis between the mode of production prevailing among the Germanic tribes and Roman slavery. My main contention with your points was based on my argument that:
1) Wage labor during this period in the cities was at best sporadic, and not supported by any independent economic base;
2) The cities were not the main hubs of economic activity during this period, even though trade was wide spread
3) The dominant social relation during this period was the slave relation
Based on the clarification of your response, and your citations regarding the parasitic core-periphery relation, I don’t think we are in disagreement on points 1 and 2. I would also like to add that I certainly don’t agree with the mechanical Marxian argument that historical “progress” unfolds as a result of iron clad laws that automatically lead to the demise of one historical epoch and its replacement by another more advanced one. The determining factors behind transitions in my opinion are political struggles and class relations. I think this was Marx’s main emphasis as well, although he did subscribe to a type of technological determinism in the preface to the Critique of Political Economy. Marx’s main focus on dominant social relations is what likely led him to neglect the core-peripher dynamic that you draw attention to.
However, I should also add that the core-periphery relation makes sense in certain constexts but not in others. It was a central feature of large agararian bureaucratic states such existed during periods of antiquity, and in pre-revolutionary France, as well as in China and Mogul India. The dynamic does not play itself out under feudal social relations, since feudalism was not a world empire and did not include a centralized bureaucratic state as its main social component. Nor does it explain how certain states end up in the core and others in the periphery, or why once there they are likely to stay in such positions, as other dependency scholars such as Cardoso and Peter Evans point out. I would also tend to disagree with your assertion that money served as a solvent that dissolved the bonds of embededness or feudalism. This was a main point of disagreement between certain Marxists during the debate on the transition to capitalism. Maurice Dobb, and later Brenner rightly pointed out that the transformation of rent in kind to rent through payment represented a change only in the form of payment, and not in the substance of lord-peasant relations, or in peasant-peasant relations, since such a transformation would require a qualitative change in the method of surplus extraction, from absolute to relative surplus extraction. Polanyi himself tends to ascribe a type of technological determinism to the transformation to capitalism, though his work is extremely useful in every other respect.
@Richard, I agree that Wallerstein’s work is helpful in conceptualizing the dynamic of the world economy as a whole, though I disagree that he provides a useful explanation of the emergence of capitalism, if we understand the latter as a social relation as opposed to mere participation in the world economy. I think the below quote from Brenner’s article on the “Origins of Capitalism” best explains this point:
“Those Marxists who, like Wallerstein, stress the significance of an original amassing of wealth in either money or natural forms often tend to beg the fundamental questions. In the first place, they do not say why such a build-up of wealth ‘from the outside’—from the periphery to the core—was necessary for further economic advance at the time of the origins of capitalism. Were there, for example, some sort of technological blocks requiring an immense concentration of capital to overcome: blockages which demanded even more resources than could be brought together from within the core? [56] Even more importantly, what allowed for, and ensured, that wealth brought into the core from the periphery would be used for productive rather than non-productive purposes? In particular, what determined that this would be used for the development of the productive forces, so as to increase the productivity of labour? And how was it connected with a continuing process of accumulation via innovation? Historically, the build-up of wealth, and its concentration in the hands of specific potential ‘investors’, has occurred time and again without discernable effect. It is only a system which is organized so that the accumulation of capital via innovation is enforced by the very structure of the social productive relations that can turn an accrual of potentially productive resources from outside to the service of economic development.”
5 December 2011, 3:23 pmRichard:
Shauket, I’m sorry, but I don’t find Brenner helpful at all there. Nor does he seem to have understood the Wallerstein (which I also feel to have been true of Wood: given how she characterizes his arguments, she can’t have understood what Wallerstein was arguing). For starters, I would not at all say that Wallerstein “stress[es] the significance of an original amassing of wealth in either money or natural forms”.
You say you “disagree that [Wallerstein] provides a useful explanation of the emergence of capitalism, if we understand the latter as a social relation as opposed to mere participation in the world economy”.
Well, he doesn’t define capitalism so narrowly (i.e., only as a social relation), and I think that’s a massive sticking point for Marxists. Nor does he define it as “mere participation in the world economy”. He defines it as a WORLD-system (hyphen necessary) of endless capital accumulation, that is, the emergence of a world-economy (hyphen necessary) that serves that one purpose above all.
I’ll have to read the full Brenner article (it’s called “The Origins of Capitalism”? when does it date from? but most of the paragraph you provide doesn’t say much to me at all), but it seems to me that in fact it’s his argument (which, again, I know mostly through Wood’s book by the same title) that begs fundamental questions, as to how and why the social relation emerged when it did.
5 December 2011, 4:13 pmRichard:
I would suggest, btw, that the true disagreement lies not in when “capitalism” emerged, but in what “capitalism” is. This distance may be fundamental. I, personally, have learned many useful and true things in thinking about capitalism as a social relation, but I find that thinking of the actual system as a whole as primarily about the endless accumulation of capital to both be more helpful in allowing us to think about such issues as modern finance, and also to understand the roles of slavery and other unwaged/coerced labor, which were absolutely crucial to the system’s development.
5 December 2011, 4:21 pmShaukat:
Richard, the article is entitiled “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” and should be available here: http://newleftreview.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/?view=185
Wallerstein argues (as does Sweezy and Frank and Samir Amin) that the influx of precious metals from the Americas, in conjunction with the crisis of feudalism due to the demographic alteration brough by the black plague, led to the rationalization of agriculture in England because the lords needed to increase labour productivity in order to acquire the luxury commodities made possible by the revival of trade and the increase in bullion. This argument does not provide an adequate explanation of the emergence of capitalism, since it breaks down in the face of comparative analysis. The exact same trends produced diametrically opposite results in different parts of Europe, and this divergence can only be explained in reference to different degrees of class strength, solidarity and community organization.
Regarding the meaning of capitalism, Wallerstein’s definition states that capitalism is based on “production for sale in a market in which the object is to realise the maximum profit.” This definition is problematic because such a logic permeated other systems as well, such as the feudal world economy, in which production for exchange was wide spread but in which capital as a social relation and mode of labour control did not exist.
5 December 2011, 5:26 pmJosiah:
I’m reluctant to get into the thickets of 1970s academic Marxism (“the Brenner debate,” let alone Perry Anderson’s forays into ancient history). But, given the title of the thread, I can’t resist quoting David Graeber, one of the people who first recommended using “we are the 99%” as a slogan at Zucotti Park.
It’s an astute comment about an error Marx’s followers (worshippers?) often make, from his brilliant recent book on debt:
“Karl Marx, who knew quite a bit about the human tendency to fall down and worship our own creations, wrote Das Kapital in an attempt to demonstrate that, even if we do start from the economists’ utopian vision, so long as we also allow some people to control productive capital, and, again, leave others with nothing to sell but their brains and bodies, the results will be in many ways barely distinguishable from slavery, and the whole system will eventually destroy itself. What everyone seems to forget is the “as if” nature of his analysis. Marx was well aware that there were far more bootblacks, prostitutes, butlers, soldiers, pedlars, chimneysweeps, flower girls, street musicians, convicts, nannies, and cab drivers in the London of his day than there were factory workers. He was never suggesting that that’s what the world was actually like.
Still, if there’s anything that the last several hundred years of world history have shown, it’s that utopian visions can have a certain appeal. This as true of Adam Smith’s as of those ranged against it.” (354)
5 December 2011, 5:41 pmJosiah:
Also, Stan, since you’re interested in money-dependency and how “military models have infiltrated other practices and institutions,” I’d highly recommend Graeber’s book to you. He makes a strong case that coinage and printed money originated, historically, with the rise of large empires and standing armies. “Hard” currency began, it seems, as way to coerce people to feed soldiers.
5 December 2011, 5:56 pmm.c.:
I’ll not hijack this thread; but my two cents on First Century Palestine History for example. Ancient or near Ancient History doesn’t provide as many Primary Sources as Modern History does. Some of the Roman Historians, like Tacitus & Cicero were Court Scribes and were in the Patronage of the Ruling Pols of the time. Non-Fiction books on this time are fine as Conjecture & Theory, but Empirical History/Politics/Political Economy requires or requests at least data. Ths is one of the points I remembered from one of my cambridge profs. in summer school from a dozen years ago. He thought Americans Academics were too happy making stuff up as Non-Fiction when there wasn’t real Data.
5 December 2011, 6:43 pmRichard:
Thanks for the link, Shauket. Have you yourself read the Wallerstein volumes, or are you relying on Brenner’s gloss? The gloss you provide for what he argues does not at all resemble what I’d characterize as his argument. I’m saying, in fact, that that is not his argument.
6 December 2011, 6:17 amStan:
One of the prevailing problems has been the attempt to define capitalism, a singular noun, as opposed to describing a highly variable and rapidly changing emergent reality in many places. It is always useful to identify dominant trends, yet there is always the danger of getting wrapped around the axle of our own generalizations. Money has not been adequately theorized imo, one reason I am so grateful to Hornborg who tries. The modern state, which is a necessary corollary for what we generalize as capitalism, simply could not exist without money.
Bricolage and accident are also factors, often significant factors, in the development of societies; and the granular realities of society at ever more local levels nearly always present embarrassing questions to any summaries of society at larger scales. This is kind of the ontological background of the tactical principle above that the more local you get, the further from direct large-institutional control you are.
My interest in military models is based on my own notion that war is formative of masculinity and the parallel belief that military organization is reproductive of the several evolutions of male social power… and the inseparability of war, ‘capitalism,’ and the modern state. Somewhere in there is the subject of food. I’m still waiting for someone to write the world history of food and power, which I feel sure would be a super-productive interpretive POV, and one that maps onto these other hermeneutics.
Robert Biel, author of the excellent “The New Imperialism,” has gotten the food praxis bug himself, as I discovered the other day, to my delight. I read him alongside ecofeminist Maria Mies, and they were very formative of a lot of the preoccupations I have still. He describes local food projects not as revolutionary, but as “plug-ins” that people can use to begin to extricate themselves from a system in failure.
http://vimeo.com/21363063
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMiLELjDoAQ
On money, social dissolution, feudalism, etc, I again recommend Hornborg, who explains money semiotically as a delocalizing agent that is a precondition of the transformation described by Polanyi.
http://knowledgeecology.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/hornborg-ecosemiotics.pdf
http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/4/2/143.short?rss=1&ssource=mfc (Sorry I can’t get into Sagepub past the abstract, but if anyone can and share, good deal)
6 December 2011, 6:53 amShaukat:
Richard, I have read most of Volume 1 of The Modern World System and numerous essays by the author. I have also read a lot of the dependency scholarship from Frank to Amin and Cardoso. I used to place my self squarely in the World System theory camp. I still don’t discount what they say, except when it comes to the origins of capitalism and its definition, which is an issue you raised. I cited specific quotes from Wallerstein in order to clarify my disagreement with his analysis, so I’m not sure what part of his argument you claim Brenner doesn’t understand. Theda Skocpol also has an interesting critique of Wallerstein’s analytical framework. It should be available here in case you want to take a look:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2777814.pdf?acceptTC=true
@Stan, again thanks for the links. David Harvey has a very interesting analysis of the historical role played by money in precapitalist and capitalist societies, available in “The Limits to Capital.” He argues that while money has always functioned as a medium of circulation and exchange, it can only begin to serve as a measure and store of social power once class struggles and force elevate the law of value as the regulator of economic activity. Money may be a necessary condition for the transformation discussed by Polanyi, but not a sufficient one. Below is the link for the sage article by Hornborg. I’ve linked it using my own university account, so hopefully it works for people.
http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/4/2/143.full.pdf+html
6 December 2011, 6:11 pmStan:
Link doesn’t work for me. I think Polanyi agrees with your “necessary but not sufficient” assertion. There are also philosophical/ideological conditions that were necessary, technological conditions (which required money), and political conditions. All these emerged together, but I don’t buy the mechanical base-superstructure analysis of how they emerged. To these suppositions and analyses, we are adding that additional thesis — Dunbar/strong bond-weak bond/administrative corruptibility. If we are right about that, then it has implications for how people navigate either as people practicing various forms of bricolage or as political agents seeking conscious changes in human relations.
What is to be done?
7 December 2011, 8:24 amRichard:
Where did you cite specific quotes from Wallerstein? You quoted Brenner, who mischaracterized Wallerstein.
I suggest you read all of volume 1 and volume 2 (they aren’t very long). It’s worth noting that volume 2 was published after the Brenner article you linked to (which is one defense of Brenner, I suppose). He rather effortlessly handles the problems. No one who’d read volume 2 could come close to saying that Wallerstein’s “argument does not provide an adequate explanation of the emergence of capitalism, since it breaks down in the face of comparative analysis. The exact same trends produced diametrically opposite results in different parts of Europe, and this divergence can only be explained in reference to different degrees of class strength, solidarity and community organization.” He spends considerable space on comparative analysis, on similar trends, various differencs, etc.
The emergence of the world-economy is the emergence of capitalism.
But we’re obviously getting nowhere, so I’m out, having already contributed too much to the derailing of this thread. I agree with Stan completely that the food is the central issue, and I look forward to trying to become more food productive myself (and I appreciate all of the food-related discussions and links).
7 December 2011, 9:13 amShaukat:
@Stan, sorry, it appears that the login time expires after awhile. I’d be happy to send you a pdf copy if you have a usable email for such things (and others who might be interested). I agree that the mechanical base-superstructure dichotomy is useless as an analytical tool. I don’t think Marx himself ever meant tto employ it in such a manner, although many Marxists do so.
@Richard-“production for sale in a market in which the object is to realise the maximum profit.” That’s from Volume 1. I agree that we are at an impasse if you believe that “The emergence of the world-economy is the emergence of capitalism.” Seems to be the fundamental source of our disagreement. And you’re right that we probably have derailed this thread enough. I do plan on reading Volume 2 at some point though. An interesting point made by Robert Denemark in an article summarizing this whole debate was that Wallerstein’s position on the state changed subtly between the first two volumes.
7 December 2011, 11:28 amCharles:
http://www.occupytheory.org/TIDAL_occupytheory.pdf
8 December 2011, 3:47 pmCharles:
It’s an astute comment about an error Marx’s followers (worshippers?) often make, from his brilliant recent book on debt: …….. This constant refrain that we followers of Marx are worshipers and u critics of us are free minded or critical thinkers compared to us is itself dumb and anti-Marxist dogma. Marxism is fundamentally critical thinking and defines most excellently exactly what “worshipful” or religious thinking is.
8 December 2011, 3:52 pmCharles:
I would disagree. The 99% in Russia at that time were the muzhiks, peasants.
^^^^
hammer and sickle : workers and peasants.
^^^^6
And they did not revolt. I would guess that Lenin was very much part of the elite;
^^^^
Well, they overthrew the Czar and then the bourgeois governments
Lenin came from the elite , but became a partisan of the working class, one of the best of all times.
^^^^^
if not 1% then close. Given his horror of actually being out there working (which would qualify him as a “worker”, no?), he can hardly be counted. Lenin mooched off relatives. Marx mooched off Engels.
^^^^
Some of the 1% go over to become self-sacrificing partisans of the working class. Marx, Engels and Lenin were that. Lenin was more from the middle class which is part of the 99%.. Russia didn’t quite have monopoly capitalism then.
^^^^^
Looks like Marx was right about the inner contradictions of capitalism ripping it apart, though.
Look into it. These “revolutionary vanguard” struggled with the fact that Marx was wrong, and the revolution happened despite there being only a tiny urban working class.
^^^^
8 December 2011, 4:01 pmYeah it was debated. Lenin wrote a long book on the development of capitalism in Russia. Lenin concluded that there was enough capitalism for a socialist revolution. However, he definitely was counting on socialist rev in Germany or France, developed capitalist countries as Russia didn’t have enough economic development to stand up to imperialist Big Power nations. In the end, the USSR did fall in part because of its original backwardness and lack of devdelopment plus giant imperialist wars on it.
Charles:
Marx explicitly predicted that the industrial working class would be the vehicle for revolution. Your own party used to have a policy of industrial concentration (that progressively marginalized it) based on this idea.
^^^^
Marx did not mean that it would only be “industrial” proletarians and not the rest of the proletariat leading the revolution. All who are wage-laborers are part of the revolutionary class in Marx’s prediction. The CPUSA didn’t mean that the rest of the class of wage-laborers will not be “leading” the revolutionary class.
“The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people. [2]“
8 December 2011, 4:09 pmJAN:
What could people adopt in place of money in order to get off the monetary grid?
It seems that food and adopting a currency are two of the most crucial issues facing all of us today, which if addressed might result in a smoother landing if the system ever reached a point of collapse.
Is there a way for people to eon some level and just drop out of the system while developing a private system of commerce?
9 December 2011, 1:04 amStan:
I don’t think there is any way to consciously and strategically disentangle ourselves from the monetary grid; but that is because I have no faith in strategy generally, or large-scale projects that require them. Reducing dependency is something each person or community can work out based on their own circumstances. I have seen some mixed results with local currencies, and it is interesting, but I admit I don’t know much about them or how they are working everywhere. Certainly gifting and barter are easy ways around money, as it growing food, re-using materials as necessary, and trading labor. Nor do I anticipate a sudden rupture in the system that leads to an apocalyptic collapse. What we are seeing already is a kind of winding down, with a lot of maneuvering to preserve power within the system by ruling strata. And dependency is what takes the rest of us along for the ride. My bigger concern with this “gradual collapse” is that it will (and is) creating the conditions for more and more dangerous wars. Obama’s foolishness in Pakistan (and soon enough Iran) has a huge potential for someone sleepwalking into a nuclear conflict. Bountiful Backyards in Durham NC has tried a lot of different things (kind of a small-business/public benefactor model) that are very interesting with regard to reducing grid dependency, some stuff monetized, other stuff not, including sponsoring lots of re-skilling workshops. Detroit has a lot of stuff going on with urban agriculture. There are little projects going on all over the place.
9 December 2011, 5:29 amvera:
Charles: the muzhiks overthrew the tzar? Where in the world did you hear that? And the fact that the sickle is included on the graphics means nothing. Like other systems, the peasants counted very little in the scheme of things for the vanguard… viz later starvation campaign against Ukraine. And how else? They knew little of the life of the proles, and were quite happy being bourgeois.
And one of the reasons the USSR fell was that the ideological abuse of the population could not be maintained. The iron curtain fell before all the razor wire came down…
Read Animal Farm… very instructive regarding the “self-sacrificing vanguard” … written by someone who actually walked the walk.
The revolution is not about scheming in warm offices and libraries while the proles are out there doing what it takes to feed everyone. That’s just more of the same old same old. This revolution is about everybody doing it, living it… and being part of the food revolution is at the basis of it. Go make some cheese or something. Learn an old fashioned skill. Care for the living soil. Let praxis inform your theory…
9 December 2011, 3:04 pmJAN:
[Stan]“My bigger concern with this ‘gradual collapse’ is that it will (and is) creating the conditions for more and more dangerous wars.”
If what you’re saying is accurate, it would position the working and middle class people to gradually integrate and become accustomed to the planned poverty that will flow out of it, while creating a destitute labor force ready to enlist and fight in the oil wars in the years ahead.
With all the oil in Canada and Mexico do you see the US eventually forming an alliance along the lines of the EU?
9 December 2011, 6:40 pmmichele:
Just wanted to share a few links in regard to complementary currencies. There are many forms out there..the Swiss WIR has been around for 6 decades.
http://www.complementarycurrency.org/ (worldwide resource center)
http://www.lietaer.com/ (Bernard Lietaer’s site)
http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/RDavies/arian/wir.html (information about WIR)
http://fora.tv/2011/10/24/The_Case_for_a_Monetary_Ecology (lecture by Bernard Lietaer)
10 December 2011, 3:33 amJoel Caris:
Thank you, Stan, for this brilliant essay. I came here via a blog I arrived at via a link off a comment on a post I put up at my own blog and was immediately sucked into this post of yours. It dovetails just a bit with the post that I just linked, which deals with conflicting feelings I’m having about the Occupy movement and my place in it–except that your post is far broader and more ambitious and better and smarter and exists on a more impressive and complete intellectual and philosophical base. So, yeah. Consider me pleased to have found it.
There’s a lot here for me to think about it and I plan to do just that, as well as start exploring some of the links in it. I hope to eventually write about some of this on my own blog.
In the meantime, I’ll say that I absolutely love the idea of taking up the planting of food as one of the major actions stemming from OWS and think it would be a very effective tactic. As someone who’s spent the last three years farming at different small, organic CSA farms, I’m well versed in the flaws of our industrial food system and the challenges that we’ll all face as it begins to fall apart under the strain of ever-rising energy prices. The resiliency of a million or two gardens scattered across the country would really help to cushion the blow. And it’s a brilliant challenge to those in power.
Thanks again for the essay.
16 December 2011, 9:12 pmStan:
I am linking Joel’s essay here, because it deserves to be read widely. Thank you, Joel.
FULL ESSAY
17 December 2011, 6:42 amRichard:
“This constant refrain that we followers of Marx are worshipers and u critics of us are free minded or critical thinkers compared to us is itself dumb and anti-Marxist dogma. Marxism is fundamentally critical thinking and defines most excellently exactly what “worshipful” or religious thinking is.”
Charles, seriously, let’s not pretend there hasn’t been a long tradition of dogmatic Marxism. “Marxism” is not “fundamentally critical thinking”. Marx himself was an excellent example of a critical thinker, but too often the -ism rigidly followed what its proponents took to be this or that idea of Marx’s, or implications of his thinking.
18 December 2011, 4:48 pmJoel Caris:
Stan, thanks so much for the recommendation of and link to my post. I really appreciate it. Hope to do some grappling with your essay in the next week or two.
19 December 2011, 1:49 amMichael Anderson:
@ Richard: People did the same thing with Jesus as with Marx, too.
19 December 2011, 10:47 amMichael Anderson:
While not concerned with agriculture, these stories are representative of “localized” thinking and doing, and are worth considering.
http://www.registerguard.com/web/newslocalnews/27117487-41/business-eugene-local-buy-program.html.csp
http://www.registerguard.com/web/newslocalnews/27106431-41/local-businesses-smith-business-buy.html.csp
20 December 2011, 1:02 pmStan:
Tactical agility.
http://www.portlandoccupier.org/2011/12/15/occupy-portland-outsmarts-police-creating-blueprint-for-other-occupations/
25 December 2011, 7:07 amKim Sky:
in addition, saturday night is a good night, most people are free, can sleep in the next day. the running around having good fun, encouraging others to join, the bar going crowd spontaneously increases the ranks.
25 December 2011, 6:36 pmaskod:
Liked the WIR article. Similar organisations in Sweden and Denmark – JAK – has developed in a different direction. Danish JAK had a very succesfull attempt at alternative currency in the 30ies but that was shut down by the state. Both Swedish and Danish JAK now does rent-free loans. You park your money there and get borrowing-points, in essence you can borrow as much as you have let others borrow your money.
26 December 2011, 1:35 pmJoel Caris:
Alright, Stan. As promised, I wrote another essay that both responds to this essay of yours and builds on my previous one. I like how it came out and hope it adds a bit to the conversation.
I’m still unpacking your full essay. In many ways, I only responded to your garden-planting suggestion. I really want to write about your comments on covenantal relationships, but that’s going to have to percolate a little longer.
28 December 2011, 3:49 amStan:
“stealth infrastructure,” love it. thanks Joel.
28 December 2011, 7:55 amHenry:
I absolutely love these articles on the traditional city, transition towns, and more, including the fundamental distinction between “places” and “non-places.” Classic articles on the “growth” economy and suburban hells, so-called scarcity, life without cars, the problem with bicycles, “little teeny farms.” Be prepared to ditch the American consumerist and hyper-materialist mode of imagination.
Here are some examples:
Let’s Take a Traditional City Break 3: Life With Really Narrow Streets
http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2011/050111.html
Transitioning to the Traditional City
http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/052310.html
Transitioning to the Traditional City 2: Pooh-poohing the Naysayers
http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/060610.html
Place and Non-Place
http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2009/101109.html
The Service Economy
4 January 2012, 7:37 amhttp://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/051610.html
Stan:
Thanks Henry.
4 January 2012, 8:27 amSam:
President Hugo Chavez Threatens to Take Over Spanish Bank on Live Television
http://en.mercopress.com/2011/01/27/president-hugo-chavez-threatens-to-take-over-spanish-bank-on-live-television
President Hugo Chavez eccentricities continue. This time he threatened to expropriate the Venezuelan subsidiary of Spanish banking giant BBVA in a tense telephone conversation Wednesday with the Banco Provincial CEO that was broadcast live on radio and television.
I can expropriate it right now if I want for the sake of national interest,” the president said. I can expropriate it right now if I want for the sake of national interest,” the president said.
Whorush: 3 sites by this AdSense ID
“This is very serious. Either you obey the law or hand the bank over to me. Tell me how much the bank is worth, I won’t argue with you,” Chavez told Pedro Rodriguez during an event with people affected by what the president termed “mortgage deceit.”
===============================
Chavez Threatens to Seize Banks to Guarantee Agricultural Loans
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-30/chavez-threatens-to-seize-banks-to-guarantee-agricultural-loans.html
By Corina Rodriguez Pons and Jose Orozco
Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened to take over the country’s banks if they don’t hand over 40 billion bolivars ($9.31 billion) for agriculture loans this year.
Chavez, speaking on state television yesterday, cited Banesco Banco Universal, BBVA Banco Provincial and Mercantil Banco Universal for giving loans to industrial producers and not to small farmers.
The government plans to create a fund called Ezequiel Zamora to assign the loans directly, while borrowers pay the banks, Chavez said. The president will use special legislative powers granted to him by the congress to create the fund, he said.
“If you don’t comply with this, I’m willing to nationalize those private banks,” Chavez said during his weekly “Alo Presidente” program.
Chavez’s government is financing housing and agriculture programs ahead of a presidential election in October and elections for governors in December. The country’s private banks last year handed over money for a government-controlled fund to finance housing construction.
Chavez asked Vice President Elias Jaua to meet with the country’s bankers, including Banesco President Juan Carlos Escotet, this week.
“Escotet, let me know if you can,” Chavez said. “If not, give me the bank.”
Chavez last year threatened to nationalize Provincial, the local unit of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA, for allegedly not cooperating with the government on financing housing projects.
Venezuela’s central bank will give out 3 billion bolivars in agricultural loans this year, Chavez said.
[Nice that someone has the guts to face the bastards, isn't it?]
Chavez phoned Rodriguez after hearing from a woman who said that bank had rejected her request for a housing loan.
“You’re involved in this, like it or not. You can’t wash your hands like Pontius Pilate. Face up to your responsibility,” Chavez told the CEO.
“Pedro: I’m not going to argue with you anymore,” the leftist president said. “Listen, I’m asking you to attend to these people. If you don’t have time or can’t, then tell me how much the bank costs. I’ll buy it from you.”
The conversation grew testier when Rodriguez told the president that the bank is not for sale, a response Chavez described as “arrogant.”
“Be careful how you respond because you’re telling me the bank’s not for sale but I can expropriate it right now if I want for the sake of national interest,” the president said.
The call ended with Rodriguez agreeing to receive people who had criticized Banco Provincial’s service and Chavez instructing Vice President Nicolas Maduro and Attorney General Luisa Ortega to accompany them to the meeting.
In a communiqué the bank said we are “interested and committed to” helping the people affected by financial problems over mortgages.”
Rodriguez later agreed to meet with people allegedly affected by the “mortgage deceit” and said “we have just had a meeting and are sorting out how to deal with the problems, so that in the next few days everything will be sorted out. We have responded to the President’s telephone call and we are convinced that, all sides involved, will be able to reach a satisfactory solution to the cases in question.”
In May 2009, Chavez nationalized Banco de Venezuela, buying that institution from Spain’s Grupo Santander for just over $1 billion. His government has also taken over several struggling small banks.
The leftist leader also has nationalized companies in the oil, cement, food, telecommunications, steel and power sectors as part of his drive to usher in “socialism of the 21st century.”
30 January 2012, 10:17 pmMichael Anderson:
http://www.truth-out.org/black-bloc-cancer-occupy/1328541484
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=5332
These are links to Black Bloc activities, and are complementary.
Notice the Toronto Police standing by while the Black Bloc people destroy property last summer—very strange.
Hedges is right to call it “the cancer in Occupy”. The Corporate State can relate to violence. Is this another aspect of agent-provocateur strategy?
7 February 2012, 7:42 amMichael Anderson:
Chis Hedges:
“The corporate state understands and welcomes the language of force. It can use the Black Bloc’s confrontational tactics and destruction of property to justify draconian forms of control and frighten the wider population away from supporting the Occupy movement. Once the Occupy movement is painted as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob we are finished.”
7 February 2012, 7:48 amHenry:
URBAN HOMESTEADING
Surrounded by urban sprawl and just a short distance from a freeway, the Urban Homestead project is a family operated and highly productive city farm. It is also a successful, real-life working model for sustainable agriculture and eco living in urban areas and has been featured in multiple news medias both nationally and internationally.
Our work in creating Urban Homesteading as a flourishing and self-sufficient lifestyle using minimum resources and land has been referenced as a progressive and forward-thinking example and sourced as the representation of future city planning and reclamation worldwide.
For over a decade, we have proved that growing ones’ own food can be sustainable, practical, successful and beautiful in urban areas. We harvest 3 tons of organic food annually from our 1/10 acre garden while incorporating many back-to-basics practices, solar energy and biodiesel in order to reduce our footprint on the earth’s resources. This website documents the many steps we have taken and hopes to inspire fellow travelers on their own life-changing journey … Be inspired to take the first step…
http://www.urbanhomestead.org
9 February 2012, 6:04 pmHenry:
11 year old Birke Baehr weighs in against GMO food and wants to grow up to be an organic farmer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7Id9caYw-Y
9 February 2012, 11:39 pmMichael Anderson:
@ CALL FOR CITATIONS: Having read in several places that both factories and public schools were organized on military models….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm
U.S. schools were organized, in the late 19th century, on the Prussian model. New model, starting in the late 60′s:
http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Gatto.html
12 February 2012, 9:19 amHenry:
Cracks in the Union?
Confederacy-lite: The Oklahoma’s AG’s Civil War against the United States of America
By William K. Black
(Cross-posted from Benzinga.com)
The fact that only 49 State Attorneys General (“AG”) entered into the mortgage fraud foreclosure fraud settlement focused attention briefly on Oklahoma’s AG, E. Scott Pruitt. The Oklahoma Republican Party bills Oklahoma as the reddest state, and Pruitt is beet red. He refused to enter into the settlement not because it was too weak, but because it provided any reduction in the principal amount of the debt of distressed Oklahoma homeowners.
The distinguishing characteristic about Pruitt is that he was elected on the promise to launch a litigation war against the federal government, particularly federal regulation. Pruitt and his counterparts in Virginia (Ken Cuccinelli) and Florida (Pam Bondi) claim that their principal function is protecting their citizens from the depredations of – the United States of America. Pruitt, ala South Carolina in 1860, expressly politicized the cause as opposition to the elected President of the United States. He asserts that regulation is inherently illegitimate because it is done by “unelected bureaucrats.” (So is policing and firefighting and service in the military.)
http://www.neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/02/confederacy-lite-oklahomas-ags-civil.html#more
15 February 2012, 4:42 pmHenry:
Summer is coming, so here’s an inexpensive way to cool things:
Passive Cooling
7 April 2012, 3:03 amhttp://permaculturetokyo.blogspot.mx/2006/11/passive-cooling.html
Michael Anderson:
I found myself wondering if this is a daily occurrence on the grain market, either for animal feed (as described here) or DIRECTLY into the human food stream, like civilian massacres in war, instead of the “one bad apple” scenario presented here. Guy sounds like a schmuck…
http://www.registerguard.com/web/newslocalnews/27859135-41/chase-organic-corn-grain-conventional.html.csp
Man gets two years in organic food scam
The grain seller who carried out the fraud is rebuked for damaging a system built on trust
“You made a big mistake to commit this crime in Lane County,” a judge said Wednesday in sentencing a rural Springfield man to more than two years in federal prison for selling a local grain broker 4.2 million pounds of conventional corn he misrepresented as organic.
U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken cited the long-running Lane County Farmers Market and strong local interest in pesticide-free foods as she imposed the 27-month sentence on 55-year-old Harold Chase. In a plea deal with the government, Chase pleaded guilty in December to a single count of wire fraud in connection with the case. He admitted wrongfully pocketing an extra $190,000 by passing off the conventional grain as U.S. Department of Agriculture-certified organic corn.
The wire fraud conviction reflected Chase’s use of a fax line to send Grain Millers faked documentation that he bought the corn from a USDA-certified organic farm in Milton-Freewater. Grain Millers contacted authorities after finding “inconsistencies” while auditing the transaction to ensure USDA organic program compliance, according to Keith Horton, vice president of milling at the company’s Eugene plant.
The bogus fax was part of an elaborate ruse Chase conducted between November 2009 and May 2010 to pass off the corn as organic, nearly doubling his profits, according to the government. He used several aliases to buy approximately 2,253 tons of conventional corn from four grain suppliers in Idaho and Eastern Washington, Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Bradford wrote in court documents.
Chase then had the conventional grain delivered to “transloading sites” where it was placed on different trucks to further disguise its origins. The actual value of the conventional corn he sold to Grain Millers was about $260,000, but he received more than $450,000 for it, court documents show. Before discovering his fraud, Grain Millers unwittingly sold the corn to other companies, including Danish Dairy in Coquille and CHS Nutrition Inc. in Harrisburg, for use as organic feed.
Bradford pressed for 27 months in prison, citing the “seriousness” of Chase undermining the integrity of the USDA’s National Organic Program.
Chase defrauded “countless consumers of the end-products” — such as milk — who paid higher prices to get what they believed was pesticide-free foods, Bradford wrote. Chase also jeopardized the organic certification of the Milton-Freewater farm and of the businesses that unwittingly used the falsely labeled corn in their own organic products, the prosecutor said.
One of two brothers who own the farm, Tom Williams, drove to the sentencing from Milton-Freewater in Northeastern Oregon to testify. Williams told Aiken it’s crucial for consumers to be able to have “full faith” that organic products are just that. Conventional and organic products often have much the same appearance, he said, and farmers don’t have the resources to test every load of feed corn they buy.
USDA regulators “try to do a good job, but they simply don’t have enough people to go around and police this as it probably ought to be done,” the Milton-Freewater farmer said. “The whole thing is based on integrity. … You can’t have people trying to game the system.”
Defense attorney Craig Weinerman urged Aiken to sentence Chase to a year in the Lane County Community Correction Center, where he would be released during the day to work and perform community service under the supervision of federal reentry program officers. Chase, an Army veteran who had never before been arrested, committed a nonviolent crime that Weinerman likened to counterfeiting, “which impacts the integrity of our monetary system.”
“Incarceration is not necessary in order to protect the public from future crimes by Mr. Chase,” the defense lawyer said.
Bradford disagreed. He said news coverage of Chase’s guilty plea in the corn sale fraud prompted tips to the government that Chase previously conducted a similar scam in 1997 in which he sold conventional onions as certified organic. The U.S. attorney is not filing charges in connection with the alleged onion scheme because the statute of limitations appears to have expired, Bradford said, but an investigation suggested that the corn scam was not Chase’s first crime.
Aiken told Chase Wednesday that her sentencing decision was also influenced by his response to her suggestion at his plea change hearing that he engage in food-related community service to show his remorse.
He reportedly performed only 20 hours of volunteer work at FOOD for Lane County during the intervening four months — “not impressive,” Aiken said.
“You’ve inflicted damage on the whole (food) industry,” she told Chase. “I thought you’d come in here with a bunch of hours and show the court you understood that you knew that what you have done was wrong.
“The food supply and the water supply of this country and other countries is sacred,” she continued. “It is to be respected, period. … It’s going into the bodies of our children.”
7 April 2012, 3:51 pmcabdriver:
The Famine Foods website, a project from Purdue University
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/faminefoods/ff_home.html
This is a long list of overlooked nutritive plants, most of them not typically thought of as having value as food, often considered weeds or nuisance species. Not a lot of summary, and no indexing for factors like geographic region, favorable climate, type of nutrition, possible toxicity or allergy problems, modes of preparation or recipes. And almost all of the plants are listed solely by their Latin taxonomical names for genus and species, rather than their popular or colloquial names.
Still, the list of foods is extensive:
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/faminefoods/ff_indices/ff_genus_ab.html
7 June 2012, 7:56 amcabdriver:
Also, this sobering article from Scientific American:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/06/06/my-morning-cup-of-coffee-kills-monkeys/
“…this spider monkey is just one of at least 25,000 animals currently threatened around the globe. The primary culprit in at least 30 percent of such looming extinctions, according to a new analysis published in Nature on June 7? Global trade…”
11 June 2012, 8:06 ammichele:
Hey cabdriver..just wanted to supplement your share of the awesome famine foods list with a suggestion: if you utilize the embedded search engine..for say north america, it will come up with a list of foods that are specific to north america, and the listing will also have some of the the common names of the plant. Once the individual searches by region, more information is easy to find.
13 June 2012, 11:10 amAnd thanks so much for a new favorite link:)
cabdriver:
Thanks for the tip, Michele.
Also, that Famine Foods archive is part of a larger Purdue project on usable plants
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/default.html
which includes this comprehensive list of traditional farm crops
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/Indices/index_ab.html
15 June 2012, 11:51 amMark:
This sad story made me remember this thread. It’s not going to be easy.
19 June 2012, 1:29 pmStan:
Sad, but predictable. Fortunately for “us,” these kinds of discrete setbacks are – like gardens – local. A local desire (by whomever) to build something different, expand an intersection, or go all homeowners-association about property values… whatever the reason is to endanger that one garden, is not part of (and cannot be part of) a general strategy against gardens. There is no possibility, looking at a more biotic model, of this fungus spreading through all gardens, because there are too many species of them (mimicking the natural resiliency of a stable forest, eg).
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/dining/11garden.html?pagewanted=all
http://wamu.org/news/11/04/21/community_gardens_flourish_as_food_costs_increase.php
http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/2011/0921/The-rise-of-urban-farming
http://treemedia.com/treemedia.com/Urban_Roots.html
Looking into a water system today (to pump water from the river into a storage tank 300 feet and 30 vertical feet to water a handicap-accessible community garden. The city here is letting us use the property, one parcel last year (still running) and another this year. In the last one, we couldn’t even finish the beds and berms before people began growing there. Hauling their own water, too, which tells us something about motivation.
More good news than bad here…
20 June 2012, 7:05 amMichael Anderson:
@ Mark:
There was another instance last year of similar tactics in another state(can’t remember which one at present), but the outcome was that the city council was deluged with email complaints from all over the nation, and backtracked on their order. Things CAN be done. Public shaming does work.
22 June 2012, 9:44 pmHenry:
America: Becoming a Land Without Farmers
September 10, 2012
Evaggelos Vallianatos
The plutocratic remaking of America has a parallel in the countryside. In rural America less than 3 percent of farmers make more than 63 percent of the money, including government subsidies.
The results of this emerging feudal economy are everywhere. Large areas of the United States are becoming impoverished farm towns with abandoned farmhouses and deserted land. More and more of the countryside has been devoted to massive factory farms and plantations. The consequences, though worse now than ever, have been there for all to see and feel, for decades.
http://independentsciencenews.org/environment/america-becoming-a-land-without-farmers/
See also:
http://gardenearth.blogspot.se/p/keep-your-ear-to-ground.html
10 September 2012, 11:08 pmMichael Anderson:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/nyregion/where-fema-fell-short-occupy-sandy-was-there.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121111
Yeah! Ain’t this what it’s about?
ON Wednesday night, as a fierce northeaster bore down on the weather-beaten Rockaways, the relief groups with a noticeable presence on the battered Queens peninsula were these: the National Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Police and Sanitation Departments — and Occupy Sandy, a do-it-yourself outfit recently established by Occupy Wall Street.
11 November 2012, 3:29 amMichael Anderson:
http://www.hungryforchange.tv/the-missing-detox-link
Been looking at these links. They want to sell you the DVDs (of course), but this particular segment has some interesting things to say about prioritizing what we spend our money (and time) on—is food more important than STUFF?, looking at food & food storage long-term, fermented foods, and CLEAN water as a crucial element in detoxing your body. He uses an analogy of a fish tank with dirty water as a metaphor for water in our bodies affecting our cellular health, our cells being the fish.
It puts the high-priced, exclusive, organic food stores (and we all shop at them) in a VERY different light—the fellow in the vid does not see them lasting much longer as a “solution”. They could be considered profit machines for industrial organic.
This is a good vid for those of us who don’t want to be farmers! You can certainly SUPPORT good Ag in a localized context.
27 March 2013, 11:30 amcabdriver:
I’ve just become aware of Prof. Dickson Despommier’s ideas on vertical farming:
http://www.verticalfarm.com/more
http://www.amazon.com/The-Vertical-Farm-Feeding-Century/dp/B0055X6F1A
I have NOT read the book yet. Despommier gets hammered pretty hard in some of the book reviews on Amazon. But I find the vision intriguing.
It seems to me as if these structures appear to me as if they could work especially well if sited in coexistence with municipal water treatment plants. There’s usually quite a lot of space on those sites, and obviously plenty of nutrient-rich water, as a rule going through filtering and UV light disinfection as part of the process. I could even imagine that part of the water supply for the crops could be drawn up passively, through absorbent wicking material.
Also, I’m not sure that it’s necessary or even desirable to build these vertical farming structures as sealed, climate-controlled buildings. Or to require that they be dependent on artificial light. Or to build them to skyscraper height. I look at the architectural depictions shown on the Amazon page, and in my opinion, they’re obviously impractical. But a more less ambitiously scaled and more “passive” approach could work very well indeed- perhaps partially integrated in with the waste heat from nearby buildings, and relying on convection to draw heat to upper floors. Ideally, such a structure could be engineered to work as a complement to the water treatment process itself. I think that some sort of open, semi-open, and/or enclosable stepped, terraced pyramid building style could work as a functional shape. That’s where I’d start.
28 March 2013, 3:13 pmcabdriver:
http://inhabitat.com/bosco-verticale-in-milan-will-be-the-worlds-first-vertical-forest/
http://inhabitat.com/bosco-verticale-the-worlds-first-vertical-forest-nears-completion-in-milan-new-photos/
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/03/farmscrapers_could_turn_future_cities_green_partner/
“…Milan’sBosco Verticale towers are residential towers with trees growing on modular balconies on the outside of each unit. The design would spread one hectare of forest across 27 floors,according to FastCo, while only adding five percent on to the construction costs…”
Harmonia 57, in Sao Paulo Brazil
http://www.archdaily.com/6700/harmonia-57-triptyque/
Too early to know how all this will pan out. For one thing, ambitious projects like these require ambitious maintenance programs. But I like the basic principle- the notion that trees and vegetation are being integrated into buildings, instead of simply being replaced by concrete and steel.
3 April 2013, 8:47 pm