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Posted on August 1, 2024 | 54 Comments
I thought I’d introduce a new element to the blog starting today with this first ‘news’ post. The idea is to intersperse my longer essay-style offerings with shorter postings on matters that seem newsworthy according to my idiosyncratic view of world affairs. ‘News’ in the sense of a mix of facts and opinion, because as The Guardian doesn’t say but ought to: ‘comment is free and so are facts and it’s harder to separate them out than you might think’. Anyway, let me know your thoughts.
Four brief items to kick off.
The alt-meat and alt-dairy industry that I criticized in my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future seems to be acquiring some considerably higher-profile enemies than me in the form of European political leaders Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán, plus US politician Ron DeSantis.
All of them are politicians of the far-right. With company like this, should I reconsider my critical position on manufactured food? Hmm, well … this pro-manufactured food article points to connections between these politicians and big business in the form of the meat industry, which is no doubt happy to play up to right-populist framings of meat as honest, traditional and determinedly non-woke. But the problem with the article, and with manufactured food narratives generally, is that their respective claims to sustainability and social justice are basically greenwashing for other corporate interests in the ‘disruptive’ food-tech space. So, right-wing or left-wing, nationalist or ecomodernist, the corporations are the winners either way, and we’re the fools for letting them divide us.
I’ve recently written about books by two ‘progressive’ thinkers – Naomi Klein and Caroline Lucas – who both make the point that the far right moves in and claims important issues where progressives fail to develop a coherent narrative. I can hardly think of a better example than farming, particularly localism and farming. I truly believe that the drift of too much of the left into a kind of vapid, top-down, techno-fixing ecomodernism is an enormous political failure which will haunt us in the future.
A shoutout for James C. Scott, who died recently, aged 87. Along with the late David Graeber, he was one of the two distinguished, anarchist-populist social scientists writing about agrarianism and world politics who’ve influenced me the most. Here are some of his books that I’ve just pulled off my shelf:
(I’m sure I also have a copy of The Moral Economy of the Peasant somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it).
I went to a seminar given by Scott at Johns Hopkins University as a callow youth in the 1980s during my brief and ill-fated attempt to do an anthropology doctorate there. I can’t remember much about it to be honest, apart from two things. First, Scott was worried about leaving home to give the seminar because lambing was about to start. One of my colleagues opined that he was just playing at being a farmer – the larping critique that forever attends anyone trying even mildly to practice what they preach in our precariously virtualized modern world.
Second, I remember my professor Ashraf Ghani tearing into Scott on some point of Marxist principle or other, and Scott impressing me with his unfazed and easy-tempered manner of reply. For all that, maybe there’s a lesson to be drawn about the downsides of ruralism and agrarianism from Ashraf’s later misadventures – or maybe the lesson is that global powers should stop their wargaming in other people’s rural backyards. But let’s keep it brief. As I’ve said many times before, I think the future for most people globally is going to be a rural and agrarian one. The challenge of our generation is to try to make that future as positive, peaceful, pro-social and non-patriarchal as possible. Few other things matter as much.
It emerged more recently that Scott had had some entanglements with the CIA in his early years researching peasants in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. Not all that surprising, really. US governments of that era were terrified at the prospect of communist peasant revolutions sweeping the world. All of a sudden there was a surprising amount of research money sloshing around in American universities to fund eager graduate students in their studies of ordinary peasant life (another of my Johns Hopkins professors, Sid Mintz, reported a historian friend of his, a medieval specialist, saying as he eyed the anthropology department’s budget on a university committee that he wished the middle ages could rise up as a communist threat).
I don’t know enough about what Scott did or didn’t do to have an opinion about all this, though I’m inclined to endorse the characteristically forthright opinion on X of my colleague, Anthony Galluzzo:
“RIP James Scott. Seeing Like A State was a transformative book for me, and his “high modernist ideology” certainly informs my own discussion of hypermodernism in the recent book. Cue toy Bolsheviks and various other hypermodernists shouting “CIA” as a way to avoid his arguments.”
It brings to mind a debate under my last blog post about the times in history when you’re called to take sides. A lasting contribution of Scott’s work is his answer to the question of choosing between communism and capitalism – neither of the above. But it’s not always easy to tread the line.
Anyway, RIP James Scott, and thanks for what you gave us.
There were some interesting discussions under my last blog post, including the recent sentencing of four climate activists to lengthy jail terms. Joel’s point about the pearl-clutching that goes on when middle-class activists suffer from harsh sentencing of the kind that’s routine for less celebrated and well-connected folk is well taken, although I’m not a big fan of jail for anyone but those who pose major risks to other people’s safety. Perhaps the more worrying trend has been cases involving judges threatening juries if they fail to convict or finding people in contempt of court for merely mentioning climate change. More than far-right dismissals of manufactured food, I think these erosions of basic legal principle are a more worrying trend that governments of different political persuasions seem happy to nod through.
Unfortunately, climate change and activist efforts to address it are a classic joint action or ‘tragedy of the commons’ problem (more accurately, a tragedy of failing to create a commons). “I’ll do something about it if you will…”
In terms of personal news, I’m looking forward to talking with Carwyn Graves (author of the magnificent Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape) at the Green Gathering in Cas-gwent/Chepstow on Saturday. On this blog, I hope to tie up some loose ends from recent posts with two further posts – one on renewable energy and the other on urban/rural network efficiencies before moving on to new ground. But there may be a slow turnaround of these posts for various reasons. One of them is that I continue to have minimal internet access at home and have to head into town if I want to get a connection. And, as featured across said internet, I reportedly hate towns…
Larry Siedentop Inventing the Individual – the Origins of Western Liberalism
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For a news post this is pretty weighty stuff, Chris! I appreciate it, though.
As I’ve said many times before, I think the future for most people globally is going to be a rural and agrarian one. The challenge of our generation is to try to make that future as positive, peaceful, pro-social and non-patriarchal as possible. Few other things matter as much.
Hear, hear.
I’m curious whether Siedentop goes into the Reformation (and Protestantism more generally) in his book.
Chris wrote: “All of them are politicians of the far-right. With company like this, should I reconsider my critical position on manufactured food? Hmm, well … this pro-manufactured food article”…
That article’s summary says “The lobby does not shy away from twisting the truth, even lying outright, to achieve its agenda”, but in the details of the article, I didn’t find any substantiation of their claim of lying. This is especially disappointing since it comes from independent investigative journalists (FTM dot eu) whose purported goal is to “uncover the truth”.
The narrative they’re promoting seems to be pinning the far-right bogeyman label on those who aren’t embracing the hype about manufactured foods, but the truth runs deeper than that.
In January 2024, the European agriculture ministers had a meeting at which the Austrian, French, and Italian delegations presented a jointly-written document which was critical of “new lab-grown artificial cell-based food”, and the document was supported by the delegations from ten additional European countries (including Spain, Poland, Greece…), so it’s not just “right-wing” Italy and Hungary.
The agriculture ministers from those 13 European countries had a wide range of shared concerns, including economic questions (“How are we to prevent the creation of monopolies or oligopolies on the food market?), sustainability issues (“What is the real carbon footprint of these lab-grown meat production techniques?”), social questions (“How do we ensure that inequalities do not increase as regards the affordability of genuine meat-based products between consumers?”), and food safety concerns (“Does the current regulation on Novel Foods provide a suitable and comprehensive frame to assess the potential risks associated with these products while taking fully into account the precautionary principle?”).
The governments of some other European countries (such as the Netherlands) reportedly have already invested millions of euros into the new food technologies, and did not support this document.
https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-5469-2024-REV-1/en/pdf
Chris wrote: “So, right-wing or left-wing, nationalist or ecomodernist, the corporations are the winners either way, and we’re the fools for letting them divide us.”
Exactly.
I think that the far edges of the right and left, progressive and conservative, have almost met for quite a while. There lots of issues where my conservative neighbors agree with me if the issues are framed in the right way. Until it gets down to very specific details.
Rights come with responsibilities. It used to be that we were all in this together. The government is not doing anything that matters to working class people / benefit go to the rich. Etc.
Are ecomodernists really progressive / socialist / left leaning ? Is right wing populism an oxymoron ? Anyone supporting corporate / capitalist solutions is not looking out for the best interests of the majority. See Trickle Down Economics or Project 2025 as prime examples from the right.
The left seems to be too disorganized to come up with overarching plans like those. The belief that there are large scale, techno fixes diffuses the drive to address the root cause (over consumption)of the problem and is at best simply delusional. It leaves all the planning to the corporatists. Right and left meet again.
There are other directions besides right and left.
Politicians not fit for purpose ?
Sadly, that is too often the case.
A cheeky fifth bulletin, if I may: The Land Magazine is back!
https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/
The good news that a Norwegian fake food company went bust even with government subsidies because they could not sell the stuff .
Over on this side of the pond . Gov is trying to encourage ( force ) the us military to use only fake meat along with schools / federal prisons , giving the fake food companies a “captive” consumer .
IMHO , I/ we are living in the twilight of the fossil fuel age , if governments did nothing it would not matter , we are coming up to the hard fact that peak conventional oil was around 2007 , all increases since then are basically chemical magic turning gas into liquids , what’s left in the ground is too expensive to recover and fields are too small to
drill .
.Coal mines need diesel in large eye watering amounts , in a decade that will be over , as will heavy freight trains to carry it .
I can’t quite get my head around that the ” fachists” are the ones that don’t want the people to eat fake ultra processed foods while the ” left. ” think its a good idea . Fachists want farmers ,” liberals ” want corporate globalism .
The discription of Fachism is state and corporations working hand in hand .
@D10
“I/ we are living in the twilight of the fossil fuel age , if governments did nothing it would not matter.”
I’m kinda with you on that one.
Lab food etc is a debate that has no real meaning.
It’s a bit like the best way of distributing the “means of production.”
Centralised Planning or laissez-faire Capitalism.
Without fossil fuels there is no “means of production”.
Fascism is a product of the industrial age.
I’m more concerned about neo-feudalism.
Maybe Fascism and Feudalism are the same thing. With religion being the befelow of feudalism.
Religion has been little more than collectors of property , finance and temporal glory , very limited distributing the word that was supposed to be their primary function .
And a little news
https://x.com/Telegraph/status/1819252279758799027?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1819252279758799027%7Ctwgr%5E4936238d12a28f3a65f907b73c7c91ab213503c2%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fit-turns-out-hillary-clinton-biggest-donor-extremist-climate-protesters-uk
In other news, “cultivated meat” hit a milestone earlier this year in Singapore, with “the first cultivated meat product to be sold for retail anywhere in the world.”
It looks like they found a way to partially compensate for the sky-high production costs of lab-grown meat, with “a lower-cost formulation comprised of fewer cultivated meat cells… just 3% of the product. The rest is made up of wheat and soy proteins, sunflower and coconut oils, natural flavours, modified food starch and soy lecithin…”
Yes, that means the “cultivated meat” consists of only 3% cultivated meat cells, and the rest of the ingredients are plant-based (sounding similar to veggie burger ingredients).
The reported retail price of this “shredded chicken” substitute is the equivalent of US$20 per pound (for the “lower-cost formulation”).
https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/eat-just-good-meat-cultivated-chicken-retail-hubers-butchery-singapore/
(by Anay Mridul)
“The retail milestone comes as the cultivated meat startup faces various challenges in its home country. It has been embroiled in a $100M lawsuit with contract manufacturer ABEC over unpaid bills…. Despite its financial troubles (the company has faced at least seven lawsuits since 2019) Tetrick has previously outlined Eat Just’s plans to break even in 2024. The startup, which has raised over $850M to date…”
https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/08/europes-largest-wind-power-plant-stacks-up-hundreds-of-millions-in-losses/
??
Oh — I went to pick some pears yesterday from a tree in a semi-abandoned community orchard. Paths get mown, but there’s no real pruning and quite a lot of it is nettles and brambles, but there are also some clearer, more grassy areas with lots of tussocks and anthills.
A little way away from the path, someone has set up a small garden with potatoes, radishes (gone to seed), kale (flowering), Jerusalem artichokes, and some currants, gooseberries and autumn-fruiting raspberries, all planted in mounds of what looks like either compost or perhaps assorted leaf litter collected from the more forested areas. I only noticed it at all because a couple of ash saplings had had their lower branches sawn off, presumably to allow for better light.
I was pleased to see it. A few years ago I noticed several clumps of Jerusalem artichokes in another part of the orchard, and I’ve thought a few times about putting some squash mounds there (except I seriously don’t need more winter squash), though I feel like clearing a pathway to some of the less accessible apple trees and sorting out the plums that have been overtaken by their rootstocks might be better use of my time and labour. Or maybe just putting in a hazel coppice or adding some quinces and medlars to the mix.
I wonder how much of this informal gardening actually goes on, though, and whether technology like satellite imaging and regular helicopter patrols might limit opportunities to remain relatively undetected. I tend more toward to planting food crops in very small but very public bits of land and then just seeing how they get on, and I didn’t manage as much this year as I wanted to. This feels a little more maintained than that.
Thanks for the comments.
I duly did my session at the Green Gathering with Carwyn Graves yesterday. Great setting for a discussion of cultural resilience and farming cultures right on the England-Wales border with Chepstow castle, built by the Norman colonisers with their designs on Wales, almost in view. I’m fascinated with Carwyn’s tales of Welsh agrarian culture, even when he’s translating them into what I learned yesterday Welsh speakers call ‘the thin language’.
I cycled the fifty miles there, and twenty-five miles back before giving in to failing light and body and catching a train from Bristol. Never seem to find the same route through Bristol, but the one yesterday took me past lots of swanky gentrified harbourside bars and restaurants where everyone seemed to be having a good time, and then into the centre where there was a weird atmosphere and men yelling “stop the f***ing boats”. Only when I looked at the news this morning did I see that I’d inadvertently cycled through one among a wave of far-right protests across the country without really noticing.
So yeah … right and left – complicated! I think I’ll just say a couple of things about it here for now. First, I agree with Greg that ecomodernism isn’t really left-leaning … or if it is, it’s a kind of ‘let them eat cake’ version whose major concern is not to disturb the political status quo. Funny how ecomodernists themselves use the ‘let them eat cake’ gambit in respect of arguments for agrarian localism!
Second, again in keeping with a point of Greg’s, in some generous remarks about my book yesterday (ie. A Small Farm Future), Carwyn said that he’d taken notice of it because it sought responses to collective problems from ground-up local practice, rather than global environmentalist narratives (Microbial protein! Seaweed! Insects! Trees for carbon! Veganism for carbon!) His examples of small-c conservative Welsh farmers who are deeply grounded in place and in local ecological knowledge resonated. I think we need more of these kind of conversations, the kind that it sounds like Greg has with his neighbours, and less of the veganism vs stop the boats kind of articulation of contemporary problems. But I think we’re going to need to find a way through the latter before we get to have more of the former…
…which is why, while I think I understand what John means by saying “Lab food etc is a debate that has no real meaning” and agree, I nevertheless also think it’s an important debate. Though I would say that, having taken the trouble to write a book about it…
Talking of books, my negotiations are underway about writing another one. This remark, also from John, is relevant to it:
“Maybe Fascism and Feudalism are the same thing. With religion being the bedfellow of feudalism.”
Thoughts on that welcome…
Thanks to Steve L for the digging on the microbial food side of things. Maybe it’s worth politely pointing out to FTM the error of their ways?
Finally, to Kathryn’s question about Siedentop, I’m 250 pages in and about 100 pages from the end, and we haven’t got to the Reformation yet, so my guess is the answer is going to be no! I imagine he thinks of the Reformation as a minor quarrel in a bigger story about Christianity and individualism whose key protagonists are the likes of St Paul, Augustine, Charlemagne and Gregory VII. It’s a fascinating book. I think he filters a lot out of his narrative, but what he does bring centre-stage is thought provoking (incidentally, I’m sure Siedentop would dissent from John’s fascism/feudalism/religion point…)
Also interested in Kathryn’s points about the different styles of guerilla gardening. And the thought of helicopter patrols to stop it … forcing us to ‘live in the pod and eat the bugs’ to use the familiar (right-wing??) framing?
Thoughts of secret gardens in abandoned orchards also raises an important point – people expend a lot of rhetorical effort claiming that there’s not enough land to feed ourselves in Britain. That there’s not (currently) enough labour may be more to the point.
I’m not sure that helicopter patrols are likely to be a big factor right now for the particular garden I’m thinking of. There is definitely at least some helicopter traffic there, I assume because it isn’t far from the north circular, but I don’t think anyone is out looking for secret gardens in order to bulldoze them.
But I think if I tried something similar closer to home in Epping Forest I might well run afoul of the park rangers (especially if I tried it in the skylark nesting ground), and I think the scope for larger scale guerilla gardens on privately owned land (possibly just as abandoned as the orchard) is limited. Maybe speculative landowners don’t have helicopters, but small drones are pretty cheap these days. If the tables were somewhat rearranged and I owned land, I’m not sure how I would feel about someone coming and planting spuds on it without my permission. I like to think I would have a chat and work out some mutually agreeable arrangement and maybe talk trash about slugs for a while.
I think whether we have enough labour to feed ourselves is perhaps dependent on whether we have a stable enough climate for staple cereal and legume crops. I like potatoes as much as the next gardener, but they just don’t keep as long as wheat or dry beans (and I don’t live on a mountain in the Andes, so freeze-drying them isn’t going to happen). I didn’t grow wheat this year but even in my rather labour-intensive method of growing it, it’s a very undemanding crop in terms of labour inputs; and my soup peas and drying beans are similarly not a lot of trouble once they get started. Vitamins and minerals in things like leafy greens and soft fruit are important, but in a true labour shortage it’s probably easier to forage those nutrient-dense foods than grow them on purpose, even if that means some marked changes to dietary patterns (a lot more bitter greens like charlock, dandelions and wild chicory; aromatics like mint, fennel, alexanders and crow garlic; smaller, mealier, sour fruit like hawthorn and sloe; things like pine needle tea to keep scurvy at bay). If I were attempting full self-provisioning in calories in a situation where I absolutely couldn’t go to the shops instead, then I would probably turn the entire allotment (except maybe select perennials that are already there) to grains, legumes, roots and tubers, and oilseeds, and forage the rest. Of course, if everyone did this then of course it would be harder to get that nutrition from foraging, but I have honestly never stopped picking nettles because there weren’t any more nettles, or haws because there weren’t any more haws. In general these wild foods are much more nutrient-dense than their cultivated cousins. Maybe with increased general demand, blackberries and plums would be back into the category of “this is a real treat when we can get some” rather than “I am currently picking a kilo or two at a time and the freezer is filling up because it has been too hot to make jam and we already have enough wine and you can eat as much fruit as you want as long as it’s blackberries, but next month the same will be true of apples”. (Why yes, I am feeling smug about my life choices this evening.)
I don’t see the current dereliction of the orchard as a matter of insufficient labour availability. A lot of the people at the soup kitchen would take a job in horticulture if they could find one, though any training would probably also need to be paid for. A lot of the people who harvest from the orchard (I am certainly not the only one) don’t know much about pruning larger trees, or orchard pest management practices. Rather, I detect a certain unwillingness to pay for the appropriate labour. That could change pretty quickly when those who conspire to write the law get hungry.
The Reformation is a bit chicken-or-egg, I think; it could only happen because of the technological changes, especially to communications, that were happening at the time, but it’s difficult for me to see those changes as separate from the political environment, which was absolutely tangled up with the religious environment. If nothing else, the Reformation gave the West a measure of separation of church and state that we now take for granted. Seeing it as a minor quarrel is perhaps an error of looking at the past through that modern lens of religion as a personal and private matter (despite the degree of political power exerted by e.g. conservative evangelical Christian groups in the US). But I am not a historian, and perhaps organised religion has always been more marginal than its advocates (and detractors) like to think. Or perhaps my very broad framing of the Reformation as the working out of a tension between centralised and decentralised power (and one that is ongoing!) is simply too broad for meaningful discussions about historical events. But there is, even now, a certain fiction to some of the bureaucratic aspects of church life. Recently several of our brass door knobs were stolen (long story, which I cannot relate here), and technically we should apply for a thing called a faculty if we want to replace them with anything other than the exact same type. But it’s not trivial to find the exact same doorknobs, and it has been pointed out that in these matters it is often easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. It’s possible that someone from the relevant diocesan committee will notice if we replace the doorknobs with a similar but not exactly the same substitute. It’s extremely unlikely that in this matter we would face any consequences beyond a mild telling off: the building isn’t listed and the doorknobs aren’t religious art or anything like that, and generally everyone involved recognises that it isn’t worth the headache of making it into a problem.
I don’t think fascism and feudalism are the same thing at all, beyond perhaps the overly simplistic notion that both of them aren’t great and both of them constrain people’s freedoms somewhat. Fascism, according to Wikipedia, is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy. Feudalism, according to the same source, was a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour. I’m aware that many of the narratives around feudalism present it as miserable poverty for the vast majority, which we were only lifted out of by the Wonders Of Capitalism/Progress/Democracy/Technology (pick one). I don’t want to fall into hearkening back to some Golden Age — I am very glad to live in a world with corrective lenses, bicycle pumps, vaccines, computers and working antibiotics — but I could be forgiven, I think, for pointing out that despite all these wonders I still see people sleeping on the streets and it is still necessary for my church to feed people who cannot afford to buy their own food. I don’t think feudalism was great, but I can accept that it was an imperfect system that basically sortof worked, just as capitalism is, and I don’t know if we should fear it as much as we do.
I wonder whether some kind of distributism might be, in effect, a way of protecting (some or most) people against the worst effects of feudalism, much the way democratic socialism theoretically protects citizens against the worst effects of capitalism (unfortunately, in practice it has mostly just exported problems to colonised people and places instead).
What I’m not sure about is how to implement ground-up local practices to solve collective problems when the people who hold the most power are intent on the imposition of top-down global technological eco-solu… er, extraction of wealth while it’s still there to extract. This is part of why I am so focused on refugia and also on small, iterative practices that may or may not move the needle on a large scale, but still improve life for me, my household and my local community in the here and now.
(That last paragraph should say “ground-up local practices to respond to collective problems”, not solve. But you get the idea, I’m sure.)
Chris: First, I agree with Greg that ecomodernism isn’t really left-leaning …
I’d disagree – though what I’m about to say does rather illustrate why I find “left” and “right” unhelpful terms.
One possible unifying feature of the label “left” is both the desire to make things better and the conviction that things can always be made better – a kind of blanket optimism. From that point of view, ecomodernism sits very well – almost naturally – on the “left”.
With regard to fascism and feudalism……
I see them both trying to achieve the same thing.
Control/domination over resources by a minority/elite.
In feudal times the resources were food surpluses/human labour/Land. Leading to privilege and luxury goods.
Fascism is trying to achieve the same thing but in industrial times.
Land/food production being less of an issue.
Control of the means of production and labour (breaking up of trade unions etc) being more relevant. Leading to privilege and luxury goods.
Both express a “right” to the exploitation of others.
In feudal times it was a belief in “birth rights and blood lines”.
For fascists it’s a “Darwinian” survival of the fittest. A biological basis for hierarchy. Strong dominating the weak.
The game is the same. It’s just the methods that change.
In feudal times, “The Church” reinforced the rights of Kings and Queens to rule. Ordained by God. God’s representatives on earth.
The Church controlled people’s beliefs and went after anyone who disagreed. (As did the Brown Shirts)
The Reformation was interesting because “The Church” overstepped the mark and decided that The Pope was more important than the king.
Henry VIII set the record straight.
Paraphrasing Chairman Mao “Real political power comes from the edge of a sword”.
On Lab Meat……..
For me, it’s like debating the pros and cons of flying cars, teleportation or colonies on Mars.
It’s all just Science fiction.
Studge hasn’t been made at scale using only renewables and it hasn’t been proven that anyone is going to choose to eat it.
It’s just not going to be a “thing”.
It doesn’t mean that humanity won’t waste a whole lot of resources trying to make it happen though. I guess we are just going to have to go through the process before we get to the conclusion that it’s not an option.
On the far right protests/random violence…..
My fear is that this will be the direction of travel in the midterm.
As the decline in fossil fuels causes a slowdown, then shrinking, of the economy, we are all going to get poorer.
But no-one in the MSM is talking about it. Labour is promising growth. Good luck with that one.
Unless there is an honest debate about why the majority are getting poorer, then the void will be filled by the likes of Farage. The blame game has begun and minorities will bear the brunt.
I’ll be the first to say that the Church has messed up a lot of things for the sake of earthly power, but I think comparing the Pope to Mussolini, Hitler or Franco is quite inaccurate.
I share your concerns about the resurgence of the far right as standards of living get worse. This is one of the reasons it’s so important to build inclusive and diverse local community relationships.
@Kathryn
“but I think comparing the Pope to Mussolini, Hitler or Franco is quite inaccurate.”. 🙂
I’m not sure I am :). The Pope seems like quite a passive fella.
But I do think we take for granted our modern “right” to our own opinions.
For “The Church” to feel that they had the moral authority to burn someone at the stake for heresy is kinda “fascist” in a modern context.
The Nazis went after the Social Democrats for having different political opinions. Murdering and putting in concentration camps.
Going around “bad mouthing” Mussolini could have got you killed.
The Spanish Inquisition was about the “rooting out” of Jews and the remaing Muslims after the fall of Granada.
Then there are the Cathars. The Pope, of the time, didn’t like the fact that they, the Cathars, were practicing Christianity in their own, distinct way.
And then there is the brutal treatment/conversion of all the peoples of the Americas by “The Church”.
Is that exploitation very different to what Hitler had planned for the Slavs???
Same stories, different methodology.
Suppression/domination/exploitation/murder/confiscation
The justifications might be different.
God/biology/blood/Darwinism but the intentions are the same.
I’m not really interested in rhetoric inviting me to defend various atrocities.
I’m going to repeat that feudalism and fascism are not the same thing, and let you go read some definitions.
I’m going to add, in case it helps clarify things for you, that while fascism is generally violent, not all violence is fascism. Not everyone who has ever tried to control a narrative, or committed a genocide, or done some other atrocity, is a fascist. That doesn’t mean that suppression of freedoms, genocide, colonialism, religious warfare etc etc are okay — they aren’t. It just means that not all violence is fascism.
If you want to argue that feudalism was underpinned by violence, that’s another conversation. But so is an awful lot of what we currently call democracy. (Don’t believe me? See what happens if you don’t pay your taxes, or if you try to cross a border without the “correct” paperwork.)
@Kathryn.
I’m not asking you to defend anything.
Especially events that happened long before you or I were born.
And, thankfully, “The Church” of today doesn’t have the moral or legal authority to put anyone to death.
For what it’s worth, I don’t see Fascism and Feudalism as the same thing. Times/circumstances are different.
Fascism is a product of modernity as are concepts like “left” and “right”. Projecting them onto past times doesn’t work.
To try and see The Peasant’s Revolt as an expression of leftist ideals would be wrong.
But………
I think I’ve said it all already and don’t need to repeat myself.
Over to you Chris 🙂
Over to me? Well, briefly I agree that there’s a human will to power which has manifested historically when powerful people use institutional office to regulate others and advance their claims of authority – something that applies to premodern popes and modern autocrats alike. As well as the will to power there’s also counter-will, which sometimes is just another will to power built on alternative foundations but sometimes rests on more universalist claims – justice, liberty, democracy etc. A nuanced understanding of history involves taking both will and counter-will seriously in their specific circumstances (hence I disagree with Chairman Mao … not that I would have said so that plainly had I been subject to his rule!)
You can write a history of medieval Europe in terms of the will to power of church and secular rulers, but the counter-will is also important. Siedentop argues that modern ideas of individual liberty and citizens as subjects of a state with limited powers emerged from early Christian thought, and was given decisive political shape in various medieval contexts such as the 11th century Investiture Conflict between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV.
I’m largely persuaded by his arguments, and I don’t accept the view that modernity involves the triumph of liberty against the premodern will to power. It seems we all agree there are modern examples of the will to power expressed in totalitarian terms, like fascism. I agree this has medieval precursors, of which the inquisitions can be seen as examples – in my view, not just an initiative of the church but of the church as an organ of nascent states.
On ‘feudalism’, I think it’s best not to apply the term widely to every situation where there’s a class of peasant cultivators and a class of warrior aristocrats. It’s better applied more specifically to where land is granted and held ‘in fief’ by a lesser landlord from a greater one through ties of obligation. In that sense, Anglo-Saxon England had peasants and warrior aristocrats (and slaves) but wasn’t a feudal society, whereas Norman England was.
I’m not really a fan of Henry VIII as a hero of the counter-will. I see him more as an autocrat flexing his muscles. But the Tudors, like many royal houses of late medieval or early modern Europe, did play a cunning game of building a monarchical state by playing off the aristocracy and the church against ‘the people’ in a way that laid some of the foundations for the modern secular nation-state.
I think the modern secular nation-state is now in deep trouble, and it’s worth looking back at some of the highly sophisticated medieval thinking around power and authority to help chart a different course – not to return to feudalism/medievalism, but nor to return to the high-modernist idea of a secular state progressing the material prosperity of ‘the people’.
@Chris
I’ve come to the realisation that History, the telling of stories about our past, is ALWAYS political.
What is told and more importantly, what is not told, is really a reflection of the beliefs of the story teller.
The “air brushing” from history of women or people of colour for example.
Concentrating history on Kings and Queens can create the narrative of the inevitability of Power.
Peasant life rarely gets a “look in” unless it’s in the context of challenging the powerful.
I didn’t learn about Peterloo or Tolpuddle from the national curriculum!!!!
But equally, I didn’t learn about the Mir system of feudal communes in Russia from school or TV either.
That’s why I found The Dawn of Everything so refreshing/enlightening/challenging. It looked at stories that aren’t told.
Like the idea that Enlightenment ideas were a result of interactions between European and First Nation Americans.
Or that large communities can and have existed without “Rulers”.
But…….there again, The Dawn of Everything is a very political book.
The “counter-will” is an interesting phrase.
In some cases it’s just people trying to improve their “lot” but not trying to seize power. Like crofters on Harris and Lewis trying to get better tenants rights.
Or it can be the mercantile class that grew, after the discovery of the “new world”, trying to turn it’s accumulated wealth into political power. Eventually bringing feudalism to an end and morphing into the industrial age.
I agree with you on Henry VIII. He wasn’t trying to liberate the English people from those “evil bishops”. Those “evil bishops” had challenged his authority and playing them off against the people’s discontents was a clever move. (Not sure he would have got away with it, if England hadn’t been on an island?)
But the people’s discontent with “The Church” must have existed for a while before.
Whenever I go to Wells I like to go round the Bishop’s Palace. Those high walls/ramparts and moat aren’t there just for the aesthetics!!!!!! (Built in the 14th century.)
Out of interest……….
I wonder when “The Church” stopped being about passive/pious monks wandering amongst the barbarians spreading the word of Jesus and started murdering people instead?
My guess it is when “The Church” became a tool of the State, whenever that was?
No last comment on fascism/feudalism………
I see the connection as being a “right to rule” through similar ideologies. Birth right/biology/hereditary/strength
Whereas, Soviet Communism was more about inforcing ideas of equality through terror and violence.
Same methods, different ideology.
On a slight tangent but related to the early Church……..I found this podcast and the follow-on one interesting.
Looks into the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Bk81Qb2n4RvBKg1ZsTXpo?si=wkuIqCT6Q366jtOmU-jCtg
I think there is a large difference between ” conservative ” and “capitalist ”
Around here there is a substantial number of ” conservative ” farmers/ ranchers , they do both , farms that have been in the same family for generations and handing it on as a viable proposition to their children using practices that improve the land and environment , wind breaks, ponds , sowing legume rich grasses etc .
Then you have the ” capitalist ” moving in planting cotton , fertilizing the he’ll out of the ground then when the land is exhausted ,handing the deeds to the county and walking away leaving a moonscape , and bare dirt , over a few years it recovers to misquite scrub that burns fiercely if it catches fire and in turn hits the news headlines when it does with banner global warming headlines . Plundering the land for quick profit causes this problem .
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/has-peak-oil-become-self-evident
Interesting read .
Quick follow up on a few responses:
Kathryn, my comments about labour I think are consonant with yours – my main point really was just that people often think there isn’t enough land in the UK (or the world) to feed the population, but that’s not the case. There probably isn’t enough labour that’s appropriately constituted to farm the existing land in such a way that it can feed the population. But for sure there *are* enough would-be labourers. The problem is constituting the labour in such a way as to make it possible for them to farm – hence my general orientation to a small farm future. Which might involve people being insistent on farming land that’s formally owned by other people … hopefully insistent in good rather than bad ways. Talking about slugs would be a good start.
Regarding Siedentop, I shouldn’t really have put words in his mouth about ‘minor quarrels’. He doesn’t take a presentist view of religion as a personal or private matter, but he does argue that Christianity was fundamental to constituting a sense of the individual and the sovereignt state. I think his take would be that the Reformation further shaped this process in the early modern period, but its basic outlines were long prefigured in medieval Christianity.
Agree on the uncertainties around how to build robust human ecologies from the ground up in the present moment. That’s what we need to work on, while being sceptical of anyone who claims there are easy answers.
On feudalism, it’s a tricky term, often applied too indiscriminately to any agrarian society involving landlordism. The notion that global history has involved leaving feudalism behind for the upgrade of modernity is, I agree, flawed in numerous ways.
…which brings me to Martin’s point. I think most of us here broadly agree on the decreasing utility of the left/right dualism (okay, so I was slow to the party), although it still animates a lot of mainstream politics and I think it’s useful to try to get a handle on what’s involved. “The desire to make things better and the conviction that things can always be made better” doesn’t quite do it for me as a sufficient definition of the left, because it also applies to capitalist/neoliberal positions. But maybe what’s interesting about ecomodernism is the way that left and neoliberal positions align within it around Martin’s description. The key thing for me here is the ‘modernism’ of ecomodernism, involving a progress and historical betterment narrative shared by mainstream positions of left and right. And this is one of the many things about modernity that need to be transcended.
Also resonances with Diogenes’ point about conservative farmers oriented to intergenerational land stewardship versus capitalist farming oriented to short term profit. Unfortunately, left ecomodernism increasingly also cleaves to the latter. Carwyn touched on this on Saturday in terms of ‘conservative’ Welsh farmers who are highly attuned to local ecological health in ways that are missed by global environmental narratives, which risk great ecological destruction despite their best intentions.
Yes Chris, I think we agree that:
We have enough land to feed ourselves if (and only if) we actually tend it, instead of overproducing industrially monocropped grains and pulses and oilseeds in an extractive manner for global markets.
Similarly, we have enough labour to feed ourselves if (and only if) people are actually given access to sufficient land to tend, very basic/broad training in how to tend said land, and protection from external compulsion to sell their produce in globalised markets.
Neoliberal capitalism doesn’t optimise for these conditions, so if we want to have a congenial small farm future we must either replace neoliberal capitalism with something else, or find ways to make agrarian localism work despite the pressures of neoliberal capitalism.
How we get there from here will be heavily dependent on local context, which means it cannot rely on a plan imposed in a top-down manner.
A question I have is whether there are enough similarities and enough connectedness that a more horizontal strategy, or really a set of strategies, might work. Think mutual aid and solidarity, coordinated activism, seed exchanges, distributed federalism, a thousand small land co-ops, all of that stuff — if we throw together the Landworkers Alliance, guerilla garden-style re-wilding, people putting cute little holes in their fences for the hedgehogs, Food Not Bombs, people who refuse to drive cars, church soup kitchens, allotments, some brilliant weirdo who is trying to breed a better root crop out of silverweed, Just Stop Oil, community orchards (I can think of at least two active ones I cycle past regularly in addition to the derelict one with the secret garden), and those diligent saints who actually get involved with their local council to encourage them to let the grass grow longer to preserve habitat for pollinators, do we end up with something emerging that is better (for all Creation, not just humans) than what emerges from neoliberal capitalism? That is a vision of progress and betterment that I could get behind: perhaps not the eschatological utopia I yearn for in my religious life, the Kingdom of God on earth as in heaven, but, maybe, a tiny step in that direction. I am thinking of a re-integration of human activity and good stewardship, of re-learning our role as a keystone species, of relinquishing control over things we cannot control without destruction, of turning toward humility and toward building one another up, of finding some peace with the inevitability of death, of a reconciliation which will be the hardest work humans can do as well as the most rewarding and which I can only really describe in theological terms. Can all the good work I see already reach a tipping point to bring us, collectively, a little nearer to that place?
I think it’s possible, but with some caveats:
– while neoliberal capitalism is powered by fossil fuels, those at the top of the current hierarchy will always come out on top by using that energy against those they perceive as threatening them
– enough of those in power today have figured out that land is important that we may find there is an even bigger issue with land access than we have now
– the climate aspects of this are going to have an impact such that agrarian strategies that worked in pre-modern times won’t necessarily be viable now; we will need to develop approaches that are resilient to an unstable climate
– predicting the future is hard and putting dates on those predictions is foolish; if the tipping point I imagine even exists, I can’t say when or where it will become apparent. (But now I am into religion again: nobody knows the day or the hour…)
It won’t be an easy ride, and progress as I’ve framed it (which I think is very different from most modern conceptions of progress) is not guaranteed. But… the fossil fuels won’t last forever, and the weapons people currently use to enforce stupid laws are all very fossil dependent. So I figure we are still in with a chance.
Siedentorp — I’ll have to add him to the reading list, but I’m glad he isn’t making the rookie error of projecting modern conceptions of the role of religion onto the past. I probably need to refund my own thinking about what I mean by the Reformation, because I suspect there is a narrow historical definition and also a broader concept and as a lumper I tend toward embracing the broader concept.
Speaking of rookie errors, I visited the mulberry tree last week with no gloves and wearing a very light pastel coloured shirt, which I guess will be Gardening Clothes now because those pink stains are not coming out. I am amused at the transition in my wardrobe from “mostly smart casual with a few grubby things for heavy work and a few smart things for church and special occasions” to “mostly work clothes, and I try not to mess up my Sunday Best too much”. The latter is probably a lot closer to what most of my ancestors wore, anyway.
Refine my own thinking, not refund.
(I see the five minute edit button has returned, hurrah! I don’t always catch my bloopers immediately, but such is life.)
Not sure if you watch TV Chris, but I found the series Yellowstone, starring Kevin Costner quite interesting re the conservative/capitalist divide. Kostner stands for a conservative cowboy aristocracy that is pressured by capitalist encroachment. In one scene he runs for Governor and says: “progress stops here”. In another scene the native american chief from the reservation tells him “you’re the Indian now”.
Re feudalism, I found this article quite interesting: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-07-31/corvees-commons-practices-in-ancient-and-modern-france/
portraying the feudal corvee in France as a kind of extension/perversion of communal cooperation through the pooling of work. Made me reflect on 1) the continuity of things even though they take new forms and 2) how something essentially good easily gets corrupted by power – perhaps we need to be constantly vigilant….
Interesting article.
I guess something similar to corvees will appear again given the chance.
Thanks Gunnar – will try to take a look
Side point about Feudalism. I read those terrible middle ages by Regine Peroud, which appeared briefly on Chris’s reading list. The translation is *really clumsy* – the translator clearly not fully fluent in one of the two languages – hence making it a bit of a trudge to read – but it did contain some interesting thoughts. One of which was:
It would not be irrelevant to recall today that a form of state different from those which we are acquainted was able to exist, that relations between men were capable of being established on bases other than that of a centralized administration, that authority was able to reside elsewhere than in a city …
The feudal order, in fact, was very different from the monarchical order that replaced it and to which succeeded, in a still more centralized form, the order of state control that is found today in various European nations.
(and see what I mean about the clumsiness? I think they couldn’t afford a proper translator)
Just to add regarding fossil fuels and topical events ……….
The (modern) Olympics, Football World Cup, Ashes Cricket etc, etc are all products of a fossil fuel world.
Be strange to live in a world where they are no longer possible.
Yes — we’ll need some different cultural touchstones. Though in a sort of “electricity lite” world I imagine radio could continue to exist, at least. We’ve only been watching things on screens as part of daily life for about half a century.
I think the costs of putting on these shows for the hosts will be the killer.
No-one wants to host the Commonwealth Games any more. It’s just too costly.
It’s going to be a hard sell for potential hosts if their citizens are seeing critical infrastructure starting to crumble around them and everyone is getting poorer.
I mean, I was seeing that before the 2012 Olympics in London…
Indeed. But we haven’t seen anything yet in terms of infrastructure decay!
‘Far right’ … what a naive and divisive comment.
Years ago an electoral research organisation in the UK suggested it needs at least seven axes to describe a person’s beliefs on politics and current affairs at all accurately.
But the ruling class has learned how to very successfully divide and rule – including ‘COVID’ and more recent – so I expect people will continue to ignore this point.
If they take it seriously, at least read Tony Benn’s diaries 1991-2000 and 2001-07 and see who he disagreed or agreed with on civil liberties.
@,Bill N
I guess your comment was directed at my comment referencing the “far right”.
I get your point. It is a “catch all” and clumsy phrase. But then I also think that “far left”, “hard left” or “woke” are also.
However, if someone is giving nazi salutes, attacking asylum seeker hostels or dragging people of colour out of their cars and throwing punches at them. This is behaviour reminiscent of the AS in the 1930’s and I am quite happy to call the AS “far right”.
Concrete anyone
https://www.cnn.com/style/skyscraper-batteries-som-energy-vault-spc/index.html
And more
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/08/07/major-solar-company-files-for-bankruptcy-after-california-strips-subsidies/
Someone is going to have to print some money , CA is bankrupt .
Skyscraper batteries.
Hmmmmm.
How many would be needed to power a city like London when the sun doesn’t shine? Like at night for example.
Sounds like a lot of concrete to me.
Look good on Star Trek.
I had an idea similar to this which was more retrofitting theses useless structures with copper pipes (from the internal plumbing of the original building) on the sunny side to use solar heat to transport water to the top to be stored for gravity/hydro when enough of a head is gained. I know from our own solar water system that it gets hot, hot, hot and that’s in London!
Flash #1
Seems other people are noticing the rest of the costs of fake meat production –
https://www.fastcompany.com/91168714/alternative-protein-why-silicon-valley-cant-hack-the-future-of-food
It is just an excerpt.
Just catching up here as we’re away farm sitting on a farm in the Ariege near the Pyrenees. We’ve got 11 cows, 32 sheep, 58 chickens, 3 pigs, a mountain dog and 4 cats to look after!
We’ve watched the riots and counter protests from here and it’s depressingly similar to the American situation. The Labour movement that can articulate for both immigration and working class interests (and the need to develop a plan for local agrarianism) has morphed into a professional class of gate keepers. ‘The people’ have no natural political home and chaos ensues, que the ruling class moving into the space.
What’s interesting here is the communes and local mayor’s and a lively village culture, within a regional culture occitanie which spans the mountain region and both ‘nations’ – the farmer we are covering for said they all voted for the right wing national party though!
charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/the-global-food-supply-is-in-trouble
!
Interesting article.
I’ve often thought that hydroponically grown veg is low on nutrients..
I think the same will be true of lab meat. Mother Nature is a hard act to follow.
I think the future for most people globally is going to be a rural and agrarian one. The challenge of our generation is to try to make that future as positive, peaceful, pro-social and non-patriarchal as possible. Few other things matter as much.
I think that a more important challenge is maximizing the number of people who get to participate in that agrarian future. This is truly a life-and-death matter, far outweighing the niceties of the politics we might end up with. As we are now on the precipice of a massive dieoff, nothing matters more.
Besides, living people can always change their political system, as the history of numerous revolutions attest, so if the alternative to death by starvation is participating in an agrarian world dominated by violent, anti-social patriarchs, I think most people would take it. This means getting a lot more people out of cities and onto the land should be the important (admittedly political) question of today, not worrying about how all those new farmers will organize themselves after nation-state power collapses.
But maybe I’m wrong and there are a lot of death-before-a-dishonorable-agrarianism people out there, people who would refuse to make the move if they can’t get into a small farm community with a political system they like. If so, they are likely to get their wish, but I wouldn’t encourage them. Rather, march them out to their new farm (or any farm) at gunpoint if necessary, but get them there. Save the lives of as many as possible now, let them sort out the politics later.
Thanks Joe. I spend so much time armouring myself against the barbs of collapse sceptics or ridiculers that I leave myself vulnerable to fire from the other flank. Maybe that’s okay. Hopefully it’s friendly fire, though even friendly fire can kill you.
I understand what you’re saying. If I were to push back against it, I guess I’d say that there’s no chance of successfully marching people out to a farm at gunpoint (indeed, all the guns are pointing in the opposite direction), so if it’s a matter of saving as many people as possible then there’s a job to do in making the journey to the farm palatable, even if that seems like a luxury we can ill afford. I’d also say that, again, if it’s a matter of saving as many people as possible, then I’m not convinced getting as many as possible onto the farm first and then worrying about the politics will work out well. There’s just so much potential for a violent culling of humanity along the way if the path from the industrial-farm present to the small farm future is unsafeguarded.
I was being a wee bit hyperbolic with the “at gunpoint” meme, since there will likely be far more demand for a place on a farm than the acreage available, but I stand by my larger point. The current politics of reruralization is far more important than the politics of the rural population of the future. Get that rural population of the future as big as possible as fast as possible, now.
Interesting article relating to some of the debates here about modernity.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2024/08/12/286-whatever-happened-to-progress/
Thanks, I’ll read