Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on November 16, 2023 | 153 Comments
A few brief announcements before I launch into a hopefully relevant one-post digression from my present theme of exploring my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future.
First, Christmas has come early to readers of this blog, with my publishers offering a 25% discount until 1 January on my two books. Frankly, I’d be disappointed if anyone reading this doesn’t already have them prominently displayed on their shelves. But I’ll never know the truth of it, so for the laggards among you, just click here or here and use the code SayingNo25 to claim your reward. This offer, incidentally, applies only in the UK. In the US, Chelsea Green are offering a 35% discount on all books from 20/11 to 15/1 (or 11/20 to 1/15, in the local argot). More evidence, if it were needed, of an over-bless’d country.
Second, The Ecologist has published this short response from me to George Monbiot’s ‘Cruel fantasies…’ piece that they replicated. I’ve published a slightly longer original-draft version of this piece (with references) here, which I’d suggest is the more authoritative version of the article. Getting that piece published has been a tangled tale, but anyway there it now is.
You might also be interested in Million Belay’s article on ‘Africa’s forgotten farmers’ which touches on the debate. And also an article in Civil Eats by Nhatt Nichols, based on an interview she did with me about Saying NO… This page on my website provides a full briefing on the post-publication adventures of my book.
And so on to the main theme of this post, involving a brief retrospective on two podcasts and one book.
The first of the podcasts is #6 of Nate Hagens’ ‘Reality Roundtable’ conversations on his Great Simplification site. The episode featured Jason Bradford, Andrew Millison, Vandana Shiva and Daniel Zetah talking about fossil free food systems. It’s well worth a listen. It covered a lot of similar ground to the discussions on this blog and in my books, although as ever I learned new things from it.
Still, here I want to emphasize the areas of overlap with some of the themes in my recent writing. On the podcast, these included the analogy between cities and livestock feedlots (high efficiency can come at an unpayable cost), a critique of subsidized US commodity export agriculture (low food prices don’t necessarily benefit the poor, or local agroecological farming systems), and a (perhaps overly tentative?) discussion of likely future migration and agricultural patterns as climate, energy, water and other realities change.
It was good to hear other people raising these issues in view of the fierce pushback that’s come my way as a result of saying much the same things. I think we need to lean into these discussions rather than insisting that the high energy urbanizing status quo is non-negotiable and can be sustained by improbable ecomodernist techno-fixes. Which is where I believe articles like Million Belay’s are important, with their message that the best workarounds to the problems faced, for example, by African farmers are likely to be devised by … African farmers. Still, Nate’s roundtable discussion raises some further questions here that I’ll come to in a moment.
One further point about the roundtable. The issue arose of terraforming to create livelihood resilience – in this instance, detailed, small-scale terraforming at the household, farmstead or local community level, the kind of labour-intensive thing that permaculture design tends to emphasize. You can do it in urban and suburban situations to some degree, but you can also do it in rural ones. In the latter case, you probably need more people occupying rural space than is typical in most European or North American farmscapes today.
The second of the podcasts was Jason Snyder’s Doomer Optimist interview with historian Steven Stoll, whose book Ramp Hollow I’ve enthused about before – a history of land use and land title in Appalachia (it’s more interesting than it sounds, okay…) with much wider implications.
There’s a ton of things I’d like to say about this interview, but for now I’ll restrict myself to three. First, it’s worth listening carefully to what Stoll says about common and private property and the nature of capitalism. People on both the political left and right get into real tangles on these issues, and Stoll lays out the issues very well. From a left perspective, it underscores points I’ve often made here: common property isn’t necessarily positive and progressive, while private property isn’t necessarily the horror show it’s often made out to be. Context is everything.
Second, talking of left and right, Stoll negotiates the shifting political territory around this in interesting ways in the podcast. As I see it, too much left-wing analysis these days buys into top-down techno-fixes barely distinguishable from corporate greenwash, except for a largely gestural hatred of the Tories or whoever, and an insistence that it’s all, like, for the people. And too much of the remaining left-wing analysis that doesn’t make this mistake is in hock to problematic ideas of state collectivism. So I like Stoll’s basically distributist notions of farmstead-owning collectivism. Likewise his criticisms of the ‘capitalism as freedom’ school of thought on the political right, which fails to recognize the extent to which contemporary capitalism is simply another form of state collectivism.
Which brings us to the third point – markets. Stoll rightly points out that markets are the small farmer’s friend, as long as the farmer retains access to non-market sustenance. This is terrain I covered in Chapter 14 of A Small Farm Future, partly with reference to Adam Smith’s distinction essentially between commercial societies built on local agricultural development and capitalist societies built on maximizing returns to capital through colonialism and global trade.
Stoll is one of several influences recently making me wonder if I’ve over-emphasized agrarian autonomy and self-reliance in my writing. I think it’s necessary as a defence against the over-commodification of capitalist trade, but I do think trading food and fibre locally is an important part of a congenial small farm society.
Where such arrangements have worked historically, it’s usually either been via enlightened top-down governance that ensures usury and fiscal abstraction don’t get out of control, or via bottom-up local moral economies able to avoid the extractions and abstractions of more powerful economic players. The trouble is, I can’t really foresee how either of those would easily take root in the near future most of us face, involving decaying capitalist nation states along with a lot of migratory money and people. Much as I want to emphasize the virtues of the local, in the future the local is going to have to be forged anew – and quickly – by people who weren’t necessarily local to begin with. I think that’s going to be pretty difficult and I don’t have great answers as to how to make it easier.
But I do have some answers nonetheless, which I hope to discuss in more detail soon. The answers in brief revolve around people quickly reconstituting themselves as peasantries, with local moral economies and agrarian populist politics, as discussed in Chapters 19 and 20 of A Small Farm Future.
One thinker I’ve found useful in getting to grips with this is the late Christopher Lasch, notably in his book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (1991). Recently, I came across an interesting critical essay about Lasch by Rich Yeselson (the essay itself is not recent, but I’ve never been overly concerned about newness or being on-trend). I agree with some of Yeselson’s criticisms, even while finding his position generally a bit too complacently liberal-modernist. But where I mostly disagree is in his objections to Lasch’s fixation with the populist politics of artisans, small farmers and proprietors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The problem with this for Yeselson is that “all of these people are dead”, so “they are inadequate agents to carry forward a critique of modernity”. But as I see it, their ideas (or at least the ideas that Lasch invested in them) are not dead. They’re very much waiting in the wings. Our task today is to bring them centre stage.
Anyway, enough on that for now. Finally, a few words on the book I mentioned – namely Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse. The book is a wonderfully thought-provoking meditation on climate change, geopolitics and colonialism, written by someone who – praise be! – understands that quantification is an important intellectual practice, but also an ideological one that can envelop an issue in an obscuring ‘fog of numbers’, to coin one of Ghosh’s chapter titles. I don’t think this is an especially hard issue to grasp, but it seems quite beyond some people nowadays.
Again, there’s a ton of things I’d like to say about Ghosh’s book, but I’ll stick with just one (okay, two – I’m also going to mention briefly Ghosh’s very interesting discussion of settler-colonial terraforming. To be compared and contrasted with the kind of localist, permaculture-inspired terraforming discussed on Nate’s show).
But my main point relates to a debate here a while back about climate ‘doomism’, which some commenters saw essentially as a self-indulgent affectation of, shall we say, ‘well fed’ people in the Global North. I felt at the time that this was a wrongheaded criticism, and I find support for that in Ghosh’s book.
‘Doomism’ is one of those pejorative terms that gets repurposed positively by those it seeks to ridicule. I guess I’m a doomer in the sense that I don’t see any dominant technological or political trend in modernist global society that’s going to rescue it from biophysical and socioeconomic disorder. Which is not at all the same thing as welcoming that disorder in the hope it will result in the kind of society I’d like to see, or surrendering politically to whatever happens (Eliot Jacobson has written a nice little essay touching on this ).
In Chapter 13 of his book, Ghosh describes the sense of racial privilege attending climate change narratives in the Global North. It has two faces – the anticolonial argument that the suffering is disproportionately concentrated among poorer and darker-skinned people in the Global South, and the neocolonial argument that this concentration reflects the weakness and inferiority of these people and/or their countries. The first of these faces isn’t unreasonable and I can sign up to it myself to some degree, but I think it does implicitly recuperate a sense of the superiority of the Global North, just as the second one does … a superiority that lurks within ecomodernist plans to save the world through bacterial protein, nuclear energy and so on, and a superiority that invests all those tiresome indictments of low-energy localism for its bucolic romanticism or whatever.
Ghosh isn’t convinced the cards will fall quite so one-sidedly to the benefit of the Global North this time around. Neither am I. The implications are huge and I won’t discuss them here. But while I don’t welcome the chaos that’s unleashing, I can’t honestly mourn the passing of a modernism that was always rotten to the core and that always had doom written into it. It’s vital now to wrest the best outcomes we can from its passing. In my opinion, this won’t be achieved by ‘we can do this’ techno-narratives built around ongoing processes of capital accumulation in the Global North, nor by derision towards lower energy and more local ways of being.
Ghosh says, rightly I think, that “the settler-colonial holocaust that has devoured so many Native American life-worlds will one day engulf the entirety of the planet” (p.207). But while that holocaust destroyed many people, along with their life-worlds, it didn’t destroy all of them, nor all of the world. The challenge then is to do what we can to start reconstructing a better life-world to come once the fire of the settler-colonial world-holocaust has burned out.
Perhaps there’s an irony here in my juxtaposition of Lasch and Ghosh as influences, since you could interpret Lasch’s position (albeit rather unfairly in my opinion) as a justification for settler-colonialism. Here’s how I’d parse it: being a settler is going to be an increasingly common human experience in the future. Lasch teaches us useful things about the politics of settler livelihood-making, while Ghosh teaches us useful things about how settlers must avoid becoming settler-colonists.
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“…a superiority that lurks within ecomodernist plans to save the world through bacterial protein, nuclear energy and so on…”
I’m glad you’re calling the ridiculous “food from thin air” by what it really is, bacterial protein. This helps counter the PR and marketing narratives hoping to cloud consumer certainty about the origins of their proteins (“agnostic of source”).
“Agri-food tech’s building block: narrating protein, agnostic of source, in the face of crisis”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41292-022-00287-3
Thanks Chris, for highlighting The Great Simplification, a fantastically important podcast, Ghosh’s really excellent book and for even mentioning Jacobson’s doomer essay. All good stuff.
“Stoll is one of several influences recently making me wonder if I’ve over-emphasized agrarian autonomy and self-reliance in my writing. I think it’s necessary as a defence against the over-commodification of capitalist trade, but I do think trading food and fibre locally is an important part of a congenial small farm society.”
Reading here (your online writings) and dialoguing with you, Chris, has had the effect of my relinquishing much of my fixation on a sort of leftish reaction against the decidedly rightish politics of our present world — and has even resulted in my being less certain and more open-minded about what right and left have to offer us as a key to fathoming the depths we are in presently.
It’s always a pleasure when I watch you grapple with the same topics I’m grappling with, and to see how we both seek to use uncertainty as a means of gaining clarity and “aptness,” as I like to call it. And so here I am, grappling with the notion of “agrarian autonomy”. We perhaps ought to qualify this “autonomy” as something like the verbal construct of “local agrarian autonomy”? But what is it exactly? And what does it stand in contrast with? And how do we contextualize this with the dominant globalized economy and culture?
When I first began reading you, I thought you had perhaps over-emphasized the family, and kin, whereas I tended then to emphasize the notion of the village. But as we dialogued on this, I realized we weren’t really opposed to one another in our most basic framings. I loosened my grasp and opened my mind. It eventually helped when you said that you felt a certain sympathy, if not as far as affinity, with anarchism — which I regard mainly as an anti-authoritarian, localist, decentralist trend — and one not at all strongly contrasting with distributism.
In lots of ways, my intellectual life now seems to be shaped by the recognition that neither socialism nor communism has ever happened — at least not in any version that would make sense to an anti-authoritarian like myself. (Wait! I’m not so much an anti-authoritarian as I am a pro-liberty(arian) [[libertarian?! … a foul word here in America, where it refers to a perverse form of pro-capitalist mind slurry. I’m a socialist! That is, I believe “the people” (polis — and not necessarily a city!) should democratically organize itself — economically and politically — in a way which maximizes liberty over power-hoarding. (Power referring to a conjuncture of accumulation in property and/or decision-making, with each being a facet or feature of the other. I’m an “individualist” in the same degree and kind as I am a “collectivist” — because I don’t believe either of these ostensibly two are opposed to one another in the least, but that they form a complemetarity — a necessary complementarity.
Anyway, I can’t find an intelletual home in the common currents which devide those to commitments from one another! So what is autonomy in such a context as one in which these two are not two, but form a whole together? A complementarity?
What happens when those who advocate for family and kinship and villaging and neighboring join together and honor one another fully in solidarity as folks trying simply to revive a tradition which globalizing capitalist industrialism flattened under its boot over a couple of centuries? What happens when we acknowledge that the gap between “schools” of thought are not so great as we may have previously imagined?
I don’t think I yet know how to think these questions adequately. To do so, I’m beginning to suspect, I’ll have to grapple a lot more with a lineage of thought which includes voices like Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation), Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power, Technics and Civilization) Jacques Ellul…, Ivan Illich… a lineage of thinkers who all had things to say about what I think R. W. Emerson may have been alluding to when he said “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind”.
But how can I read these books, and your books, and all of the other books all at once? I cannot! To wrestle with these matters is, in large part, to pay close attention to what is right before my eyes! (ears, nose, skin…).
A correction of myself:
“In lots of ways, my intellectual life now seems to be shaped by the recognition that neither socialism nor communism has ever happened — at least not in any version that would make sense to an anti-authoritarian like myself.”
Sorry, I meant only that these have never occurred within a “state” as a “state project” in modernity.
Pro-capitalist mind slurry of the Austrian variety has taken over Argentina from the socialists. If it succeeds you can always say that the socialists weren’t real socialists.
Have you ever considered that socialism is a mirage? That it’s always out of reach, that the grasping for it will always and ever be a tool for manipulation by wannabe dictators?
@ Greg Taylor –
‘Have you ever considered that socialism is a mirage? That it’s always out of reach, that the grasping for it will always and ever be a tool for manipulation by wannabe dictators?”
Nah, not so much. Overwhelmingly most people, as it seems to me, don’t know and understand that what socialism really amounts to is ownership of the “means of production” by all of the people, as contrasted with a special ownership class. But, by implication, socialism also means an ownership of democratic processes of decision-making by ordinary and everyday people, as well, and that socialism must therefore be radically democratic.
If you’re with me on these points we might have an interesting conversation on the topic. If you’re doubtful about what I say we may still have an interesting conversation on the topic.
Socialism, wherever it has been tried, leads to tyranny. Collective ownership always needs to be brutally enforced as it goes against the psychology of human motivation. See Frank Doikotter for how it turned out in China under the collectives.
The kibbutz movement in Israel fell apart because even small scale collectives run up against the realities of biological bonds: they tried to collectivise childcare and the mother’s mutinied. Socialists fail to take account of the fact that humans are also a means of production and will not be treated as machines.
But to your type of thinking (is it thinking or blind faith in fancy phrases?) those who’ve suffered at the hands of socialists just didn’t have the intelligence to grasp the esoteric majesty and stunning simplicity of the ssocialist system; or the implementers didn’t have the competence or purity of vision to deliver the holy child from the virgin body of theory.
Socialist radical democracy? It has always tended towards the democracy found in the People’s democratic republic of Korea.
As one who has, in the past here, wondered if you’ve ‘over-emphasized agrarian autonomy and self-reliance in my writing’, I found this post very interesting. But also, as a participant in the old ‘doomer’ debate, I’m not quite sure of my response to it.
Chris, you seem resistant to any very positive meaning to be found in the word ‘collectivism’, almost always associating it with state collectivism, or its use within modernist ideologies that justify such states. You are attracted to Stoll’s ‘farmstead-owning collectivism’ here, but I wonder to what extent that is rendered acceptable to you by the role of markets in mediating local collectivities, rather than anything more political. I’d be interested in your answer to that.
For my own part, I’ve often been encouraged by the detail of your small farm future, or even farmer-owned collectivism, if we could call it that now. In particular, you usually frame the ‘ownership’ part as something substantially less rigid than modern ideologies of exclusive private property would like, and so often imply the presence of a localised political scene committed to issues of land redistribution even if the details remain hazy. To be clear, I think arguments over common and private property are something of a red herring here – I’ve long agreed with you, I think, that common ‘property’ is more usefully thought through as common ‘management’ of (some) resources, in which individuals each have a stake.
But back to politics. I also wonder about the extent to which ‘moral economies’ are also invoked here to avoid dealing with the political implications of local societies. And so to ‘doomerism’. If you had defined a doomer as one who simply doesn’t see ‘any dominant technological or political trend in modernist global society that’s going to rescue it from biophysical and socioeconomic disorder’, I think we’d have had a lot less to argue about. But I think doomerism also often implies a fundamental lack of faith in politics per se, rather than only currently existing trends. Sometimes it’s explicit: for Eliot Jacobson, ‘the world becomes non-political’.
My own feeling on this is that building a new localised politics is essential – and yes, ‘local’ means there can be no totalising blueprint, but at the same time I think it must also grapple with commitments to larger scales of politics, while remaining fundamentally bottom-up – and yes, this will be hard. But it does mean continuing to recognise disparities in power at larger scales and asking how they might be acted upon. I feel that in the post above you belittle anti-colonial arguments as, essentially, ‘a self-indulgent affectation of, shall we say, ‘well fed’ people in the Global North’. And yet regardless of how the chips eventually fall (the rich may well not be able to ride things out forever in their shiny lifeboats for ever) I think an important point in anti-colonial argumentation is the need to resist violence and the attempted imposition of power and control in the present.
To use an extreme if extremely relevant example, olive farmers in Palestine who want to reconstitute a local peasantry around the resources and practices bequeathed by their forebears will almost certainly not have the luxury of waiting to build the ‘better life-world to come once the fire of the settler-colonial world-holocaust has burned out’, because that fire is about to consume them. For Palestinians and Israelis, the idea that the world can be made non-political is laughable – to have any chance at terraforming locally they need to build a new politics in the present that escapes the modernist hellscape they currently inhabit as part and parcel of building their better life-worlds for the future.
I don’t think that being a settler will be ‘an increasingly common human experience in the future’; I think that honour will go to being a refugee. I think that, without doing a disservice to refugees enduring horrific conditions across the world, the word might even be given a valence particular to the global north, where so many of us are estranged from a productive relationship to our local landscapes and are kept out by the power structures of the societies we live in. The remedy will need to be sought in building the localised terraformed small farm collectivisms that you espouse, but I think that such construction will also require a continuing engagement with politics on a range of scales.
@ Andrew –
While I have for a very long time basically understood that the term “politics” refers not only to that mode of politics which occurs within state institutions, of whatever scale (a city council in a small town being a state institution in this respect), but also to group decision-making outside of state institutions, it has only been recently that I’ve recognized a potential for non-state forms of politics to offer an avenue for political transformation outside of state politics. Theoretically, this would be the case even where the state’s political institutions are very strong and well-established.
Max Weber rather famously defined “the state” as a form of institution which has coalesced around the maintenance of a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force / violence. And it’s not difficult to see that the state system has also tended to consolidate other kinds of monopoly, such as taxation, law-making, etc. But it’s likely that citizens of any given place in many nations in the Global North (and elsewhere) can assert citizen autonomy, or agency (not sure the best word here) through the formation of non-state institutions, both formal and relatively informal.
What are your thoughts on this notion?
Hi James, I think you’re right about the possibility of forming non-state institutions outside/inside/alongside the state, but also that, given the extent of intrusion that legal jurisdictions now enjoy, it is actually quite difficult to be truly ‘outside’ the purview of the state (and I take the state here to be that collection of mechanisms that ensures the legitimacy of legislation as well as its enforcement).
Many people are already involved in community-directed projects that are not necessarily closely bound to the state, but when we broach the topic of land (which much of this boils down to, I think), it is difficult to see how established mechanisms of inheritance and buying/selling/gifting can be levered out of the enforcing grip of state institutions. There are ways in which people might work within the bounds of the state to achieve more community orientated aims, such as through various kinds of trust (including cooperatives), but they, perversely, end up relying on the legal framework supported by the state to maintain their coherence.
So the options polarise, I think, between revolution on the one hand (turbo-charged transformative politics), and, on the other, holding on and hoping that the current status quo collapses under its own contradictions, allowing the survivors to rebuild in some way (the avoidance of politics). The latter, it seems to me, is the preferred route of many who self-identify as doomers. My first comment above explains why I don’t think that’s justifiable, but I’m hardly a budding revolutionary either! What routes lie between these two poles? Often various appeals to compromise, moderation, and an acceptance or even support for the status quo where it allows one’s own immediate interests to be maintained. What else is possible? It would certainly be unfair of me to demand that Chris or anyone else here answers that question, as I certainly can’t. But I do feel the need to keep asking it in various ways. I’d love to hear any thoughts you have on it.
Thanks for the comments. I’m mostly going to address Andrew’s points (good to see you here again, Andrew), which I hope will also address some of James’s. Thanks also Steve & Chris!
Markets, autonomy & livelihood:
My inclinations towards producerism & livelihood autonomy have partly been conditioned by my experiences as a small-scale commercial grower in a world of consumerism where supermarkets set the price and growers routinely grow half as much again or more as ever leaves the farm and plough it in if need be for fear of not making their contract for ultra-low price and cosmetically perfect produce. I’ve never played that game, but it conditions the game I have played and I’m not up for playing it any more.
But beyond the circle of capitalist consumerism, a lot of societies emphasize the virtues of individual people having the skills and resources to furnish much of their daily needs themselves – always as part of a larger community, of course, but nonetheless with considerable emphasis on personal livelihood-making. In the face of the terrible economics of the global food and farming system, I’ve been drawn to advocating that producerist model, rather than existing consumerist ones.
However, when you consider people like Stoll’s Appalachians or the African smallholders that Million Belay describes – people who genuinely have to rely on their own hand to produce almost all of their daily material livelihood – then the attractions of the marketplace come into focus. If these people can produce something on their landholdings relatively easily that people with money are willing to buy, this can make their life a lot easier.
So my remarks in the post above about markets were driven mostly by trying to tread the line between the faux market economy of the present monopoly food system and a possible market economy of a peasant food system (with Smith’s arguments about the ‘natural’ commercial economy of an agrarian society against the ‘unnatural’ colonial-trade economy of a capitalist society in the background). As I know all too well from recent arguments, a lot of people seem to think of cheap food as a kind of entitlement of modernity. I strongly disagree with that view.
Collectivism:
Present company excepted, I have a suspicion that a lot of left-leaning people who are aware at some level of the need for more local future livelihoods invoke the idea of collectivism because they don’t really like the thought of having to milk the cow, hoe the onions, spread the compost or clean the ditches, and they’re labouring under the misapprehension that the hard work involved in all that will somehow disappear if it’s done ‘collectively’. My view is that the collectivism mostly just adds a whole additional layer of hard political work on top of the farm chores.
But that aside, I think I’m in agreement with Andrew about the need for collectivism at some level (humans are political animals, and all that) and I agree that collectivism is inherently and intensely political. Again, this is a major reason why I emphasize limiting collectivism wherever possible, because politics is hard work. Imagine organising all the necessities of life in a community or bioregion on an entirely collective basis, where everybody’s voice counted equally and everybody’s voice had to be heard in relation to every decision. I’m drawn to Oscar Wilde’s remark that ‘the trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings’.
This is one of the two major reasons why collectivist political thought becomes statist or hierarchical in practice. Collectivism then gets invoked as an ideological veneer for something that isn’t collective (often some variant on the will of the people or an approved subset thereof), and indeed I’m resistant to what I see as false collectivisms of this sort. I prefer the distributist emphasis on subsidiarity: make decisions at the lowest appropriate level of collectivity. Of course, that raises questions about how and who determines appropriate levels, which are … political.
This is where moral economies come in. I agree that this can be just another feelgood phrase like ‘collective’ and it can bury potential conflicts, but I think it has a harder political edge in drawing attention to the boundaries of what has to be agreed and what doesn’t. I can’t really see a viable and non-statist or non-dominant collective politics except in the context of a moral economy with a lot of shared assumptions and shared lifeways in respect of substantial self-provision of basic livelihood. I’m not saying it’s non-political. But I think it’s political in a less generic and more practically useful way.
I concede my descriptions of how that kind of politics might proceed remain hazy. Partly because I don’t really see the virtue of producing blueprints from my keyboard which are bound to be dead on arrival. When I publish my great unfinished novel (actually, my unstarted novel), perhaps I will try to flesh out how things might unfold and what difficulties may arise along the way. I think we have to start at a more cultural-spiritual level, because the problem isn’t about political procedures but about how we see the nature of the world and people’s place within it.
It strikes me that a lot of the examples of well-functioning collectivist politics favoured on the left (the Zapatistas, Cuba’s special period and so on) are basically moral economies of people often with strong pre-existing ties (shared lifeways, shared culture) organizing practical livelihoods within conflicted political contexts that rise to wider salience.
Doomerism & politics
I fully agree with this from Andrew:
“building a new localised politics is essential – and yes, ‘local’ means there can be no totalising blueprint, but at the same time I think it must also grapple with commitments to larger scales of politics, while remaining fundamentally bottom-up”
I’ve tried to do this in my writing, while struggling with that ‘no totalising blueprint … also grappling … fundamentally bottom-up’ nexus. This is what I hope to move on to more directly in future writing.
So yes, I agree that Jacobson’s ‘non-political’ point is a bit naïve. As per James’s points, I think a lot that passes for ‘the political’ in contemporary life is irrelevant froth. Nonetheless I agree that the political in its true sense can’t be expunged … although I think much of the rest of Jacobson’s article is consistent with a more political reading of climate futures, and aside from passing nostrums of the “we’re screwed, but what can you do?” sort, I don’t agree that doomerism is less political or lacks faith in the political more than other orientations to present problems. If anything, the opposite.
Regarding Andrew’s point about me belittling anti-colonial arguments, I can see how my post might give that impression and, again, I agree on “the need to resist violence and the attempted imposition of power and control in the present”.
However, paralleling Ghosh, I think way too much of the discussions I find myself in involve fairly privileged people who invoke the violence and suffering of the oppressed as rhetorical support in their arguments with other privileged people under the hidden assumption that we’ll stay privileged and the challenge is merely how to open the door to that privilege for others. No doubt my take here has become a bit jaded in the face of critics of mine such as Heffron & Heron, and now Monbiot’s ‘Cruel fantasies of well-fed people’, rhetorically arming themselves against me using the poor and oppressed as their pawns (like pieces on a chessboard…) Leaving that aside, privilege does limit perspective, as Ghosh repeatedly emphasizes, but I think Andrew is right to move towards a view of this at the end of his comment that violence and power will increasingly manifest in more open and contingent ways than current political traditions and geopolitical assumptions allow for. Ghosh also makes this point.
But I’m not sure what point of disagreement with me you’re articulating with your Gaza example, Andrew. Possibly it arises from the ambiguity of my phrasing in this sentence: “The challenge then is to do what we can to start reconstructing a better life-world to come once the fire of the settler-colonial world-holocaust has burned out” … by which I didn’t mean that people should wait until the fire had burned out to do anything. I meant that people should be working on reconstructing better life-worlds now that will hopefully come to fruition once the already burning fires are out (probably a bad metaphor in that there will always be new fires). It was kind of a generic global point about what I think everybody should be doing right now, but if we’re to apply it to specific situations I’d have thought it would apply all the more obviously in Gaza at the moment than it does in, say, England. If the argument is that it’s impossible to transcend settler-colonial violence, that seems quite apolitical?
Refugees
Again, I’m not quite sure what the point of disagreement is around your preference for ‘refugees’ over ‘settlers’, Andrew. I agree with the last sentence of your comment, but that surely implies refugees becoming settlers. People might be ‘refugees’ in a more legalistic sense and be stigmatised and treated as a problem in the places they go – in which case they will not have found refuge. However, if there’s to be any building of the ‘localised terraformed small farm collectivisms’ I espouse, that implies settling – including by people who might already be in place but who are not ‘settled’ there. Maybe the argument is about the number of settlers there will be in the future trying to build a home versus the number of refugees who are denied a home? You’re right of course to mention the importance of the latter. It’s implicit in my argument that there will be a lot of refugees in the future (both internal and external to existing nation-states) and the key task is for refugees to become settlers (again avoiding the assumption that it’s within the gift of the ‘privileged’ simply to accord refuge). So maybe it’s just a case of me thanking you for that clarification?
Just to add in relation to this new comment from Andrew:
“So the options polarise, I think, between revolution on the one hand (turbo-charged transformative politics), and, on the other, holding on and hoping that the current status quo collapses under its own contradictions, allowing the survivors to rebuild in some way (the avoidance of politics)”
I don’t see it that way. On the latter pole, I don’t think it’s a case of hoping the status quo collapses, and nor can any rebuilding avoid politics. Rather, it’s a case of thinking that the status quo is unavoidably collapsing, and acknowledging that the main kinds of politics and solutions to problems that have been pursued within the status quo of the recent past are at best of limited help in dealing with the consequences. Saying ‘we can’t stop this, we don’t know what to do about it and we no longer have any really convincing political stories about the world that’s emerging’ is not avoiding politics. I see it as just being honest about the conditions within which politics must now occur.
On the former pole, I guess revolutions are intrinsically political in that people who bring down governments always have a political account about why they’re trying to replace the existing government with their own preferred one, but as I see it a revolution is basically a method of regime change which fits more or less into the same category as an election. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but I don’t see any reason to think the politics will be adequate to the situation just because it’s delivered by revolutionary means.
…however, as I’ve argued recently, I think we’re seeing the emergence of new kinds of class politics.
” …. Rather, it’s a case of thinking that the status quo is unavoidably collapsing, and acknowledging that the main kinds of politics and solutions to problems that have been pursued within the status quo of the recent past are at best of limited help in dealing with the consequences. Saying ‘we can’t stop this, we don’t know what to do about it and we no longer have any really convincing political stories about the world that’s emerging’ is not avoiding politics. I see it as just being honest about the conditions within which politics must now occur.”
As I see it, we have what could be called a “mass politics problem” in our world, and by “our world” I suppose I’m mainly referring to what is often called “the global North” or “rich countries”. Our mainstream sense of how the world is, and what the risks are, and how we might respond to those risks, are (in my view) just plain delusional. There is no match between our actual situation and how the mainstream of the culture imagines things to be — and talks about things.
Mass politics is “the politics of the state”. And, as I now see it, “the state,” throughout the rich world / global North, is a consolidation of unquestioned, and largely unquestionable (except on the fringe) ideological assumptions, habits, attitudes…, which are essentially false, usually because obsolete in the the sense of being “no longer useful” (Referencing the Merriam-Webster definition of obsolete found here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obsolete .
In other words, I see “mass politics” in the global North as woven warp and woof with delusion, ignorance and stupidity which results in those who are less deluded, ignorant and stupid from taking proactive steps to prepare for the future which is coming soon to a theater near … us. But then, I live in the USA, where this is so in your face that the world around me often appears like Disneyland woven together with the Jerry Springer Show (which latter reference may only be familiar to Americans).
Long ago, here in the USA, and in some other countries within the Global North, big business and corporations pretty much fully fused with what we call “the government” (a.k.a., the state), and the result is that it’s not possible within mass politics to challenge the ideology (and practices of the ideology) of the state within the state’s mode and system of politics — usually not even at the local level. Only the delusions are allowed a place at that table, not reality. As soon as you begin to talk about what’s real people are shifting their attention to something else, changing the subject — because they will think you are entirely mad if you don’t accept the Disneyland narrative about the world.
This is why I’m so often trying to find ways of doing politics outside of the state and its systems. I see it as mad. It sees me as mad. I try to ignore it. It tries to ignore me — and the people like me.
“On the former pole, I guess revolutions are intrinsically political in that people who bring down governments always have a political account about why they’re trying to replace the existing government with their own preferred one, but as I see it a revolution is basically a method of regime change which fits more or less into the same category as an election. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but I don’t see any reason to think the politics will be adequate to the situation just because it’s delivered by revolutionary means.”
This perfectly describes the conventional, traditional, habitual … notion of revolution. But for years now I’ve been trying to re-imagine revolution along the lines of what I describe here:
Revolution 2.0
https://rword.substack.com/p/revolution-20
In my view, revolution through insurrection and violence is simply not a way to take on the regime which dominates and oppresses us. It cannot work. All it can do is get us killed — while making the Machine of the delusional state all the more powerful at oppressing and dominating us.
There are three major necessary ingredients in the revolution I think of as within the margins of possibility.
1. An honest and fact-based perspective on our current situation (Waking up from the delusions of the dominant culture and its politics)
2. Organization toward mutual empowerment among those who are not caught in the delusions of the dominant culture
3. A spirit of loving kindness and solidarity among those not so deluded
Much else is also needed, but these three are like striking the match to light the candle in the darkness.
…
I don’t want to wait for “collapse” to force us to do what we should be doing now … which is building a bridge to a more reasonable and sane world, and one where folks will have access to livelihood. That bridge project is immense. It takes time. We don’t even have enough time, but we should use whatever time we have. But we cannot build that bridge within the Megamachine of the state’s delusional political imagination.
2.
Thanks Chris, it’s good to be back discussing these issues again!
Markets, autonomy and livelihood:
Thanks for clarifying the background – I appreciate the need to emphasise the producerist perspective. I suppose, walking back a little from extreme forms of autonomy, the most useful perspective will be ‘mixed’, in the sense that everyone will need to be considered both producer and consumer when it comes to the basics of nutrition and inhabitation. The question of how they choose to redistribute these within their communities is open to several kinds of answer, of which a commercial economy is one. The need for money as a medium of exchange within that economy will, of course, raise other problems at a more political level – which may well deserve their own blog cycle!
Collectivism:
We can both clearly concede that these labels work ideologically in some modern discourses to paper over issues that should rather be confronted – I can see how ‘collectivism’ is sometimes used as a talisman in that way.
Accepting that and moving forward, I think that politics of a ‘less generic and more practically useful’ kind is precisely what I would love to see emerging! Socialism only takes up too many evenings if it is limited to rarefied theoretical hair-splitting – if instead it articulates the organisation of the community, enabling cooperation and dispute resolution, then the problem isn’t real. Granted Wilde may have been referring to the former, but it’s a red herring in my view – like Garret Harding assuming nobody bothers to cooperate when managing a common. The trade union movement is perhaps a better example of politics of a less generic and more practically useful kind.
I agree that an important element in any politics is agreeing where the boundaries of politicisation lie. I’m still unclear as to exactly what ‘moral economy’ gets at that isn’t simply political – any society features ‘shared assumptions and shared lifeways’, which may or may not need to be brought within the political depending on circumstances. Are you suggesting there are some things that should basically be off-limits to politics, no matter what the circumstances? One thing that bothers me about that sort of idea is that it is precisely a set of shared assumptions and associated lifeways around exclusive/absolute private property that is getting in the way of opening up a small farm future here and now.
Doomerism and politics:
Looking forward to your future writing on this! I agree on the danger of leveraging the poor and oppressed for rhetorical effect, and Monbiot is a good example of this. Likewise, doomerism is a more multi-pronged discourse than I used to give it credit for, although I think there remains an element of politics avoidance among some. But perhaps this can only lead to splitting hairs, and I can’t complain too much if Jason Snyder keeps producing interesting content under the DO label.
My Gaza example was in part based on a reading of your sentence that you clarified above, but also to make the point that building new lifeworlds can’t escape the political. Perhaps it now serves to highlight the difficulty of establishing moral economies, in that creating shared assumptions around the goals of localised politics is going to be very difficult in societies riven with conflict. The fissures are spectacular in Israel/Palestine, but perhaps also deep in more peaceful societies that are nevertheless marred by inequities. In that sense, I’m not sure you can get to equitable moral economies without a lot of political work. The Zapatistas have been working on it for decades, and perhaps there never will be an end in sight.
Refugees:
Again, I’m wary of splitting hairs here, but ‘settler’ does bring a lot of colonial baggage, no matter how carefully you define it. Robinson Crusoe always lurks in the wings, and there’s a sense of painting on a blank canvas – terra nullius, etc. ‘Refugee’ certainly implies settlement, but in pre-existing circumstances, not necessarily friendly, that always have to be confronted in some way. It strikes me as a better metaphor for how we should face the future, as well as pushing solidarity with the most vulnerable – a good way to create a set of shared assumptions about what we need to politicise as we go.
Revolution:
I think both ends of the scale involve ‘being honest’ about the nature of contemporary conditions – self-delusion is more characteristic of the centre, and those who see something of value in the status quo even as it is collapsing. If being honest about conditions leads one to commitments about what ‘politics must now occur’, to my mind that puts one closer to the revolutionary end (so I agree with James’s point 1 above).
But revolutions are messy – I take your points about regime change. Revolutions are always incomplete (from the point of view of the initial political programme/manifesto), always inflected with elements of counter-revolution – never ‘perfect’. And for that reason they are not only destructive but also dangerous, in the sense that nobody can guarantee exactly what kind of regime will emerge at the end – ‘I don’t see any reason to think the politics will be adequate to the situation just because it’s delivered by revolutionary means’. Quite. But where fundamental transformation is desirable, I can see the attraction! Perhaps we do need to look more closely at the more long-form kinds of revolutionary experiments currently underway – Zapatistas, MST, Rojava, Venezuela – for more clarity on this.
James, on points 2 and 3 I’m less convinced- not that these commitments aren’t worthwhile, but that they will be effective in leading transformation. They are maybe necessary but not sufficient to any lasting revolution- the devil is in the detail of point 2, I would think.
Andrew wrote “Socialism only takes up too many evenings if it is limited to rarefied theoretical hair-splitting – if instead it articulates the organisation of the community, enabling cooperation and dispute resolution, then the problem isn’t real.”
There is still a problem if the organisation of the community, arranging the ongoing cooperation, and resolving the inevitable disputes takes up too many evenings. Even cohousing communities, a far cry from socialism, can have a bunch of evening meetings.
It seems that less wrangling would be required with a higher degree of “shared assumptions and shared lifeways”. The Amish might be a good example.
Andrew:
“James, on points 2 and 3 I’m less convinced- not that these commitments aren’t worthwhile, but that they will be effective in leading transformation. They are maybe necessary but not sufficient to any lasting revolution- the devil is in the detail of point 2, I would think.”
I think I was pretty clear that I didn’t think that very short list was sufficient. I said,
“Much else is also needed, but these three are like striking the match to light the candle in the darkness.”
There are hundreds of items which could be put on such a list. Near the top of the list is that a certain kind of generative dialogue — a highly imaginative and largely experimental generative dialogue — would seem to me to be necessary, the task of which would be to radically re-imagine and re-frame what revolutionary engagement doesn’t come down to the use of force, violence and insurrection.
A lot has been written about non-violent revolution, but the overwhelming most of this writing has been oriented toward political regime change in the typical, standard sense of “regime change”. That’s not what “Revolution 2.O” is about. The goal of revolution 2.0 (R2) is social, cultural and political transformation (not merely ‘reform’), but R2 intends not to get bogged down and misdirected by the goal of changing political parties and regimes in the common sense of these terms. Rather, R2 would shift the very essence of what we imagine political engagement to be. I hint at some of my thinking on this here:
Nonviolent Revolutionary Prefigurative Direct Action — a school of praxis
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-08-08/nonviolent-revolutionary-prefigurative-direct-action-a-school-of-praxis/
I think the key feature of a non-violent revolution of the R2 type would have to be the prefigurative component. It would be about enacting the way of life we want to live, empowering one another to do so, cooperating and collaborating with one another to empower others to do the same, and doing it in an organized way which seeks to draw in a LOT more participants than we have at present. Strategy and tactics here are utterly unlike those in R1. (Classic Revolution of the sort which puts weapons front and center.)
I always say that imagination is key. This to me is the most obvious part. There cannot be R2 without putting imagination front and center — and dialogue, which two are for me facets of the very same thing.
Chris says …”we have to start at a more cultural-spiritual level”…
Exactly.
To oversimplify, as I see it, nearly all of our current predicament follows from the crazy urge to turn the living world into dead money.
This, as James says is a blinding delusion that we privileged northerners almost never notice.
I also agree with James about the necessity and possibility for non-violent revolution; “A spirit of loving kindness and solidarity”… indeed.
What I fear is the ever-present threat of violence coming from a significant portion of my own species.
That’s how I read the recent news, anyway.
Thanks
Thanks for the debate. A few follow up points.
– Mediating producers & consumers. Yes this is tricky. The advantage of money is that it can ease one’s dependence on networks of kinship or status. If you can’t simply buy land, for example, you might have to find ways of getting friendly with the mayor. But there are disadvantages with money, of course. One of the interesting things about Stoll’s book is the way that a non-monetary Appalachian local economy operated both outside and within the surrounding monetary economy. Its currency was whisky. Hamilton’s whisky tax was a big deal – and in Stoll’s accounting Hamilton was a key originator of the modern notion of the state which most of us here are kicking against.
– Evening socialism. I’m with Steve. Without subsidiarity, I think you’re committing yourself either to hierarchy or to continuous meetings to thrash out every damn thing. Even in our little non-egalitarian land community here with its population of around ten, there’s a real time cost to sorting out community issues which increases in rough proportion with the numbers.
– Trade unions. A necessary evil IMO in a capitalist society, but ultimately they seem to me like a counter-manifestation of the Machine – another machine, relying on an ultimate weapon in the form of a labour strike. I’m more interested in guilds and would welcome some discussion around them. Peasant farmers can’t strike, but they can withdraw their labour from the wider economy.
– Moral economies. This arose in the discussion in contrast to collectivism, but they occupy conceptually distinct niches. I’m not saying that moral economies are not political, but I guess I am saying that, yes, the way they work is to make things off limits to politics. If they didn’t, I think we’d be back to the excess of evening meetings. I’m not saying it’s wise to make things off limits to politics always and forever, but their essence involves an account of what a good person in this society would do in such-and-such a situation. You could argue that this acts as a drag on political change, but that’s not always a bad thing. You could flip Andrew’s example of absolute private property – I’d argue that’s typically been the outcome of long modernist wars against more sensible moral economies concerning the nature of access to land. Moral economies are inevitably subject to change, but I believe it’s necessary to rebuild cultures of limits. It’s important to be able to question the limits. It’s also important to understand why limits are needed.
– Conflict riven societies. I agree that it’s very difficult to build these cultures, especially in conflict riven societies, and that it’s necessary to devote a lot of political work to them, which is important work to do. But this is why I’m not sympathetic to the kind of leftist collectivism that insists a family-based farm is a moral outrage, and all carrots must be grown by committee. I parody, but not much. Doing the political work is hard enough without dreaming up more of it to do. I’ve also become more interested in recent years in conflict resolution and regenerative culture type approaches which traditional leftists would no doubt scorn for their bourgeois individualism … but I think they can work because structures live through individual interactions. Equally, I’m interested in emerging class divisions and their uncertain implications. I need to do more political work on all this!
– Revolutions. Thanks for the discussion. A lot of interesting points … I don’t have an awful lot to add at the moment, but it’s something to come back to. I think we need fast and fundamental cultural and political change. But I don’t think it’s going to happen in the same way as modernist political revolutions did via the central political apparatus. I hope I can talk about this emerging in the context of crisis and collapse without this being dismissed as apolitical, or being subjected to Monbiot-style jibes.
– Refugees. I understand where you’re coming from Andrew, and I acknowledge the troubled connotations of ‘settler’. At the same time, maybe there’s a case for keeping them in the forefront of the mind by using the term. Am I a settler here, or only a settler-colonist? Ultimately I think people need to be settled, to settle down, to be denizens and ecological protagonists. Refugee doesn’t really work in that context. But it probably does work in the present context for most of us, as you say. So … I’m a refugee, but also an aspiring non-colonial settler.
I wonder if the time taken up by Evening Socialism might not be so onerous if it were considered part of the working day, rather than something that eats into what we conceive of as “leisure” time. There’s something here about the pushing of politics (along with family life, a fair amount of religion, volunteering with charities, general civic participation, and just about anything else that might threaten crapitalism) into the “leisure” box that makes it feel both burdensome and optional.
Interesting point. Another aspect of this is individual differences. Some people like working collectively more than others, and some people are more skilled at the political arts and like to spend time deliberating more than others. I’m fearful of expanding the ambit of enforced deliberation too much. Some of the people I’ve encountered who are most insistent on collective democratic deliberation seem quite domineering sorts, and I suspect this kind of politics would suit them very well!
Certainly people who seem to usually get what they want in “consensus” discussions think that consensus discussions are a good way to govern everything, without necessarily examining how much of their privilege in the current context is contributing to them getting what they want most of the time. Having recently witnessed someone attempting to generate consensus by the asking of leading questions to committee members, I’m currently grateful that reaching consensus, or even consent for a particular course of action, can be harder than that.
It reminds me a bit of those who believe that if they explain their position well enough, people will of course agree with them, or those who believe that if you simply explain to poor people that they should get a job, they’ll stop being poor at you.
A quick response on political labour, I meant to pick this up earlier. Chris said:
‘Imagine organising all the necessities of life in a community or bioregion on an entirely collective basis, where everybody’s voice counted equally and everybody’s voice had to be heard in relation to every decision.’
I agree that would be prohibitive, but that doesn’t have to describe an effective localised equitable politics. Subsidiarity is invoked above as something of an alternative to such politics, but I would consider it a good political principle, or rather a good strategic approach to politicised collective organisation, just as Chris defines it: ‘mak[ing] decisions at the lowest appropriate level of collectivity’.
More broadly, other political notions such as representation and accountability are also of value here; they are not just products of our modern mass politics, and would repay investment – they are useful ways of thinking through the challenges of organising small farm societies.
Relatedly, on trade unions, I chose them as an example of good practical collective action. That trade unions are a necessary evil only in a capitalist society is sort of the point I was trying to make – they represent a good use of political labour keyed to the conditions in which they are likely to have most practical use. Now imagine what it might mean to build a political organisation appropriate to a small farm future – yes, it would look nothing like a trade union, but like a trade union it would, at its best, be responsive to the needs and projects of that society.
Of course, trade unions are the kinds of collectivity that do indeed take up evenings, or time outside work, precisely because they are intended to confront problems with the ‘day job’. But if political organisation was part of the day job, it would be less of an issue – i.e. it is possible to conceive of societies in which politicised organisational practices should form part of the work it is considered normal and productive to carry out every day.
I’m not sure where this sits with moral economies and limits. It might be worth considering that overtly politicised procedures – i.e. those in which formalities have been institutionalised to some extent – can actually aid in defining limits by feeding the fluidity, variability and emotional unpredictability of messy human relationships along commonly understood tramlines that act to produce resolutions in a collectively acceptable form. Perhaps what we’re circling around here is the drawing up of local constitutions. Or maybe guild statutes – Chris, I’m interested to see what aspects of guilds you find attractive.
Of course none of this really tackles the revolution/transformation problem – to put it bluntly how do we disappropriate an established landholding class, preferably non-violently, yet quickly?
to put it bluntly how do we disappropriate an established landholding class, preferably non-violently, yet quickly?
We could just wait. When they no longer have the fossil energy to (indrectly) compel others to industrial commodity farming on their behalf, they’ll get pretty hungry pretty fast and start to realise that having people on the land to tend it so that it’s productive and they get something to eat is probably better than not.
The journey toward that realisation is could get pretty grim though. I don’t have any good answers here.
When they no longer have fossil energy neither will anyone else and it won’t just be landowners who are hungry – assuming there’s still means of enforcing the claims of ownership then exploitation rather than redistribution seems more likely to me. That’s certainly the history of UK agriculture in 17th to 19th centuries. In North Devon prior to the first world war there were farm workers working simply for board and lodge
I suspect that, sadly, that kind of exploitation in agricultural labour is highly likely, simply because it is already widespread, including in the UK. (See https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-10-22/all-that-is-missing-is-a-whip-home-office-ignored-migrant-worker-abuses-on-farms for some UK examples). One of my reasons for focusing more on tomatoes and strawberries than on calorie crops at the allotment is that if someone works long hours in poor conditions without fair pay so I can eat highly perishable seasonal fruit, I figure that had better be me.
It will be interesting (not necessarily in a good way) to see what happens with regard to economic and political power if we really no longer live in a climate stable enough for substantial grain agriculture. (Has anyone done a study of, say, weather patterns/crop yields in Europe since the Black Death and how that impacted economic and therefore political power? If not, I’m sure there’s a dissertation in it for someone — but in addition to things like whether an area is more vulnerable to invasion after a small famine, it would need to also take into account colonialism and slavery.)
A pertinent question here might be:
How were claims of land ownership upheld and enforced in North Devon in the 17th to 19th centuries?
My (very basic) understanding is that there was some enclosure going on there, associated with the wool trade.
Sorry, I just discovered this little thread, to which I owe a reply.
‘We could just wait.’
As you both suggest, by that approach things will probably get much worse before they get better, if they get better. I think it’s the attitude of a certain kind of doomer, who hopes to build a kind of landed lifeboat and wait it out. In my view it’s not an option, as I explained in earlier comments, but I feel like we’re in a sort of ‘rabbit in the headlights’ moment. Gramsci’s comment about the old world dying and the new struggling to be born gets at it to a degree, but doesn’t get at the frustration of trying to work out how to struggle – the new world has yet to approach the birth canal and it’s not clear if it’s the right way round or not.
‘How were claims of land ownership upheld and enforced in North Devon in the 17th to 19th centuries?’
I can’t speak to North Devon, but more broadly I think this is the heart of the problem. I’m partial to Andro Linklater’s focus on the 16th-century emergence of land as a commodity, to be granted, bought and sold without hindrance, and thus of private landed property in its modern form. And so the glib answer to the question is that claims were upheld and enforced through the unleashing of the law and its enforcement mechanisms – the ‘Bloody Code’, ‘Albion’s Fatal Tree’, etc.
We’re not likely to be hanged if we act against privvate property anymore, but legal protection is just as pertinent as it was two centuries ago. Some forms of tresspass were made into criminal offences in the UK by legislation passed only last year. Further down these comments I’m part of a discussion that, in Chris’s words, is trying to ‘prefigure’ desirable political arrangements for the future, but to make that a possibility, overcoming modern state-defended private property really is the elephant in the room.
Indeed. My comment was somewhat morbid; the “wait” option is already grim and it isn’t likely to improve without active efforts at substantial improvement.
But I am also not very confident of the possibility that we actually can turn politics around more globally. The fact is that the rich are not really interested in making things better for the rest of us, and I don’t know how to change that. Trespass is not the only thing to have been criminalised in recent years! And even if we do see a massive change in politics — I do think one is needed — political upheaval usually ends very badly for whatever portion of the population is seen as a scapegoat. It is not enough to get the current lot of political leaders out; there needs to be a recognition of what actual good governance looks like, and a working toward that at all levels. I sometimes feel that there is more to be done in seeking good media than in seeking to sort out the mess that is current electoral politics, but I’m honestly not sure where to start with either, so I vote and I write to my MP sometimes and I used to protest but between the hostile environment for immigrants and the criminalisation of being annoying in public, I’m no longer very keen on putting my body on the line in quite that way.
I am even less confident, though, that people will somehow be inspired to be better without the cost of political upheaval. I don’t believe that through whatever hardship the polycrisis brings, we will somehow undergo some kind of mass spiritual awakening to a greater level of awareness of our place in the world and our relationships to one another and other living beings and to materials and energy. Maybe that’s because I’m a member of a faith that has waited expectantly for two thousand years for some kind of transformation, and while I certainly believe it is ultimately inevitable, I am forced by observed reality to sit lightly to any specific claims about when such transformation might come (even as I pray that it might come quickly). Maybe it’s because I’ve watched the conditions for the poorest people in the UK get worse and worse since about 2010.
It is quite the conundrum, and it is certainly uncomfortable to have some idea of how much trouble we are in, but not be able to see a clear way out.
I was listening to a podcast the other day which referred to ecologial refugia — “habitats that components of biodiversity retreat to, persist in and can potentially expand from under changing environmental conditions” (see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1466-8238.2011.00686.x ) — in the context of church communities during ecological and economic (but I repeat myself) and political (…again with the repetition) turmoil, and thinking about how we can make our communities into sort of refuges. Importantly, this was described not as conservation or preservation of a past or present way of life, but of constructing something better, fairer, more equitable and life-giving than what we see in the mainstream now. For me, that’s a big distinction between “build a bunker and ride it out” doomerism and what I am trying to do — and what I hope is the wider project in which many of us here are participating. Faced with the tension between a decent life for my household and a decent life for people with much less privilege than we have, I try to provision for myself and my immediate community in ways that can help, not harm, other people and the natural world of which we are all a part. I focus on learning skills instead of stockpiling things; on sharing produce and seeds and building soil and relationships. Faced with some understanding of the precariousness of the way we live now, I try to make choices that lead to resilience, both locally and in some small way more globally. Faced with people who have been chewed up and then abandoned by crapitalism, I choose to stay present rather than turning away.
This approach is not sufficient to change the face of politics or to heal the spiritual restlessness that is part of being human or to undo the various wounds of the current system. But it is still necessary; and it isn’t the same thing as either passive waiting or bunker-buildng.
I think another important component of what I’ll call the “refugia” approach is that it is iterative. While not always scalable, it is replicable.
One person with part-time dayjob commitments and a bit of diligence can, in fact, learn the things I have learned, or equivalents for their locality. One person can find voluntary charitable projects to get involved with, and one person can usually influence those projects to be more “working with” than “doing to” in their approach. One person can get an allotment or ask neighbours for growing space or find a little neglected bit of land to tend on a “guerilla gardening” basis and get on with doing that. One person can learn to compost and teach others. One person can make a commitment to no factory-farmed fruit, or to only eating high-welfare meat, even if they can’t have livestock or an orchard themselves. One person can start to orient their life to a future where driving around won’t be possible, where purchasing things not made locally will be expensive, where we can’t throw fossil energy at our problems.
One person with more resources than I have — maybe with land or with money to buy it — can do quite a bit more than that.
If I were anywhere within reasonable post-fossil travel distance of Chris I expect I’d be getting involved there, too, simply because I would learn so much. I’m not, and London is… kindof a different game. We do have an excellent local Transition Towns group where I live, which I haven’t really gotten stuck into partly because I feel like my impact is greater outside that movement than within it and partly because I try to limit the number of organisations I need to attend meetings for and partly because the events I’m most interested in clash with other things in my schedule, but if I were looking to “find the others” then that is where I would start.
And no — none of this is sufficient. But none of it is bunker-building, none of it is passive waiting. It’s more like planting patches of self-seeding wildflowers and encouraging the patches to spread until they meet up. I won’t single-handedly turn London into a garden, but I don’t need to do that: I need to tend my small patches and extend the edges of them to include more and more people until they meet up with the edges of whoever else is tending their small patch.
@Kathryn
“none of this is sufficient. But none of it is bunker-building, none of it is passive waiting. ”
All valid stuff. I feel that the pace of change will accelerate. We are at the pause between tides.
Gather as much knowledge now, so that it can be shared later. We can’t all as individuals, know all the answers. There has to be an element of “specialisation”, but we can all share what we have learnt.
Oooh. Just seen the edit tool. Clever!!!!
I’ve got no typo excuses now!!!
“how do we disappropriate an established landholding class, preferably non-violently, yet quickly?” caught my eye. As a member of the landholding class I would like a real world example of how this would work.
We bought and paid for our farm with wages we earned by working for someone else. We spent years improving the soil so we could make a living growing vegetables.
A lot of monoculture cash crops here are grown on rented land. Much of that rented farm land is owned by farm widows who have always been cash poor and land rich. The rented land is still their home and makes it possible for them to avoid living on catfood.
I would like someone else to go first and demonstrate how disappropriation would work.
It should be easy. Put up everything you own to buy 10, 50, 100 or more hectares and then turn it into a collective or other arrangement. I can see several areas where problems could arise, but I’m only looking at it through my perspective.
Haven’t read other comments yet so forgive me if this has already been brought up by others. Also I’m attempting to re-create a comment that I accidentally lost.
Stoll rightly points out that markets are the small farmer’s friend, as long as the farmer retains access to non-market sustenance.
“As long as” is sure doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. But the question of how to safeguard against compulsion to grow cover crops (or wait tables, or work 16h days in the widget factory from the age of 8) in order to earn enough money for subsistence/paying the rent is, indeed, going to be some form of politics.
Stoll is one of several influences recently making me wonder if I’ve over-emphasized agrarian autonomy and self-reliance in my writing.
I don’t think you have, though I think some of your detractors would like to paint you into that corner. I recall the example in SFF of the baker that opens “sometimes” — and it seems to me that you have not been against markets per se, but against over-financialisation, and against the compulsion to labour for a wage rather than directly for one’s sustenance.
I think it’s necessary as a defence against the over-commodification of capitalist trade, but I do think trading food and fibre locally is an important part of a congenial small farm society.
A pertinent question here is whether the political governance that move our current society in the direction of agrarian localism is necessarily the same political governance that would defend against over-commification. I’m not sure this is the case, but it’s a difficult prediction to make because both small farm future agrarian localism and whatever political governance conditions we get next (I don’t even know what to call it — post-neoliberal maybe?) are likely to be highly variable according to context (and those contexts are not only local but also to do with belief systems etc…)
Let me try to unpack that a bit, and bear in mind I am thinking aloud more than anything else here. But… for markets to function in such a way that doesn’t compel people to serve markets (rahter than vice versa) requires certain criteria to be met: you need fair and trusted weights and measures, for example, and you need to know that the local bigjob landlord isn’t going to double your rent for the next decade just because you had a decent harvest one year. Currently we manage (or mismanage, in the case of rent-seeking) these examples and many more through the rule of law enforced by the state. But if we were starting from a blank slate, people might well use other means to make sure the bread wasn’t adulterated with chalk or the local landlord wasn’t charging so much rent that the people living there couldn’t grow any of their own food. And when you get enough of the same rules and the same enforcement measures for those rules existing in a certain context (local geography or maybe some other strongly-binding relational context) you have, de facto, a state, even if you call it an Anarchist Mutual Governance Manifesto or whatever.
So states are, in this thought experiment, emergent phenomena that develop out of existing systems in some way. That means that what sort of state emerges is going to depend on what’s lying around in this supposedly blank slate system. It’s entirely possible that hill country will develop different forms of governance than the plains or the network of coastal fishing villages/ports/whatever (Hanseatic League, anyone?). It’s also possible that a culture which accepts all people as equal and deserving of a dignified life free of compulsion will give rise to a very different type of state than a culture which holds that some people are simply superior to others in some way, or that only those who are successful in one metric or another deserve assistance from their neighbours, or whatever. It seems quite likely that a context where there is a stable climate and roughly enough land for most people to have access to enough to produce at least some of their own food, fuel and fibre is going to encourage a different sort of state governance than one where the climate is too unstable to grow grains and half the population is completely alienated from land.
Rather than trying to figure out what kind of state governance will give ensure the conditions we think will be best for a congenial future, it’s worth considering what sort of future conditions might give rise to a (relatively) congenial state governance.
This doesn’t solve the problem of how to get there from here. But I think it might be a bit like the small farm future: what comes next will emerge out of what’s lying around at the time, and the thing we can influence is what’s lying around, and the way we influence that is… well, it’s probably not by having a whole complete big picture of how everything works and then trying to convince others (especially the state) to comply because it’s obviously a better idea to do things our way. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about some ideals for the future of state governance, just that we should be realistic about real-world implementation either not working as well as we think or being unattainable.
I think there’s probably a sweet spot (or an area of sweet spots) between “the bureaucratic state dictates how we do everything, and following all those regulations is sure a pain in the neck,” “we do everything by local consensus, and all those meetings are sure a pain in the neck,” and “we have neither a functional bureaucratic state nor functional consensus governance, and the cattle rustling and general mischief that ensues is sure a pain in the neck”.
It is late, and I am tired, and I may or may not be able to make more sense of this tomorrow.
@Kathryn
Your final paragraph is perfect – could have saved the rest of us a lot of bother!
Thank you, Andrew. But: do you mean the bit about the pain in the neck, or the bit about it being late and me being tired?
😉
Thanks Chris S., for introducing the concept of moral economy.
Does ChatGPT do an acceptable job of defining and explaining this concept here?
https://chat.openai.com/share/78185961-a7df-4fd4-9618-1cd29e0ed2b4
There are two parts worth considering here in their relation to one another.
(a) the social norms, values, and beliefs that shape economic practices and relationships within a society.
(b) … the idea that economic activities are not purely driven by market forces or self-interest but are also influenced by ethical considerations, cultural norms, and moral principles.
What comes to mind in thinking about “moral economy” as defined here is how, once upon a time, myriad unique places embodied myriad unique moral economies, and the people living in these places had usually grown up within those local moral economies, and so knew them intimately and lived within them intimately. They learned them from toddler to teen, and on and forward from there. They could disagree with some element of the local moral economy, of course, but only in relation to its presence. And the local moral economy could evolve, change, when and where useful or necessary, but it would generally do so slowly enough that folks knew where they were, what sort of system or pattern of life was present.
And then came the capitalist industrial system and the flood of novel technologies which it carried with it. And, according to people like Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Neil Postman, and others in a lineage of similar thought, technologies are anything but neutral, but can be shown to essentially crush and replace the moral economies of traditional place-based cultures, imposing another way of life, one very much contrary to traditional moral economies most everywhere. The novel technologies of the new epoch of capitalist-industrialism (modernity?) were woven together within something else, which resembled a machine but wasn’t a machine per se. Ellul called it “technique” (only in a French spelling). Mumford called it the Megamachine. Illich had a name for it too, but I have forgotten what that term was. Each of these men saw technologies as woven together with systems, institutions and ideologies. Machines tended to impose their ideologies wherever they showed up, but also their moral economies.
The rising and spreading of capitalist industrialism, wedded from the beginning with technologies and machines, would almost seem to be at war with the localized, place-rooted moral economies of the earlier epoch. This new system or pattern of life had a globalizing trajectory and no patience or place for the moral economies of the prior epoch. It meant to crush these and replace them, or so it would appear. Though we have to pause and wonder whether it had intentionality or agency. One could even wonder if the Borg (in the Star Trek tv series) have intentionality and agency. Or whether anything has intentionality and agency? What are these in the face of the rising of the New Regime, which appears to seek hegemony over the entirety of the world, every place — treating all unique places as its own body, its own form, its own being?
“We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”
This Borg-like entity appears to enjoy — and demand — the standardization of parts, which, after all, is most efficient in all of the things it likes to measure.
One begins to wonder? Is agency only really possible in the form of resistance?
Andrew:
“Of course none of this really tackles the revolution/transformation problem – to put it bluntly how do we disappropriate an established landholding class, preferably non-violently, yet quickly?”
We don’t know how to do this — yet. No one does.
But we can take notice of certain facts. We live within systems of practice which are also systems of thought. There are myriad ways of using words around this, and none of them are perfect, or perfectly apt. Thought and action, perception… and etc… are engaged with one another in systemic patterns. It’s of no use to war over whether “idealism” or “materialism” is the better conceptual framing for these relations, since it may well be that these two (in certain forms) are like water, which in one phase is a liquid, while in another phase it is a solid and then in another a gas. Ah, but are we talking here about these two as phases? Do they enter differing phases at differing temperatures? It appears not. The analogy lacks aptness. So what analogy would be more apt? Is there an ideal analogy waiting for us, a most-apt analogy? Where?
It does come down to land, to air, to water, to soil. This is the ground. This is where we can ground the journey we are on. Blueprints are useless. Think of Jorge Luis Borges’s one-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science”. https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf
Our modern, Western story of political philosophy no longer serves us. It lacks a proper ground. Social contract theory? If one slips and falls out of that mapping of the world one has had a happy accident indeed. It happened to me. Long ago, as a boy. The land itself taught me the alternative, but the alternative isn’t a paradigm of a modern kind at all! Think of the blind men and the elephant. Think of Indra’s net. Amplify the insight … and you fall off of the map — the map which would impose a singular vista on all of the world, and its set of implicit lifeways. It’s all about the word “impose” — the hegemony in the word. Who needs it?!
I am not a modern. I fell out of that story. I did so on ethico-aesthetic grounds. I’m grounded. I live not on the Earth, but within its atmosphere as a fish swims in the sea. The emerging politics is poetic. Poetics? Does James complain of tics? Spasms? Gasps of poetry in prose?
Almost everything about modernity is embarrassing, confused, lost. It lacks poiesis, whose action emerges as land, air, water, and if we are awake it moves through us, not as our possession. But as our home.
The revolution will be a poem! It will move one step at a time, off the map. Beyond blueprints, as a dialogue of the heart where all are more than welcome.
Correction:
I said:
“Thought and action, perception… and etc… are engaged with one another in systemic patterns.”
I meant to say:
Thought and action, perception… and etc… are entangled with one another in systemic patterns.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2023/11/20/jet-powered-hypocrisy-richest-1-of-global-elites-emit-as-much-carbon-as-bottom-two-thirds/
Within country analyses also painted very stark pictures.
“For example, in France, the richest one percent emit as much carbon in one year as the poorest 50 percent in 10 years.”
There is a north South poverty problem but there is also a north North poverty problem and the poor of the North are blamed for the climate problem it’s time this ” problem ” was narrowed to those who actually cause the problem . Those with the largest personal carbon footprint should be pilloried , those that want to enforce fifteen minute cities in to the pesantry while they carry on as usual .
Some wild thoughts about dialogue
https://rword.substack.com/p/borderlands-aformal-generative-dialogue
Thanks for the ongoing discussion. I’ll have to keep my response brief here, but it’s been informative and I’ll want to come back to some of these themes.
I don’t really agree with Kathryn’s point about a de facto state emerging from local economic agreements. As I see it, that’s not a state – it’s … local agreements. So what is a state? Possibly the question leads into a discussion of sovereignty, exclusive authority, of what creates a law-giver. I’m also drawn to Graeber and Sahlins: “we may well discover that “the state”…never existed at all, or was, at best, a fortuitous confluence of elements of entirely heterogeneous origins…that came together in certain times and places, but that, nowadays, are very much in the process of once again drifting apart”.
However, I do agree with Kathryn’s point about the importance of what’s lying around. And what I think will be lying around for some time into the future is the state.
I also agree on the virtue of seeking sweet spots between non-state, strong state and various potentially quasi-state forms. But this I think is going to be buffeted heavily by a range of political and biophysical contingencies beyond the control of any would-be state or political community.
I find much of value in Andrew’s latest comment, and I hope to come back to some of his points. But if we’re basically agreeing about the need for subsidiarity & delegating to the lowest feasible level of collectivity, doesn’t subsidiarity suggest something of a negative inclination towards collectivism, which is what you were initially criticising me for?
I also find much of value to ponder in James’s comments … particularly in the light of Monbiot’s criticisms of me around aestheticised politics. I think an aesthetic politics is exactly what’s needed, rather than the anaesthetic politics of modernism. Of course that raises questions about precisely what ‘aesthetic politics’ means – I don’t think I’d want to extend it to all non-capitalist or non-modern ways of being. I like James’s contention that the revolution will be a poem. It sits interestingly alongside Monbiot’s contention that one of the greatest threats to life on earth is poetry.
If it looks like a state, walks like a state and quacks like a state…
I am happy to be corrected on my assertion that local agreements around governance eventually turn into a de-facto state of some sort. But to me, it’s hard to see how they don’t. They might not be a nation-state in the modern sense, but my understanding is that those are pretty weird if we take a longer historical view, with city-states and weird aristocratic territories and lots of tiny warring kingdoms being more common.
(I want to say something here about the Romantic development of nationalism and national identity and how that relates to the existence and legitimisation of nation-states, and the parallels in trying to articulate some sort of moral economy or common culture in order to, if not form new structures of governance, at least bring some ease in acute governance issues during the supersedure phenomenon of corporate-captured nation-states asset stripping their nations and then eating themselves. But once again it is late and I am tired.
Allotment tomorrow: Jerusalem artichokes. I still have wheat and soup peas and field beans hanging up in the greenhouse that I need to thresh, too. I rescued fourteen bags of leaves for the Soup Garden on Sunday, the interim priest (our one is on maternity leave) thinks I’m completely daft.
Meanwhile, I’ve started applying for part-time office jobs. If I get one, I won’t have as much time to grow my own food, but paying my rent will get easier… so discussions of capitalist alienation from self-provisioning productive capacity are currently somewhat closer to home than I’d like.
Hmm, well a commons involves local agreements around governance, but it’s not a state. However, most of the commons people talk about occur within the ambit of something like a state. The ones that don’t are interesting. But generally I think we incline to the view that such things as kingdoms, city republics, trading leagues, nation-states, lineage societies, aristocratic territories and so forth all look like states because ‘the state’ is a core modern conception ordering a large part of our political thought. However, per Graeber & Sahlins, I think this can be misleading. Anyway, more on this in the future, I hope.
Interesting points about romanticism. Another complicated term that needs unpicking much more than my rather desultory effort in ‘Saying NO…’
Good luck with the job-hunting and negotiating your path through the multiple alienations of present times.
Thanks for the good wishes, Chris. At this point I’m still only really looking at jobs that are relevant to my existing experience, with a side of trying to get back into a regular routine of choral composition with crowdfunded patronage. We’ll see.
In fairness, this eventuality is part of why I did the low-labour experiment at the Far Allotment this year. If I do get a job, then that will inform how I plan the Near Allotment too: more drying beans and fewer fresh ones (though I’ve found at least one variety that is good for both), definitely many fewer fresh peas (a sadness, as I do love them), fewer tomatoes and more parsnips, fewer things that need starting in pots and coddling until they’re big enough, more that I can direct sow. I don’t think I can actually manage more winter squash… I found another Marina di Chioggia today hiding in a corner that we managed to miss earlier and had to get that on the bicycle home as well as the Jerusalem artichokes, oka, salsify, parsley root, rosemary, carrots, beetroot, and some basil and green tomatoes from the greenhouse (I’m expecting a freeze on Friday night cold enough to finish them off and it’s not like they were going to ripen by then), and also the field blewits I foraged on the way there. So now I have another squash to move off the kitchen worktop before I can use it, and then back onto the worktop when it’s time to eat and I need the table. (Most of them are hanging in net bags from the ends of a set of shelves in one corner, but this year I grew more squashes than fit in that space. It’s a lovely problem to have. Thankfully only twelve of them are Marina di Chioggia or our space constraints would be quite a bit worse!)
If neither of us find a paying job, at least we’ll have plenty of good food to eat!
Kathryn, Just going from what I’ve read in your comments on this blog I’m feeling frustrated that you can’t get your hands on a very small farm of your own. It seems some university should fund your research into all these low energy projects you describe!
Governance can only happen when there is excess of food produced , Hunter gathered society has little governance because everyone had to find food the decision was in which direction do we hunt today , farming made more food and more ability to feed non workers , only during and after the industrial revolution was there efficiencies to feed the all powerfully state and its minions / bean counters , in a small farm future there will be little excess to feed the plethora of ” government ” bodies , in the USA near half the working age population ” work ” for city , county ,state and federal government in one way or another , that gravy train is coming to an end , small farmers will look at their land a d decide themselves what happens where and will discuss with their neighbours who , when and where extra help is needed , ( unless it goes full Soviet ) governance will be local village sized , townhalls will rot . There will be little to nothing to decide other than how best to grow and feed your immediate family / group and have the luxury of a full belly
‘…doesn’t subsidiarity suggest something of a negative inclination towards collectivism’?
No, because it suggests nothing about the goals of the organisation in which it acts as a principle. Subsidiarity is about management, about ensuring that the local levels retain control. What they are controlling can be as collectivist as you like – e.g. a bioregional republic in which all act in accord with a commitment to feed and house everyone and prevent significant disparities in access to resources and whatever passes for wealth.
You seem to have the direction of delegation wrong – decisions are made at the lowest appropriate level and tasks are delegated ‘up’ to the higher subsidiary levels. Hypothetically, in such a society, some more collectivist tasks – finding out about disparities of supply and demand across a region, activating mechanisms to mitigate these – will require people to act outside and between localities. But subsidiarity will ensure such delegates remain accountable to their own localities, and return to them once their roles have been fulfilled.
@ Chris –
“I like James’s contention that the revolution will be a poem. It sits interestingly alongside Monbiot’s contention that one of the greatest threats to life on earth is poetry.”
Whether it will be a poem or will manifest as poetry are questions worth dialoguing about. That’s why it must be a dialogue, and one which brings in an aesthetic and ethical orientation. I can’t say I know. I can only say that authoritarian modernity, not unlike other forms of authoritarianism prior to modernity, are about poiesis — “an act or process of creation”.
“Modernity” often pretends it isn’t an ethico-aesthetic “dialogue,” but a matter of discerning “scientific fact which is under debate or discussion. What are we to do with this tendency within modernism? Are ethics and aesthetics scientific questions? Some will insist that they are. I disagree. Some will place scientific questions on a higher level of epistemic status than ethico-aethetis questions. I think these are in error. The hierarchy is just wrong. I’m no Platonist, but Plato was onto something important when he spoke in term of there being a good, a beautiful and a true. He was right to say that we can only understand these three in relation to each other.
Poetry is the last refuge of defense for the idea that truth, beauty and good are intertwined. That premise is a form of reason and reasoning. And when reason leaves the field of discourse we are just plain lost. Any poet worth her salt will know this in her bones.
Let the poets come to the polis in our desperate hour. I have more faith in poetry by far than in what has come to be conceived as “rationality”.
“Hmm, well a commons involves local agreements around governance, but it’s not a state. However, most of the commons people talk about occur within the ambit of something like a state. The ones that don’t are interesting. But generally I think we incline to the view that such things as kingdoms, city republics, trading leagues, nation-states, lineage societies, aristocratic territories and so forth all look like states because ‘the state’ is a core modern conception ordering a large part of our political thought.”
My research has revealed that there is no consensus (nor anything even close) within the various social sciences (e.g., sociology, anthropology, history perhaps) on defining “the state,” nor “culture” nor “civilization”. (I was quite surprised by this discovery).
Whatever else we may imagine about the post-structuralists / postmodernists / folks like Foucault…, the fact that there is no such consensus in the social sciences is telling. It reveals what I think is a beautiful potential — a potential I connect with the profound virtue which is dialogue as a process-relational application of reasoning, as I figure it. And so an intersubjective one, in some sense or another. What that sense is is one we can only discover by walking the trail we’re on, not by mapping it ahead of that walk.
No blueprints! Design, yes! Design is not blueprinting. As we will learn by walking the road we are on with a properly poetic sensibility — and proper humility.
We don’t make the road, the road arises in walking.
https://rword.substack.com/p/borderlands-aformal-generative-dialogue
It would be great to have a visualisation of these subsidiarity structures and even some that run through some ‘real world’ scenarios.
I think I get what Chris is saying about the illusory nature of the state, that it is actually always a set of local situations that is symbolically ‘controlled’ by whatever makes up the establishment. I often say this to people who say ‘it could never happen, people just cannot work together’, that it is clearly the fact that we do that allows it to function. This is an important part of an anarchosyndicalist insight.
In the same way, the moral economy and systems of care also already exist despite capitalist darwinian insistence to the contrary.
This links to what Kathryn says about the things laying around – I argue that these things are latent and embodied, currently suppressed. Our natural state is prosocial, punctuated by the devastating folly of (mostly) young men and traumatised older men (wounded masculinity) dragging us toward a centralised fascist pole (read left or right, or the sides of the donut in Kate Rawthorns model). Releasing this trauma and establishing our prosocial fundament is the ‘cultural and spiritual work’.
Thanks for these further comments, which are very relevant to what will probably be my next writing project once I’m done with ‘Saying NO…’, concerning the politics of a small farm future.
So, more on this to come, I hope.
In relation to Andrew’s response, we probably need to dive deeper into what we mean by collectivism, how we understand sovereignty and so on to develop this discussion. Hopefully we’ll do that. Kathryn’s discussion about what looks like a state is also relevant.
My starter into this is to demur with Andrew’s suggestion that “Subsidiarity is about management, about ensuring that the local levels retain control” – to me, that sounds like statist thinking articulated from a centre where the control of the local level, its sovereignty, is likely to be more or less a dead letter already.
Perhaps I could rewrite another of Andrew’s sentences as a kind of neo-distributist provocation (maybe taking in some of James’s & Joel’s points too?):
“Decisions are made at the truest level of local sovereignty but sometimes delegated ‘down’ (or ‘out’?) to wider subsidiary levels as a last resort”.
I’d like to try to flesh this out, as Joel requests. But not quite yet.
I also think Joel is right to identify a gender problem, or a maleness problem. Real world examples of this are no doubt obvious enough, but I’d be interested to hear more, Joel.
Thanks again to all of you for these thought-provoking contributions.
‘…to me, that sounds like statist thinking articulated from a centre where the control of the local level, its sovereignty, is likely to be more or less a dead letter already’.
I’d intended it as pretty much the opposite! I think we’re probably splitting hairs/dallying with definitions here, in that, to me, the notion of of delegating decisions ‘down’ implied higher-level decision-making and therefore ‘centralised’ thinking, congruent with the vertical analogy present in the notion of ‘bottom-up’. I’m excited by your horizontalist reform though! ‘In’ and ‘out’ will now be my go-to terms.
So, in response to your provocation, I’d tweak it again to take away the hedging around ‘outward’ subsidiary levels. I’d leave in the notion of ‘sovereignty’ as a continuing provocation to myself – I don’t quite know exactly what you mean by it, and I’m not entirely comformable with it, but it emphasises the priority of the local centre and might well get at something more interesting. Let’s see…
I’m not having ‘true’ though!
“Decisions are made at the level of the sovereign locality, but are delegated outwards to wider subsidiary levels as appropriate”.
Obvioulsy I’m far too keen to play with this, and should you go with your original I’ll cope, it being your website and all. Both versions tackle the building of a new localised politics (within which ‘moral economies’/localised constitutions might energe?), but I’m still very interested in the intermeshing of the outward levels of each locality, enabling locals to cultivate their livelihoods within broader parameters. Something worth exploring I hope.
Thanks for that, Andrew. I’m confusing myself with all the spatial metaphors of up, down, in, out, bottom, top, centre & periphery. But they’re worth pondering, I believe.
I didn’t think you’d like ‘true’! Let’s come back to it. But in the meantime, I’m happy to proceed from “Decisions are made at the level of the sovereign locality, but are delegated outwards to wider subsidiary levels as appropriate”.
I also agree that the intermeshing of outward levels is important, desirable and indeed unavoidable and critical in the next phase of history. Definitely worth exploring.
“Decisions are made at the level of the sovereign locality, but are delegated outwards to wider subsidiary levels as appropriate.”
That sounds like it could describe the workings of a household on a plot of farmed/gardened land, like my household, where ownership can be collective (two people or more, often spouses), and ownership comes with some rights of decision making and delegating.
However, I’m not sure about whether the land use laws, for example, would qualify as something the households voluntarily “delegated” outwards (at least not in the current system). Does it qualify as “delegated outwards to wider subsidiary levels” if the members of a locality collectively decide to send representatives (or delegates) to a governance body for making laws? I guess that accountability is key, along with reversibility (in case mistakes are made).
“I believe it’s necessary to rebuild cultures of limits.”
I like this but I think you have the cart before the horse. You can’t build culture – culture grows and limits are the frame within and upon which it grows – our current individualist consumptive culture could only grow in an environment where a massive influx of fossil energy removed or at least massively loosened those constraints. As that influx recedes and limits reappear appropriate cultures will regrow.
With that in my mind I’m very skeptical about trying to prefigure the politics of a future that seems likely to show radical discontinuities with the recent past. Becoming attached to ideas about how we’d like the future to be seems as ‘disneyland’ as refusing to see that the current status quo has run out of road.
I’m minded of John Michael Greer’s advice on prepping for an uncertain, low energy future – he didn’t suggest buying gold or hoarding guns or building a bunker – he recommended learning (becoming expert in) some skill that might be of use to your immediate neighbours – I think he suggested brewing as a good bet. I think such an approach is as good as we are likely to manage and such learning might be a better way to spend our evenings.
@Bruce
“he recommended learning (becoming expert in) some skill that might be of use to your immediate neighbours”
I think this is going to be my approach.
I’m not sure that making Humanure will make me popular with my neighbours though!!!
Thanks for pushing at my arguments there Bruce. Hope you don’t mind if I push back a bit.
I think people can and do build culture, sometimes very quickly (I discussed this in relation to reconstituted peasantries & creolization in ‘A Small Farm Future’). They don’t build it individually, and they don’t do it so much intellectually through books, blogs or other tracts, but those things do play a role in it and I think are worth pursuing by those of us who are drawn to them. Yes, culture grows on a frame of limitations, but limitations aren’t only ‘out there’ forces beyond culture, they’re also cultural objects themselves. Different cultures take different views on limits.
Anthropologists like Graeber, Boehm and Clastres have emphasized how some societies put a lot of cultural effort into limiting status stratification and material accumulation. For them, there were limits it was important not to cross. Others, like the cultures of Western Europe in the modern period, didn’t do that. Limits were to be challenged and transcended. In my opinion, this has little to do with fossil fuels. European cultures were accumulative, expansionary and stratifying before there was any significant use of fossil fuels. Cultures lacking those traits probably wouldn’t have found a great deal of use for fossil fuels. Whereas cultures that are accumulative and expansionary find them very useful indeed. So it’s not so much that energy enabled them to expand, as that expansion enabled them to seek energy and expand more.
In relation to prefigurative politics, this has been a long-running discussion on this blog. My view of it in brief is that, yes, laying out blueprints of how we think the future should be as if that’s how the future will actually turn out is of limited value, but deliberately avoiding a view of how we’d like the future to be is also of limited value and something of a counsel of despair. If the future is so uncertain, why brew beer? You and your neighbours might not be around long enough to enjoy it.
Different people enjoy doing different things. In my view, there’s a place for both brewers and prophets, as well as conflict resolvers, and indeed there’s no reason why one can’t be all of those things. But as I see it I’m not becoming attached to how I’d like the future to be. I’m trying to draw attention to the kind of political issues that people are now or will soon be needing to confront once we’ve definitively run out of the status quo’s road. I think the journey thereafter will be less bumpy the more that people are looking ahead at the obstacles and thinking about how to deal with them. And I think a lot of the biggest obstacles are political. Learning the skills of brewing is easier than learning the skills of the new politics, so we’d better start on the latter too.
Greer has said a lot of wise things, but his bizarre enthusiasm for Donald Trump makes me wonder if he does a bit too much brewing and not quite enough political prefiguring.
We may well not be around long enough to enjoy the beer – but such is life (unless of course you’re an ecomodernist uploaded to the cloud for eternity in which case you’ll live forever without being able to enjoy the beer).
Yes the relationship between culture and limits is complex – but I’m not sure European culture was uniquely expansionist, stratifying and accumulative – Genghis Khan was no slouch at empire building, nor were various Chinese dynasties. In Lean Logic David Flemming looked back to the culture of the European High Middles Ages suggesting he saw there a culture that had some accomodation with limits. So I’d suggest European culture changed as the opportunity to be more accumulative emerged. Maybe the seeds were there but I suspect some of those seeds lie in human nature – hence why I also think that the re-emergence of a spiritual dimension within our culture(s) is going to be important as we go forward.
And I’m with you on the focus on producers – as far as I can see should a new localized politics emerge it will develop from their need to maintain both their independence from and their interdependence with each other. But those things could be so variable that I find it hard to imagine how I could theorize about it absent that context – that’s not to say that can’t be done only that I can’t – I know you have a deep grounding in sociology that I simply don’t have – I can spell the word but that’s about it.
I also agree that the road ahead might be less bumpy if more people looked ahead at what might be coming but I’d argue they’re not going to look ahead until such time as those limits appear – after all a good many scientists have been urging us all to look ahead since atmospheric co2 was well below 350ppm and yet here we are.
And maybe that fact (and others like it – for instance I read both this https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-11-19/self-extinction-male-fertility-pesticides-and-the-end-of-the-human-project/ and this https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/14/uk-to-loosen-post-brexit-chemical-regulations-further this week) has made me cynical and I’ve lost my faith that collectively we could do better than we are. That seems quite deep doomer but it feels like an evidence based approach . The question then is what one might usefully do – I think the cultivation of my inner NIMBY might be the best I can do – try to care deeply about my back yard and the beings within it.
“Greer has said a lot of wise things, but his bizarre enthusiasm for Donald Trump makes me wonder if he does a bit too much brewing and not quite enough political prefiguring.”
Is Greer an actual Trump supporter? I hadn’t heard that. That would indeed be very weird.
Yes he came out for Trump which was weird – I can see supporting the fact of Trump as the moment when the voices of ignored parts of the electorate re-emerged and became important again but I think Greer’s support was more than that.
Trump was a the first and only president that did not start a war since 1940 .
Sort of an aside, but the belief that there could be growth without limits brought us to this point.
I’m in full “doomer” mode today!!!!!
I’ve been contemplating what role violence might or might not have in a SFF.
What happens Chris, if a bunch of people show up at your place and park their caravans on your fields?
At the moment, you could use the “States” laws and monopoly on the use of violence, to get them to move on.
But what happens when the “State” is in full retreat and supersedure is a thing?
Or, that those “new arrivals” decide that maybe it’s you who should do the “moving on”?
If some of the projections set out in SFF are correct (which I think they are) there are going to be a lot of “refugees” leaving the big cities looking for another life.
I think the discussion between the individual/family and the collective and the discussion about the market are very closely related.
I certainly agree that it is not a desirabel proposition that each farmer/family should be self-sufficient in all kinds of way, making own tools, having an iron mine etc..That is of course nonsensical and has “never” existed in history. It also denies that humas are ultrasocial beings. So you need to exchange “stuff” with others. Whether you do that by barter or moneyd markets is perhaps not so important, I am not even sure that a gift economy makes such a big difference…..
But it is important to note that “markets” and all other systems of exchange are commons, institutions that must be managed.
The notion, often found among agrarian populist, that “free market” are the small farmer friend and that the problem with markets is that they are monopolist or controlled by governments is in my opinion mistaken. Markets are always managed and should be managed as they are collective institutions. And that is the same with “property/ownership” that is also a collective institution that is managed. It is the collective (or the government or a dictator) that grants you ownership and ownerships are always conditional.
Hi
“There is a long history of resistance to capitalist offensives, and although movements, those organized and the many more that were spontaneous, were not able to bring about a more humane and equitable world, these are histories well worth knowing. A new book from Monthly Review Press, The War Against the Commons, Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism by Ian Angus*, brings much of this history to vivid life.”
A detailed review of this book adds to the debate – https://systemicdisorder.wordpress.com/2023/11/21/if-capitalism-is-natural-why-was-so-much-force-used-to-build-it/
Also, EU’s Eurofound is hosting a webinar on Wed 29th Nov about ‘bridging the rural–urban divide in Europe: upgrading the European Union convergence machine’ – https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/en/events/eurofoundlive-webinar-bridging-rural-urban-divide-europe-upgrading-european-union
Many thanks for crucial info sharing : )
Thanks Caroline, I’ll try to follow up on those
@Chris
On a technical blog question.
On other blogs, I get notifications via email of new comments. Is this possible on your blog.
It quite handy. Saves having to scroll through to see if anything new has been written.
Hmm, I’ll have a look at this and get back to you. Any WordPress wizards out there with any suggestions?
@Chris
It’s a feature on the blog below
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
If you make a comment then there is an option to get email notifications. You the get sent a confirmation email. Then any new comments on the thread you have contributed to, go to your email.
I think it’s a wordpress site.
Interesting – my initial exploration suggested you couldn’t do this on WordPress but clearly you can. I’ll dig a bit more.
From my memory, it might need the Jetpack extension.
I wish there were anything that handled comments (and the threading thereof) as well as Dreamwidth does, but… that is not where we are, and there are many other aspects of Dreamwidth that aren’t really sensible for your use case.
Some interesting new comments in various threads above – thank you. I’ll try to pick up on a few of them in one comment here.
1. THE CASE FOR DISTRIBUTISM. I like this from Kathryn: “if someone works long hours in poor conditions without fair pay so I can eat highly perishable seasonal fruit, I figure that had better be me.” Inasmuch, as Gunnar says, that we can’t always produce everything we use, the best way of ensuring that people aren’t chained to unfair work is for everyone to have access to the means of self-production, principally land. Hence the distributist case for widespread access to a little land.
2. AN EXPANSIVE POLITICAL COMMUNITY. Part of the discussion above has focused on unfair labour conditions in a post fossils or ‘collapse’ future. Looking at the present, there are some pretty unfair labour conditions in our fossil-enhanced and ‘non-collapsed’ state. Looking at the past, some people in low energy agrarian societies of the past were enslaved or otherwise coerced, while others weren’t. I think the key here is where the boundaries of recognition, of the political community, are drawn. This doesn’t have much to do with energy levels or agrarian labour demands, although it might do at the point of rapid change. I’d like to see the political community remaining expansive. An expansive political community in a low-energy agrarian society implies widespread petty landownership. Hence, distributism.
3. DISAPPROPRIATING AN ESTABLISHED LANDHOLDING CLASS. To get to distributism from where we now are implies redistribution of landholding (sorry, conservative distributists, but it just does). Therefore, as Andrew rightly says, it involves disappropriating an established landholding class. But, as Greg reminds us, there are several or many kinds of (classes of?) existing landowner. Tracking contemporary debates about farming and landownership, I fear the wrong ones may get disappropriated. I hope to say more about this in the future. But I like Greg’s ‘put up everything you own’ take.
4. ALIENABLE PROPERTY. Andrew probably knows more about this than me, but I found Robert Allen’s arguments in ‘Enclosure & the Yeoman’ interesting – in England, there was a 17th century ‘yeoman’s revolution’ arising from the creation of private property by the Tudor courts, allowing for the defence of petty property from enclosure, followed by a ‘landlord’s revolution’ arising from the creation of indefinite mortgages in the 18th century. So I agree with Andrew that ‘overcoming modern state-defended private property really is the elephant in the room’, while noting that sometimes state-defended private property prevents monopoly power, and enables small farm society. So a lot depends on the nature of ‘the state’ or indeed whether it really is a ‘state’, per earlier discussion.
5. MARKETS AS COMMONS. Nice points from Gunnar, particularly about markets as commons. But they’re commons that have been enclosed in many ways and subjected to monopoly power (private banks creating money, trading and intellectual property regulations etc). So I don’t think the agrarian populists are wrong to argue that a problem with markets is monopoly control. But I agree that it’s useful to think of both private property and private markets as forms of commons that must be managed, and to figure out how to prevent them being enclosed and how to manage them better.
6. SOVEREIGN LOCALITY. Some good musings from Steve about the nature of this. I believe many Catholic distributists would argue that ‘the family’ along with the commons/community are the key (‘true’) units of the sovereign locality. Discuss.
7. CARAVANS FROM LONDON. John asks what happens when a bunch of people – city refugees – show up, park their caravans on my fields and suggest it’s time for me to move on, in the absence of state-backed property rights.
There are various ways I’d approach answering that. In certain kinds of frontier situation, the answer is to the victor the spoils. But those kind of situations don’t tend to last long in farming societies, which can’t really cope with that level of uncertainty. Often, frontier folk are connected to wider political communities, even if they appear to be slugging it out lone-handed, so a lot depends on those wider communities.
In my actual present situation, we’ve pre-empted it by already inviting caravan dwellers in, who’ve snaffled all the best pitches. So we already have our own little frontier community. And we have quite a few local friends and connections. Think of places with historically weak central state penetration and strong local collective power … like Sicily, for example. If ex-urban refugees turn up uninvited and park their caravans on people’s land in such places, it probably won’t go well for them. So on the one hand, I’m arguing for building local non-state political communities. On the other, I don’t really want mafia type societies to develop. Which is why I want to do some pre-empting and try to hang on to a bit of rationalist rather than personalist politics. Getting castigated by the likes of Monbiot for my supposed ‘cruelty’ in doing so pisses me off, because it’s the opposite of my intention, and I believe his vision is far more likely to terminate in a world of cold-shouldered transient refugeeism.
We’ve discussed this kind of thing before on this website, e.g. https://chrissmaje.com/2022/01/warre-and-peace-of-gifts-government-and-men-with-guns/. I regret to say my thinking hasn’t advanced massively since that post, but I hope to start putting that right. What I would say is that if the folks with caravans (or guns) rock up, you may have left it too late and all bets are off. Hence the need either to go down Monbiot’s route of preventing collapse by banning woodstoves, using all your clean electricity to manufacture bacterial protein and suchlike, or my route of trying to prefigure some of the post-collapse politics that are on their way.
…on which note, I do actually think Bruce makes a good point about keeping his concerns local and brewing beer to share with the neighbours. The big question there is whether you’re being a NIMBY or, more appealingly, just an IMBY. If the former, who does the ‘N’ apply to?
This also links to Greg’s point. Why would people turn up to my small acreage and insist on living here, rather than the large arable fields that big-scale farmers can probably no longer keep tilling and selling from into big national or international markets? Which prompts the question of where such bigger landowners might jump in class terms.
8. EXPANDING & PREFIGURING. To respond briefly to the debate with Bruce, I don’t want to overdo the European exceptionalism, but examples like the Mongol Empire were territorially expansionary, but not especially committed to economic expansion/growth. I’d probably agree that the European High Middle Ages dealt with limits, but it had tendencies to commercialism, monetization and militarization (as well as geographic contingency) that went on to fuel its expansionary rage – I’m not convinced it was just opportunity and human nature.
You’re right that the history of climate inaction doesn’t augur well for looking ahead, and I fear you’re right that we’ll hit the bumpy road hard. I guess those of us who foresee the bumpy road just have to do what we feel we’re called to in respect of it. For my part, I think the inaction stems in large measure because of deep cultural commitment to the kind of expansionary commercial society that got us into this mess and an inability to take seriously any other narrative (Ghosh is pretty good on all this). Monbiot’s reaction to my book has really brought that commitment and that inability home to me. I guess I feel called to keep pushing other narratives. Though maybe that falls foul of Kathryn’s point about thinking people will agree with me if I explain myself clearly enough. If just a few more people question the dead narrative than before as a result of my writing, that’s probably good enough for me. I also like Andrew’s take on Gramsci’s famous comment and its limitations here. And, Bruce, I very much like your observation about immortal ecomodernists who are unable to drinkg beer.
9. THE ARCHDRUID. I stopped reading JMG a while ago, the Trumpism and the ego got a bit too much for me – self-important conservatism seems to be an occupational hazard of the ageing male, which I daresay I suffer from too … please do tell me if it starts to get too much for you. Basically, he predicted that Trump would win in 2016 long before most people took the orange one seriously and I think that went to his head a bit. He also seems to like owning the libtards, which is okay up to a point but quickly gets tedious – especially when he cuts so much slack to right-wing versions of incoherent self-righteousness. Monbiot, Greer – we seem to have entered a world where apparently once clear-sighted eco-radicals are getting too easily suckered by business-as-usual projects dressed up as world-changing radicalism.
“5. MARKETS AS COMMONS. Nice points from Gunnar, particularly about markets as commons. But they’re commons that have been enclosed in many ways and subjected to monopoly power (private banks creating money, trading and intellectual property regulations etc). So I don’t think the agrarian populists are wrong to argue that a problem with markets is monopoly control. But I agree that it’s useful to think of both private property and private markets as forms of commons that must be managed, and to figure out how to prevent them being enclosed and how to manage them better.”
Well, I want to say there are lower case markets (in rare cases these days) and then there is the upper case Market. The Market, as it seems to me, is the main thing to keep in mind in relation to the famous quote from Emerson, “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” This quote often gets directed at critiques of technology, for plenty of good reasons, but it is a dynamic also and equally pointing at institutions, both formal and informal — and everywhere in between.
The Market seems to me to be what we might aptly call a negative cost externalizing machine (even “engine”), which makes it a very dangerous capital M Machine (and Engine), if you ask me. It is the embodiment of a certain kind of “maximizer,” not entirely unlike a paperclip maximizer — which itself would be a very dangerous Machine. The Market is a reductive and reducing machine, which favors “efficiency” of a very particular kind — which ultimately turns out to be the efficiency of turning all good things into bad things for a “profit”.
As James Howard Kunstler once put it, “efficiency is the straightest path to hell.” This may be a paraphrase, but it is at least close to a direct quote. This was before Kunstler became an older male, the dangers of which we’ve just heard about here in chrissmage.com . Be wary of older males!
oops! chrissmaje.com .
2. [….] I’d like to see the political community remaining expansive. An expansive political community in a low-energy agrarian society implies widespread petty landownership. Hence, distributism.
I’m in favor of distributism. However, my limited exposure to distributism has provided me with the impression that classical or traditional distributism hasn’t really provided an equal place setting at the table for the very small village of non-kin oriented groups forming social units at the most immediate local scale of what economists call “production”, which others might call “provisioning”…. Maybe distributism needs a 21st century update, since so many would (in my guess) prefer this to the relatively isolated family homestead as the base unit of community self-provisioning and mutual care — and labor sharing.
Re James’s points – yes, I think ‘markets’ vs ‘The Market’ is the right distinction. To put it crudely, governments allied with ordinary people create barriers to stop The Market from undermining people’s markets, whereas governments allied with economic elites create barriers to stop ordinary people’s markets from undermining The Market.
Distributism definitely needs a 21st century update, although I don’t think even the original distributists had much problem with the idea of non-kin groups in villages and towns being socially and economically important (e.g. commons, guilds). It’s not a doctrine of isolated family homesteads, although in its original and some of its present formulations it does place more emphasis on ‘the family’ than suits some. As per earlier discussions, this is something I think needs updating, but not entirely abandoning.
Hi Chris – I started rereading David Flemming last night and he talks about ‘protection’ as one of his seven principles of a lean (and local) economy – I think this is perhaps the sense in which I invoke nimbyism – I’ve always thought it a maligned term because if I won’t care for my back yard who the hell will. And caring for one’s backyard means at least trying to ignore the logic of conventional economics – in fact he’s quite interesting in talking about higher prices in small local shops for instance where he suggests that those higher prices reflect a range of informal services such shops provide within a community – I used to use the post office a lot and there was certainly much of this – pension day was social and the staff helped elderly people struggling to negotiate payment systems etc – but post offices were ‘uneconomic’ and so were closed. Actually much of that ‘uneconomic’ was in my opinion deliberately created in order to justify privatisation but that’s another story.
With regards land distribution I think this is central to discussions of a small farm future. Your vision, which I think is a good one, seems to me to be of an agrarian society based on private ownership of small land holdings. I’m sure you’ve convinced many people who either have such holdings or aspire to such that such a future might be our best bet. Unfortunately current patterns of land ownership in the UK suggests to me that in a future in which access to land and it’s produce is once again central we’re more likely to have a situation similar to the current state of private rented housing here in the UK and possibly much worse.
I suspect such patterns of ownership have always emerged in situations where there wasn’t land (apparently) free for the taking i.e ‘frontier’ situations and I’d suggest such patterns have been remarkably stable – revolutions being the exception not the rule in exploitative situations and often managing to recreate the pre-revolutionary arrangements to a remarkable degree. Changing this is, as Andrew point out, the elephant in the room. I think my earlier (slightly disparaging (for which I apologise)) comments about prefiguring the politics of a SFF come from my frustration at our collective inability to address/slay said elephant and a feeling that until we can discussing how the politics of a agrarian society of distributed ownership might work seems like jumping the gun. I also wonder if our collective inability to slay that elephant plays some role in the likes of Monbiot seeking answers to our various predicaments within rather than without ‘capitalist realities’.
I can’t read JMG anymore either – the tone always seems to be one of sneering superiority (I also think he plays fast and loose with facts where necessary to make his argument). And he does seem willing to give a pass to those to the right in ways that he certainly doesn’t to those on the left. At times I see something similar in Paul Kingsnorth’s writings. There seems something of the ‘zealous convert’ in it – a desire to be seen to have disowned a previous position – perhaps George has something similar going on.
Yes perhaps the Mongol empire wasn’t economically expansionist but the Mughal empire certainly was – tax take was about 50% of agricultural output according to Wikipedia. It also had a highly developed export economy. I also wonder what role monotheism v polytheism played in the nature of empires.
On land redistribution……
I spent a couple of weeks on Harris and Lewis in the summer. (Fascinating place, but that’s another story)
Talking to the locals and reading a bit of the history, I heard about how the island was given to the inhabitants by Lord Leverhulme.
Local communities organise land distribution into crofts.
The local I spoke to said, this works better in some parts of the island than others. Mainly due to the personalities involved rather than structural problems.
I confess, I don’t know how it is all organised and haven’t had the time to look into it in more detail.
Does anyone here have any knowledge on Highland crofting land disy?
Distribution not disy!!!
Does distributism extend beyond land ?
One of the real problems today is unequal distribution of wealth and income. It drives everything from climate change to poverty.
@ Greg Reynolds –
“Does distributism extend beyond land”?
If one has adequate land, one can have a basic subsistence livelihood outside of the present dominant modern of economy in the so-called “developed world,” global North, rich world…. Money and markets and The Market would then play a relatively minimal role in local subsistence / sufficiency enconomies. And so wealth and poverty mean something very different in such a context than the mean in economies where nearly everyone depends upon The Market for meeting even their most basic needs.
I strongly suspect that the original theorists of distributism were not at all interested in furthering the (now globalized) consumer-industrial economy now ubiquitous in rich countries. They wanted to enable any ordinary person to have access to a locally scaled sufficiency economy rooted mostly in pre-industrial traditions and technologies.
But if we were to fully update distributism to the 21st century, presumably all human needs would be better distributed, not just land, per se.
Some recent views on distributism, quoted from an article published in 2020:
————
[Distributism] is not the redistribution of wealth, but would end in a much more even distribution as a serendipitous side effect… The basic distributist principle to grasp is this: Distributism is the widest possible distribution of the ownership of the means of production.
————
Distributism is the third way… Communism has the controlling elite in government. Capitalism has the controlling elite in business. Chesterton called these types Hudge and Gudge, purposely similar names. They are often embodied in the same person as they make career transitions from business to politics and back again, usually dwelling in both realms at the same time. This false distinction even underpins our left/right political divide. Recent protests have seen the Left’s Occupy Wall Street protest the abuses of big-business, or Gudge. The Right’s Tea Party protest the abuses of big-government, or Hudge. The Left/Right battle is a battle between Hudgians and Gudgians, a diversion which both Hudge and Gudge welcome. Distributism makes no distinction between Hudge and Gudge… The little guy gets screwed! The only way that the little guy can avoid this is to deal only with other little guys. That’s Distributism!
————
Man is the tool wielding animal. (Understand that since the agrarian revolution, land is a tool.) So here is the basic and simple abstract idea of distributism:
Man should own the tool he wields.
The ‘should’ part is of course a moral judgment. Why ‘should’?
If he does not, then the tool will own him . The tool IS our survival. If another man owns it then he owns your survival, he owns your very life. Why would anyone choose this? Do we think the other-owner is benevolent, like the communists, socialists and statists (Gudge) want us to believe? Or are we insecure and don’t trust our own abilities in tool-wielding? That we need to prostrate ourselves to the so-called experts (Hudge), as capitalists want us to believe? Or are we merely sheep and just do whatever we are told?…
————
Interview with a Distributist
Thomas P. Turner and Matthew A. Taylor, 2020
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/328155265.pdf
Borderlands: Generative Dialogue – part 2
https://rword.substack.com/p/borderlands-generative-dialogue-part
… a bit of metaphorical inquiry as invitation to dialogue
damn the autocarrot (as Kathryn so aptly calls it!
… a bit of metapolitical inquiry as invitation to dialogue
Will it now correct me again? Sheesh! Metapolitical. Metapolitical. Metapolitical.
Not metaphysical, nor metaphorical.
We should have 24 hours to correct our own typos and autocarrots.
@ Steve L.
“Distributism is the widest possible distribution of the ownership of the means of production.”
My limited reading on the topic of distributism seems to suggest that this is an overly reductive framing. It thus has truth, but misses the mark as a generalization.
Distributism seems more accurately to be a rejection of mass (capitalist) technnological consumer society, even before it took on the form we know experience it as. It emerged when the mass capital M Market was at its earliest proto- stage of development and the contemporary form of consumerism was in its infancy. At that time, “the widest possible distribution of ownership of the means of production” implied something much closer to what Smaje now call “a small farm future” — or agrarian localism.
In other words, maybe a locally embedded person would spend a few hours a week earning money, but overwhelmingly most of the week she or he would be self-provisioning food, shelter, etc. Money wasn’t much needed, since what was mostly needed was soil, forests, fungal networks, water….
I think we shouldn’t discount the role of trade and money in premodern agrarian societies. I’ve been reading about the craft tradition in Sweden particularly turned boxes with locking lids which were turned from green wood – these boxes turn up all over the place and were apparently mostly made in a particular area of Sweden where agriculture was nigh on impossible and the inhabitants made a living through trading the woodenware they made.
There’s also a song from Scandinavia, the oldest secular song from there which was written down about 1300 and which has a line with the words ‘I dreamt of silks…’ suggesting trade was global in scope even then.
I think we underestimate the sophistication of earlier cultures – iron age Britons weaving fabrics with incredibly high thread counts i.e. as fine as anything produced today – our problem is we’ve let excess energy replace manual skills
In total agreement here, and by way of something fun to read on pre-modern ‘global trade’, this is an extract from the ‘Book of Roads and Kingdoms’ written by Ibn Khordadbeh, an official at the Abbasid court in the ninth century, here describing the routes of Jewish merchants across Eurasia (the clarifications in brackets are annotations by a modern editor):
‘These merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Roman (Greek), the language of the Franks, Andalusians, and Slavs. They journey from west to east, from east to west, partly on land, partly by sea. They transport from the west eunuchs, female and male slaves, silk, castor, marten, and other furs, and swords. They take ship in the land of the Franks, on the Western Sea, and steer for Farama (Pelusium). There they load their goods on the backs of camels, and go by land to Kolzum (Suez) in five days’ journey over a distance of twenty-five parasangs. They embark in the East Sea (Red Sea) and sail from Kolzum to El-Jar (port of Medina) and Jeddah (port of Mecca); then they go to Sind, India, and China. On their return they carry back musk, aloes, camphor, cinnamon, and other products of the Eastern countries to Kolzum, and bring them to Farama, where they again embark on the Western Sea. Some make sail for Constantinople to sell their goods to the Romans; others go to the palace of the king of the Franks to place their goods.
Sometimes these Jew merchants prefer to carry their goods from the land of the Franks in the Western Sea, making for Antioch (at the mouth of the Orontes); thence they go by land to Al-Jabia (?) where they arrive after three days’ march. There they embark on the Euphrates for Bagdad, and then sail down the Tigris to Al-Obolla. From Al-Obolla they sail for Oman, Sind, Hind (Hindustan), and China. All this is connected one with another.
These different journeys can also be made by land. The merchants who start from Spain or France go to Sous al-Akza (Morocco), and then to Tangiers, whence they march to Kairuwan (Tunisia), and the capital of Egypt. Thence they go to Al-Kamla, visit Damascus, Al-Kufa, Bagdad, and Basrah, cross Ahwaz, Fars, Kirman, Sind, Hind, and arrive at China. Sometimes they likewise take the route behind Rome, and passing through the country of the Slavs, arrive at Khamlij, the capital of the Khazars. They embark on the Jorjan Sea, arrive at Balkh, betake themselves from there across the Oxus and continue their journey toward the Yurts of the Toghozghor, and from there to China.’
Hi Chris,
Just seen this referenced on Tim Morgan’s Surplus Energy Economics blog.
https://by-my-solitary-hearth.net/2023/11/17/the-daily-17-november-2023/
Thanks – that’s a nice post. I’d be interested to know what discussion she was listening to. I ought to read other blogs like this more often, but it’s hard enough keeping up with my own. Always grateful when people put relevant posts like this my way!
I’ve noticed a shift in the debate on Surplus Energy Economics.
It’s been primarily focused on energy as being the foundation of all economic activity and how financial claims have vastly outgrown the material world. And that the two worlds of finance and material are due to “re-”
aline”.
But now the debate has started to look at the reality/implications of a post fossil fuel world.
Going up the dots has lead to the debate starting to look a lot like the debates people are having here on this blog.
More “localised” economies, land rights, self provision, etc etc.
All roads lead to Rome (or a SFF)
The viability of cities is an interesting subject.
Having read a book on the history of disease, I didn’t realise that until around 1900 all cities in the world had a higher mortality rate than birth rate. Meaning that without a constant influx of people, cities would not be sustainable.
It was only modern medicine that reversed this trend.
If people start to abandon cities (and adequate healthcare isn’t achievable) then maybe cities will just wither away.
A few quick follow ups:
@John. I wrote a bit about crofting & the Highlands quite a while ago: https://chrissmaje.com/2015/12/goldilocks-in-the-highlands-some-notes-on-scaling-resilience/. I’d like to learn/write more about it. Meanwhile, I’d suggest that personalities *are* a structural problem!
I’d be interested to hear more about your experiences in the Outer Hebrides. Cycling the Hebridean Way is an unrealized ambition of mine.
Also, I commend you in following the scent of compost toilets, so to speak. Our whole site, including the campsite, is a compost toilet only zone … so don’t worry about your neighbours! My wife is our resident expert. It would be remiss of me not to commend her online compost toilet course: https://www.lowimpact.org/categories/compost-toilets/online-courses. If you scroll down, you’ll see our campsite composting washblock. A sneaky way of importing fertility onto the site!
@Bruce. Much to agree with there. A difficulty is cultivating the local without closing the door to incomers, of whom I suspect there will be many in the future in some places. Regarding land access, yes absolutely agree with you (and Andrew) about the elephant in the room. But historically there’s been quite a continuum from something like distributed small farm societies, to crippling rentierism and ultimately slavery. Cobbett’s Rural Rides from the early 19th century shows how wide the variation within that continuum was even just within England at that time. There have been populist situations in which a fraction of the ruling class allies with ordinary cultivators (Solon’s reforms in Athens perhaps being the best-known early example) … so there may be more grounds for hope than you suggest, but for sure it’s all quite a tall order.
You write “I also wonder if our collective inability to slay that elephant plays some role in the likes of Monbiot seeking answers to our various predicaments within rather than without ‘capitalist realities’.” I suspect that’s part of what’s going on for him, but for me this is what I’d have to call a self-unfulfilling prophecy. A big part of the problem is precisely the kind of ‘There Is No Alternative’ narrative that Monbiot is now peddling, involving improbable techno-fixes consonant with a capitalist realism that’s generating the disorder, and a scorn for other visions. IMO his radicalism has become merely gestural and he is now compounding the problems that he claims to be addressing.
Lots of other interesting points in your comment … Mughals and suchlike … but maybe I should stop there for now.
@Greg, @James @Steve. Yes, distributism extends beyond land to wealth and income. I recently read John Medaille’s book ‘Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits and More’. Not a recent book (2010), but a good one. Medaille argues that distributists tend to shrink from economic debates in favour of moral arguments, which is unfortunate because they have good economic arguments too. Generally, I think it’s fair to say that distributism is a much less developed economic & political doctrine than others like socialism and market liberalism, but I believe its time has come around again. James is right though that if you get the political economy of land right, then some of the other problems around wealth and income become less acute. But it’s hard to get the political economy of land right without confronting those problems too in contemporary society. Thanks Steve for running the rule over distributist commitments.
@Diogenes. It’s tempting to quip that Trump did start a war – in the Capitol. But I guess we’ve been over that. He may not have started a war, but some of his foreign policy moves were pretty bellicose. Still, it will be interesting if the US opts for more isolationism and gives up its global policeman role. I’m not convinced that will be good for the US economy, at least within the conventional framing of how these things are judged. But it may be good in the longer term for global politics.
“James is right though that if you get the political economy of land right, then some of the other problems around wealth and income become less acute. But it’s hard to get the political economy of land right without confronting those problems too in contemporary society. Thanks Steve for running the rule over distributist commitments.”
– Chris S.
Let’s keep in mind that getting the political economy of land right, from the distributist perspective, happens at the moment to be politically impossible in the USA, UK, Australia, Canada… and most every other “developed country” where the capitalist ideology reigns supreme.
And let’s also keep in mind that this means we as yet cannot make rapid strides in addressing necessary preparations for the rather dizzyingly horrific collapse of what we now call “the economy” (and society, politics) … which would not look so much like a “collapse” if we could be prepared for it ahead of its arrival.
One of my points in saying this is that the conceptual and theoretical distance between socialism and distributism turns out to be vastly smaller than some of the key formulators of distributism seemed to suggest. I’d even go as far as to say that for all practical political purposes, we ought properly to consider distributism as a form of socialism in the same sense that classical anarchism and state-oriented socialism are conflicting schools of socialist thought.
But then, I doubt anyone who doesn’t understand the history of anarchism, in all of its rich complexity, could fathom what I have just said. Anarchism was and is a form of socialist political philosophy, if we connect contemporary and historical versions with its historical roots.
Nothing short of revolution would be necessary to implement the ethos of either distributism or anarchism. These are not reform politics, either of them. Not in today’s world. And, no, “revolution” isn’t a word that refers to violence and insurrection. It refers to human beings throwing off systems of domination and exploitation by “the elite”…, by those who wish to use us as slaves of a sort.
Trump did start a “Culture War” 🙂
@Chris
“so don’t worry about your neighbours!”
It’s not the neighbours that will be my biggest obstacle.
I think my partner and kids may be more of a challenge!!!!!!
Maybe just learning the principles for now is as far as I can go and bide my time.
Everyone I talk to about Humanure thinks I’m slightly mad but I know that one day I will be oracle:)
Biden is talking about bringing back the draft .
Diogenes. It’s tempting to quip that Trump did start a war – in the Capitol. But I guess we’ve been over that. He may not have started a war, but some of his foreign policy moves were pretty bellicose .
Yep but no one died unlike the Democrat in command now who is involved in 2.1/2 wars .
You folks keep me too busy sometimes with endless interesting comments. Okay, just a few more considerations…
Trade: While agreeing with Bruce about the sophistication of earlier societies, and agreeing on the importance of local trade and markets within them, I want to sound a note of caution. The kind of trade in Andrew’s Ibn Khordadbeh quotation is clearly of the luxury/elite sort, as surely are Scandinavian dreams of silks – the kind of things that kings and aristocrats could tap into through wider political networks, even decaying ones like the remnants of the Roman empire in early medieval Europe. It gets amplified because people become so damn wrapped up in status emulation and material cultures that are ‘fit for a king’. The argument is that such elite pushes generate economic activity, specialization, trickle down etc. And then here we are in the 21st century with our charred world of goods. Hence the thin line I think we must tread between trading/markets and Trade/The Market. There’s a need for a localist/agrarian critique of trade and the peacocking associated with it.
Cities: Yes, spot on John – cities are a health disaster. My recollection of the evidence (this is going back to my epidemiology studies, many years ago) is that it wasn’t so much modern medicine as modern public health that cut the mortality rates – basically clean water, clean air and disposal of foul waste. Which takes a lot of energy – hence the precariousness of urbanism in the future. Compost toilets are the way to go, IMO. But they do require people to be a bit more spread out than is feasible in the average city.
Distributism: I agree with everything James says on this, with the proviso that it may be possible to spread the definition of ‘socialism’ too far. After all, all politics acknowledges that humans are intrinsically social. The conservative/trad Catholic distributists I’ve tangled with online have even said ‘distributism without Catholicism is just socialism’. But I think it may be best to reserve socialism for a politics based in the idea that the centralized state should make the key distributive decisions directly. Distributism by contrast emphasizes a limited state (or no state? Anarchist distributism…) ensuring that the distribution of the means of production stays distributed.
I agree that distributism is essentially revolutionary, in a wide sense of the term. But whereas socialist/communist revolutionaries tend to think that there’s some process inherent to the contradictions of capitalism that will drive history forward to some more perfected state, I don’t. I do think there are contradictions within capitalism that will ring its death knell. In my opinion, distributism is just the best of a bad job in the chaos that will follow, so it’s worth trying to amplify it for fear of much worse outcomes otherwise.
“Distributism: I agree with everything James says on this, with the proviso that it may be possible to spread the definition of ‘socialism’ too far.”
There is no doubt that the notion of what constitutes “socialism” can be drawn too far! And now we’re beginning to address the problem of essentialism in defining anything — any “entity”.
There are a profusion of theoretical concepts around the word ‘entity’, as well. As one who subscribs to process-relational ontology (not necessarily the Whiteheadian version, which is the most well-known), I regard all “entities” as existing interdependently with other “entities” — in relation, not independently. So we relational philosophers are fine with conceptions of essences which likewise emphasize that all things are processes in relation.
Personally, I’m okay enough with definitions of socialism which define socialism as worker ownership of the means of production –, a definition which certainly could fit tidily under the rubric of distributism as I understand it.
“But I think it may be best to reserve socialism for a politics based in the idea that the centralized state should make the key distributive decisions directly.”
Well, as you know Chris, I’m at least 85% aligned with anarchist political philosophy, so this definition to me seems highly ahistorical, in the sense that one has to regard anarchism as a deviation away from socialism, rather than a variant of socialist political philosophy, to embrace this sort of a definition. Broadminded scholars of socialist history, being most actual scholars of that history, see anarchism as a variant of socialism, insofar as historical contextualization goes. So I’ll side with them!
I am a socialist, for damned sure! And I actively oppose centralized state socialism as an abomination. I’m a decentralist and a socialist — an anarchist (with mild reservations, in that even anarchism must be explained and defined). Much of what has been called “anarchism” is anathema to me. To get where I’m coming from, imagine someone who prefers radical democracy at the immediate local scale, ideally centering on villages and neighborhoods as the base decision-making units.
“But whereas socialist/communist revolutionaries tend to think that there’s some process inherent to the contradictions of capitalism that will drive history forward to some more perfected state, I don’t.”
Yeah, I’m with you. That was, of course, an idea advanced by Karl Marx, who really flubbed it up, didn’t he! LOL.
I’d say that even today most anarchists are socialists who would be at least fully allied with distributism’s basic tenets and premises. I am! And yet a lot of us would probably prefer everything we now call “real estate” (land and buildings, etc.) to be communally held (“owned”) by very small, neibghborhood and small village scaled communities. But really, the important thing is the smallness of scale of the basic units which comprise a functioning community. At the very local, small scale, people can form patterns of relationship rooted in caring for one another, and that’s the crucial piece for me. I want to return culture to mutuality rooted in care. We’ve lost this in the giantism of mass societies, and mass socialism may be even worse than mass capitalism! One only has to look at the example of the USSR and China to realize this.
In capitalist socieites, the easiest way to tar and feather someone’s socialist philosophy is to identify “socialism” with the sort of horrors which unfolded in places like the USSR and China, with the extreme centralization, authoritarianism and brutal forms of dehumanizing bureaucracy.
“cities are a health disaster… modern public health… cut the mortality rates…”
The CDC reports that “Death rates in the United States are higher in rural than urban areas, and the difference has grown over the last 2 decades”, which presumably is related to the rural disparities in income and access to healthcare (exacerbated by rural hospital closures).
Despite those rural healthcare disadvantages, the CDC reports that “In 2020, the age-adjusted death rate for COVID-19 was highest in the most urban areas (large central metropolitan)”.
Thus, the potential for future pandemics (and quarantines) are additional reasons to avoid pushing more of the population into megacities.
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/121523
Urban air quality is also a disaster and contributes hugely to non-infectious respiratory illness and probably also cardiovascular disease.
https://marshallcolman.blogspot.com/2012/03/old-postcard-of-stoke-on-trent.html
Some pictures .
I grew up down wind of this , today’s air pollution smoke screen / political talking point is drivel to keep the chattering classes occupied .
Just because you can’t see the stuff from car exhaust doesn’t mean it isn’t affecting health.
socialism / anarchism — their historical relations
https://chat.openai.com/share/bb7f9267-b618-4eb3-9ac8-7ad892b5eb6d
ChatGPT is no authority! Nor is anyone else?!?
@Bruce –
“I think we shouldn’t discount the role of trade and money in premodern agrarian societies.”
I agree.
It’s a complex thing in lots of ways. History didn’t evenly unfold as “ages” and “epochs,” as the story is often told, but in very many particular places and times, with place being a crucial part of understanding what happened, when. But generalizations are often helpful, too.
My sense of history is that in most places in the premodern world, money was used for some transactions but not for most–depending upon where and when. In the modern world, in so-called “developed countries,” money mediates nearly all exchanges… or most every aspect of “the economy” — with “economy” meaning something more than what it means to most of us now. The further back in time, as a generalization across times and places, the more likely it was the case that folks provided food, shelter and other basic needs without using money in the process. The nearer to the present, the greater the likelihood that money is involved in these processes. Oftentimes, people would require money for silks, or for turned wooden boxes, even shoes. But certainly not for all they need, as is now pretty much the case where I live today.
@Bruce –
… a little more about the history of the use of money…
“An earlier metallurgical innovation made standing armies possible, and in Scheidler’s view created the basis for the market economy. That was the minting of coins from precious metals originating in Greece around the middle of the 6th century BC. Virtually no professional armies existed before then. Armies were composed of farmers who had to return home to sow and harvest crops. Soldiers had to be paid in-kind with goods, which had to be transported to the front. Even if they looted, armies would soon exhaust the landscape. This placed practical limitations of around three days on marches.
Silver coins eliminated this limit. Soldiers could now be paid with easily transportable coin purses. But payment in coin required creation of markets. Farmers previously had largely grown for their own subsistence, and paid taxes in the form of crops. Now they had to pay in coins, the need of which forced them to market their crops for coins. Armies could provision themselves through purchases along the way. “It was an almost perfect cycle without which neither Greek imperialism, Alexander’s empire, the Roman Empire nor the modern world system would have been possible.”
from –
The rise and fall of the Megamachine
How the system devouring Earth roots in empire
by PATRICK MAZZA
https://theraven.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-megamachine
Money seems to have evolved as a whole system, and had to be made necessary, in many cases, for it to be adopted as a means of mediating economic functions. This “making necessary” was associated, in many cases, with the ostensible need of growing empires to make war — and to pay for it.
I’m sure that silk in northern Europe in 1300 was a product only the elite could afford. But I’d bet that on the other end of that trade were villages producing silk as a cash crop alongside their other crops – just as you produce electronic courses on compost toilets alongside your vegetables Chris.
I’m sure you’re right James that the history of money, as in minted coin, grew up in conjunction with states, although I wonder about the scale of those states – as in how big did the state need to grow before coin emerges as a medium of exchange. And I don’t imagine coin was the first thing to emerge as a medium of exchange – I’m sure there were less formal tokens used in trade before the emergence of formal money.
The ‘Iceman’ mummy found in the Alps in 1991 and who died around 3000bc has shoes so well made and sophisticated in their construction that academics have hypothesised the existence of cobblers – if (and it’s a big if) such specialists existed one would assume they’d not take all their payment in kind and so the existence of some sort of universal trade token could perhaps be inferred.
Dividing markets from ‘The Market’ does seem important and perhaps particularly tricky after 40+ years of political dominance by the latter.
David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years is a good read on the different forms of money/debt/exchange.
Tally sticks were particularly interesting.
Yes, I’d like to second this recommendation. A very illuminating book, written in an engaging way, as usual for DG. I was a bit bemused to see The Dawn of Everything blow up so much in the mainstream when Debt is by far Graeber’s strongest book in my opinion.
With regard to land redistribution.
Here in the UK a good place to start would be The Ducky of Cornwall.
Can’t see there being too many people that would object. 🙂
John Adams:
Add the Duchy of Lancaster to the Duchy of Cornwall. In either place, if you die without making a will and have no close relatives, your assets go to the royal family *not* the Treasury, i.e. where it might help towards public spending.
Technically I think, the £££ goes to the crown estate. It still means that the royal family and assorted hangers-on get their hands on it. Net result: a transfer of £££ from people of average means to the ultra-rich.
Norman Baker, ex-MP, wrote a good book on the UK monarchy.
FWIW, the more I see of human nature, the more I incline to owner-occupied landholdings. The least worst, maybe.
I gather it’s normal in some countries outside the UK. Guy Shrubsole, who wrote ‘The Lost Rainforests’, says Wales has come closer to that situation than Scotland or England, owing to reforms by Lloyd George when he was PM. Most estates in Wales were sold to the tenants.
It’s now clear to me that genuine democracy just isn’t possible in the modern / contemporary world. I had thought we could create new conditions of possibility for it, but it’s looking very bleak, this hope and wish — this which I had hoped would be a possibility.
I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to even try any more. There are a tiny few who know that what we have isn’t actually democracy, and among these, even fewer want to talk with one another about what we could do about our actual situation.
Modernity appears to me to be a Great Mirage, a vast illusion to keep the people from participating. I’m beyond desperate for any other framing on the story.
From my perspective, “politics” means democracy, and democracy means politics. All else is kings, emperors, empires, dominators and exploiters, etc. So the end — or death — of politics is, to me, an end of being human. It’s a loss of our basic humananity, since when the Machine replaces democracy with more of its own apparatus, we are slaves to the Machine.
@James R. Martin
I’m not sure that democracy has ever really been a thing.
Universal Suffrage isn’t that old and if it’s only a two horse race, and those two horses aren’t actually that different, then it’s not really democracy.
And if 51% of the public agree on something, it means that 49% don’t.
@ John –
I take the term ‘democracy’ to refer to governance of, by and for the people, and there is nothing in this formulation which requires democratic decision-making to be decided by majority rule of the sort where 5% +1 wins, or where there even have to be “horses” (representatives)…, orchestrated by powerful (corporate owned) political parties, with the polis (the people) “informed” by mass media propaganda owned by the economic “elite” who own everything else as well.
In short, in theory, democracy could be done very differently, and thus could (in theory) be actually democratic. But that’s in theory. We’re very far from being the kind of people — at the moment — who could enact anything like democracy in any form whatsoever.
Can we become such people? I had always hoped so. But that would require something like a miracle at this point.
@James.R. Martin
51%-49% reference is just a question really.
Democracy depends on what you mean by democracy.
How is the decision making process made?
Majority???
Biggest minority???
@ John –
“How is the decision making process made?”
If the decision-making group (“body”) is small enough, there would be no need to have “representatives.” Various kinds of consensus decision-making could be experimented with… or enthusiastically adopted — such as various forms of modified consensus decision making, where a consensus is required, but a “block” requires a certain number of blockers, which number depends on the size of the group, of course.
Anyway, there must be a thousand different ways for groups to achieve agreements.
The key to success is to cultivate communities of care, in which we’re not seeking to “win” at the cost of others.
@James. R. Martin
Yes, I can see democracy working on a small scale where everyone knows everyone and all can have a voice.
But once scaled up, then this becomes impossible.
Then for practical reasons, people are “delegated” to represent people’s views in regional assemblies etc.
This is where the problems for democracy begin.
How much are my views represented in parliament by my MP???? Not very much!!!!
Some brief remarks:
Yes, I like Kathryn’s thinking about refugia and avoiding both bunker-building and passive waiting … while also avoiding the magic solutionism and commitment to the status quo of ecomodernist thinking.
I also agree that the signs aren’t good for mass spiritual awakening, at least in the near future. But I haven’t entirely given up hope of spiritual awakenings, and political ones too. I think people should try to contribute what they’re best capable and motivated to deliver in helping to build the refugia – sketching their possible political and spiritual dimensions is absolutely part of those contributions. Delineating good possible outcomes that are achievable in the face of bad probable circumstances is the way to go, in my opinion.
I agree with James on the futility of mainstream ‘democracy’ or mainstream politics in general. But on definitions and histories of anarchism and socialism, while debating their lineages can be of interest for sure, I don’t buy the notion that putting limits around socialism in terms of claims upon the modern state is ahistorical. Ideas of fairness and collectivism reach deep into human history (and evolution), but ‘socialism’ is quite a modern usage and there’s a risk of ahistoricity also or anachronism in reading it back into other histories. My view is that there’s still vitality in many of the ideas animating socialism, but socialism as such is a modernist doctrine as dead as its parent narrative, and it would be wise to find new stories and terms to carry these ideas onwards. I think anarchism retains a bit more promise.
Interesting point from Bruce about tracing silk production back to local cash cropping, despite monopoly trade and elite purchasing. But I think there’s still a difference with modern online compost toilet courses, in that the latter lacks much of a developmental dynamic whereby smallholders are likely to be pressurised to specialise in producing more and cheaper compost toilet courses to realise more value across the supply chain. Maybe that would be possible in the short run. In the long run, it would be self-limiting as the market would be saturated with local knowledges of humanure composting that would decrease rather than increase market dependence. Hence, markets for compost toilet courses, but greater danger of The Market for silk.
I’d endorse John’s tip of Graeber’s ‘Debt’, by the way – an outstanding book.
I think I now need to stop commenting as I need to write the next post, which is proving tricky, as well as doing a bunch of other things. But thanks very much everyone for contributing to the discussion here, which I’ve found informative.
@ Chris –
It’s okay that we disagree on what the word “socialism” refers to. I have no problem with that. But the more I look into the history the more it becomes obvious that social anarchism, which eschewed the centralized state, was indeed a branch of socialist philosophy, one often in conflict with the Marxist state-centered notion of “socialism”. Wikipedia is, of course, no authority, but since I’m not here to win arguments or debates, I’ll not be providing a long list of historical resources to make my case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_anarchism
Socialism — as I understand it — is most essentially any movement which proposes to allow workers (and just plain everyday citizens) to own what was in the day called “the means of production” — land, tools, machines, etc., — rather than to have a capitalist class own everything. In state socialism, it is the state which is proposed to own the means of production. Anarchists of myriad persuasions proposed a decentralized ownership of various small (human scaled) local sorts. If you are a distributist, then, you are also a socialist. And the traditional / classic distributists are just wrong about their history, since they absurdly ignore the anarchist contribution to socialist political philosophy.
Anyway, I have no need to argue about this. I love what you’re doing and am grateful to you for doing it. And I don’t give a flying fork about winning arguments–usually. I prefer more constructive kinds of collaboration.
@,James. R. Martin
The problem with words like “socialism” is that it means different things to different people.
When a definition is contested, I’m not sure of the value of using a word to explain complex thoughts.
“The problem with words like ‘socialism’ is that it means different things to different people.”
Yes, word like up, down, (directions) left, right, North, South, East and West are highly contested terms, and so we should abandon them as useless relics of the past. Who needs orientation? Nobody! Orientation will become, as well it should be, an antique notion to be abandoned because it is “contested”… and these words mean different things to different people, so the problem is solved.
If I appear to be snide, it’s because where I live the word “libertarianism,” which had always been a left-wing term, was stolen by the political right. And folks just let them have the word! As if language is meaningless and not worth standing up for.
I remain pissed about this. And I’m pissed today whenever anyone proposes to let the right wing own our words.
Oh, sorry, in England (and the UK generally, I assume) “pissed” means drunk. Here in the part of North America (USA), where I’m being held captive, “pissed” means angry.
I’m not anti a debate about the definition of a word like “socialism”.
But when a single word is a shortcut for complex concepts that are contested, one can get bogged down in debating its definition.
It’s not just a right/left thing.
Even people on the “left” have different understandings of the meaning of “socialism”.
There are no shortcuts in political debate. The full expression of one’s opinion cannot be explained by just a word.
“Socialism” in the US has a different “weight” to it than here in the UK.
Here in the UK………
“Pissed” is drunk.
“Pissed off” is being annoyed with someone/something.
“Taking the piss” is trying to take advantage of someone.
“Taking the piss out of someone ” is ridiculing someone else.
Type faster. I’m busting into chapter 7…
Out of curiosity, I learned a little more about the silk trade and silk making, and it seems notable that Scandinavians played a big role in transporting silk to Europe (during the 10th-12th centuries).
Later, when silk was being produced in southern Europe (with the local cultivation of silkworms), Italy became the second largest silk producer in the world (after China). Silk was reportedly the most important industry in Italy during the late 19th century.
“From tenth to twelfth century, it was Scandinavians, once they had — in Pirenne’s words — given up making war in favor of trade, who supplied merchants of the north with Oriental goods, including silk… Scandinavians were able to provide both for markets of southeastern Europe and also for those of Baltic and North Seas, thereby reaching England and Ireland. In this way, silk gradually became a familiar fabric throughout northern Europe.”
“In 1890 Italy, 5,246 towns and villages were engaged in silk production, and more than 600,000 people were employed in cultivation of silkworms… Increasingly concentrated around Milan and other northern cities, silk remained the most important industry in Italy… In short, Italy was second largest silk producer in the world, after China, and largest in Europe.”
Silk and the European Economy
Luigi De Rosa, 1992
PDF download:
https://minpaku.repo.nii.ac.jp/?action=repository_action_common_download&item_id=3120&item_no=1&attribute_id=18&file_no=1
Thanks for this – I had no idea that silk had been produced in Italy
I have been trying to convince Alice that Capitalism is simply Militarism, and that ‘capital’ is just ‘the spoils of war’. It is to firmly place the guilt and blood of war in the hands of those that wage it. The scepticism we have towards the professional classes of bankers, insurers, accountancy and law, to the aristocracy and business classes, is not becuase they ‘rich’ and ‘greedy’ but becuase they are war mongers dripping with the blood of the innocents who have been slaughtered for their spoils. As a prosocial land animal we are naturally horrified by the massacres committed by this class. Historically hidden and culturally massaged, it is an indefensible system. Only now that this militaristic global structure is hitting cultural and ecological is it being recognised. The laundering of Militarism through the term Capitalism has to be stopped.
The question then becomes one over whether you support Militarism or not, rather than the euphemistic arguments about the market.
Also, nettle makes a fine silk.
@Joel
Too true.
Call me “woke” but Capitalism goes hand in hand with Imperialism.
You can’t have Capitalism without access to resources, hence Imperialism.
You can’t have Imperialism without Militarism.
The (un) holy trinity.
I guess it has to be said that this goes for centralised government structures of any stripe, nation states and corporations. Just need to call it what it is now. It is antithetical to life and all that is good!
And yes maybe it is useful to define these forms of Militarism but again, Imperialism is just another fancy word for war mongering. It returns again and again to the warped fantasies of traumatised men. Its laughable. There is a meme on Instagram about how many times a day men think about the roman empire! It is the defintion of pathetic. Lol.
Vandana Shiva and Maria Weiss were mining this out in the late 80s. Jason w.moore and Raj Patel cover it some in 7 cheap things that changed the world, and Tyson Yunkaporta makes a fist of it in his first book. Our societies are based on military training and chain of command, the systematic traumatising of young men and women for the purpose of control.
Nettle is lovely, and I enjoy working with it, but the resulting cloth is a lot more like linen than silk.
I’m increasingly aware that the debate is framed by the aggressors, the military establishment let’s call it, who set the terms. As we establish terms in regards to the arguments and facts underpinning a move to a small farm future, this happens across religious, political, academic and cultural fields.
It is an extension of the bad faith actors problem, establishing a de facto bad faith actors in the establishment of terms.
@ John Adams –
“There are no shortcuts in political debate. The full expression of one’s opinion cannot be explained by just a word.
‘Socialism’ in the US has a different “weight” to it than here in the UK.”
Not just here in the USA, but in much of the English-speaking world, “socialism” has been very deliberately associate with the rather extreme authoritarianism of the USSR and China since the Cold War began. I understand this. It was deliberately cultivated both by the USSR, China and the USA (largely the CIA) to tar and feather ‘socialism’ as an extreme form of state authoritarianism. It’s a history I know pretty well. Noam Chomsly has been a good guide on this topic, but there are plenty of others.
If we didn’t all live in a propaganda state curated by capitalists, we’d all know these things.
@James R. Martin
“If we didn’t all live in a propaganda state curated by capitalists, we’d all know these things.”
True, but when did humans ever NOT lived in a propaganda state?
In western culture, before capitalism it was the Church.
Even oral story telling traditions are promoting/projecting particular narratives onto their young.
Perhaps propoganda is one of the things that define us as human!?
With regard to the word “socialism”. I’m not sure if it can be “back projected” onto pre-industrial agrarian, feudal systems or that it can be “forwarded projected” to a SFF. For me, it’s very much a product of industrial society.
‘With regard to the word “socialism”…’
Words like “socialism” and “capitalism” can be defined and propagandized to obscure the associated power-over structures. It might be more useful and revelatory to look closely at the power relations, whether they are power-over, power-to, or power-with.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350807403_The_new_concepts_of_power_Power-over_power-to_and_power-with
As I see it, socialism is often touted for its power-with aspects, while the objections to socialism often focus on the power-over aspects of socialist state control (and other ostensibly “collective” governance).
I’d like a large serving of “power-with” mixed with “power-to”. Hold the “power-over”.
In “Saying NO…”, Chris writes about “Autonomy in Community”, and these autonomy aspects (“power-to”) might be necessary to prevent (or stave off) the “power-over” tendencies in societies.
@ John Adams –
“With regard to the word “socialism”. I’m not sure if it can be “back projected” onto pre-industrial agrarian, feudal systems or that it can be “forwarded projected” to a SFF. For me, it’s very much a product of industrial society.”
I’m not an authority on the history of socialism — as a philosophy and a movement –, but I do think it is important to recognize that while Marx had a major influence upon that movement and philosophy, his ideas are not the whole of the philosophy and movement. Lots of differing ideas were at play in the history, but during a certain span of the history more and more people started associating socialism with Marxism, to the extent that it became popular to equate the two.
I’ve read very little of Marx, directly, but I’ve read about (and heard lots of experts talk about) Marx and Marxism over the years. Marx was very much in favor of industrialism, apparently. He just wanted to go ahead with industrialism with the proletariat as the owners, rather than capitalists as the owners. But there is nothing essential to socialism which requires socialism to look like what we call “industrialism”. (In quotes to be clear that the presence of some “industry” doesn’t imply a total system we now know of as industrialism.)
The way I cope with the word “socialism” is to conceive of it, initially, as the worker ownership of the means of production (land, tools, materials, equipment). But it would be just as well — and probably better — to conceive of it as the common people’s ownership of the means of (to?) livelihood.
So, as I see it, there’s no reason to think of “back projecting” and “forward projecting” as obstacles to the evolution of the core idea and politics of socialism. Basically, socialism is any way of life, or system, culture, whatever, where there isn’t an owning class apart from everyday, ordinary people and workers.
James wrote: “The way I cope with the word “socialism” is to conceive of it, initially, as the worker ownership of the means of production (land, tools, materials, equipment). But it would be just as well — and probably better — to conceive of it as the common people’s ownership of the means of (to?) livelihood.”
That potentially sounds more like the ideals of distributism instead of socialism, unless “the common people’s ownership” is referring to the *collective* ownership aspect of socialism (as defined by modern political parties which call themselves “socialist”), instead of distributism’s individual or household ownership of the means of production.
@ Steve L –
“That potentially sounds more like the ideals of distributism instead of socialism, unless “the common people’s ownership” is referring to the *collective* ownership aspect of socialism (as defined by modern political parties which call themselves “socialist”), instead of distributism’s individual or household ownership of the means of production.”
Well, as I have said, I do believe that distributism is a form of socialism in the sense for that term I provided. So would, for example, libertarian municipalism be, if a particular town or village adopted communal ownership of the means of production — which, of course, need not be orchestrated in a centralized fashion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin#Municipalism_and_communalism
I don’t like the idea of very large cities organizing themselves into centralized city states, as these lack what is often called human scale. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1860480
Large cities, if they continue to exist in the future, could be divided up into human scaled local (autonomous) zones, however. (I almost said ‘district’, but that implies a larger entity up above it.) Not sure what word works best!
Anyway, let local folks decide how they want to live together. That’s my basic idea.
A few quick points.
1. My WordPress guru has found a plugin, now live on this site, which enables email notification of answers to comments.
2. Just to open out from some remarks of James’s, I don’t particularly want to ‘win’ any arguments either amongst the genial and excellent crowd of regular commenters here, so thanks James for putting that out there. I do occasionally get a bit triggered by the odd remark and stick obstreperously to my guns, but I hope you’ll forgive me these excesses.
3. Talking of guns, I’m interested in Joel’s thread on miltarism. Social violence is more ubiquitous, whereas militarism (standing armies etc) is a more specialist innovation. It’s easier, I think, to limit violence than militarism. There are also points on the spectrum in between – charismatic kings or ‘hall societies’ and such like. A theme for the future I think – thanks Joel for raising it.
4. Likewise with the interesting discussion of socialism, anarchism, distributism etc.
5. Thanks also for the discussions about silk. I started reading Neil Price’s history of the Vikings which is quite interesting, both in relation to silk and the emergence of militarism. Legacy of the Roman empire and its fancy trade goods mixed with early medieval environmental disaster combined to create curious societies involving ‘big man’ warrior violence and a taste for upmarket clothes shopping.
6. Thanks for the book recommendation Shaun – looks interesting. I’ll see what I can do.
7. As with reading, so with writing. Happy to inform you Greg that I bought a fresh notebook yesterday, ready for the next book. Nothing in it yet, mind you – but when I gave a talk last night the idea of the next book slowly became more concrete.
@Chris
Thumbs up from me for the plug in!!!!
OK, so Militarism is separate from social violence? I can see that but I question how ubiquitous that violence can be if it is not backed by a standing army? The subtle violence of the professional classes is backed by the police, who are now a standing domestic army – backed by the army.
The point really is to ‘refang’ capitalism, show its blood soaked hands behind the Hugo Boss suit – which relates to the fetishism for fancy clothes; didn’t he clothe the Nazis?
Also, the fetishism for fine silks and garments at the historical juncture you describe is an interesting discussion for Alice – I’ll pass it on – she/we are looking at the aesthetics of masculinity to track the Militaristism we see in everything from police, to vehicles, to clothes. Aesthetics are big part of cultural communication of inherent values and subtly hide alot of the mechanisms of power.
Interesting perspective on vehicles, many of which (cars) seem to me to look more and more like fish as the years go by. But with the Cybertruck you can smell the aggression. With the VW Beetle, hardly at all.
On Doomers –
There is a post over on Resilience about the uselessness of COP 128. The last couple paragraphs made me wonder ‘what is the gentlest way to crash the economy ?’ Maybe the question is ‘reset our society?’ No matter, the effect is the same.
A carbon tax doesn’t seem like it would do anything. Prices go up. The Government collects the price increase and gives it back to the top 1%. Or the bottom 50% of the wage earners. As long as polluters keep getting paid, who cares what coal costs ?
Putting teeth in the idea that externalized costs need to be accounted for could be a way. Prices would go so high that no one could afford to buy anything. Without consumer spending the economic house of cards would collapse. Maybe not so gently.
None of the things I can think of are going to happen. They could, but they are not. Nobody in politics will take that step. Better for them to hope for some external event that triggers a reset. Which would not be gentle at all.
As a society we find ourselves in a deep hole. The sooner we realize that the better. How do we start throwing some dirt against the side of the hole so we can climb out ? If there isn’t a way, the we should admit.
The best I can do is try to figure out ways to near the top of the pile when the walls do cave in. What about you ?
I think a carbon tax could be quite an effective way of taxing fossil energy use, I’m just not sure the political will exists to make sure it’s actually substantive.
Unfortunately we have a bunch of problems that go beyond fossil fuel use and atmospheric carbon dioxide. Even if we stopped adding greenhouse gases tomorrow, a bunch of climate chaos would already be baked in. The problems of pollution (including e.g. things like microplastics which we are only starting to understand), soil degradation, ocean acidification and so on are not exactly easily remedied. So a carbon tax by itself, even if it has the necessary political “teeth”, is not going to be enough to get us out of this mess and into a world that roughly resembles the one we live in now.
But… catastrophe is here already for enough people that a certain sort of preparation for a one-off collapse event starts to seem rather parochial. I say this as someone who does give some thought to long-term issues like genetic diversity of food crops, horticultural skills, transport and so on; it’s not that being prepared or at least prudent is bad. It’s that the kind of preparation we need to do probably looks a lot more like the mutual aid groups that emerged in the early days of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic than having a basement full of canned food.
ps It looks like the edit feature disappeared.
This is a test, to see if the edit feature re-appears.
(I think it previously only appeared if you had checked the “Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment” tickbox, but that in turn seems to expire pretty quickly.)
Yep — looks like the 4 minutes of editing have gone, at least from this browser.
I didn’t use it much though, usually I don’t find my tyops until much later.
The Edit function disappeared completely for me but today I see the Remember Me function is working. Maybe Editing is back too. It is a valuable resource. I’m terrible at proffreading unless I come back to it hours later.
I don’t think editing has ever been available hours later on this site — but most of use are proficient in interpreting tyopes.
Tyops and autocarrots, yep.
Nope, still gone.
@ Chris Smaje –
When I was in one of my more poetic moods, maybe two or three weeks ago (?) I said something about how “the revolution” might be “a poem”. And you said something approving toward the notion that ethics (and what is revolution if not an ethical response to a world in need of profound and rapid change?) and aesthetics might hang together in this sort of way.
I’m researching far more themes and topics than I can keep up with, lately, but one of those themes is this relationship of ethics and aesthetics. It fascinates me in so many ways, for so many reasons! (Partly because it reveals a lot about how conceptual schemas — with their cultural histories — effect perception, and vice versa, and I’m drawn toward helping to develop a theoretical orientation on philosophy of culture).
Anyway, I found this while doing my research, and thought to pass it on for you to read.
More than skin deep
https://aeon.co/essays/how-virtue-morphs-into-beauty-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder
Hope you are well, my brother.