The Corporate State is for Corporate Food, and Can Never Be for Community Food

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“Food safety” as a term does exactly the same political work as “war on terror”, and describes the same kind of corporate domination regime. Indeed, the Food Control Act includes provisions for Gleichschaltung between the FDA, USDA, etc. and Homeland Security. The Food Control Act also includes provisions to force domestic policy into line with globalization policies like those of the WTO.

 

Therefore, just as support for the Food Control Act (so far as I’ve seen, universal among the “food safety” NGOs) is de facto support for Monsanto, so it’s support for the food police regime, the militarization of “food safety” and imposing the race to the bottom on US food standards. The problem is the delusion or astroturfing fraud which wants to divide the corporate state into two “separate” halves, the nominal “government” and the extra-governmental “corporations”. Having performed this false separation, one then invents the fantasy, contrary to all the evidence, that “government” and “corporations” are somehow adversarial. But the corporate state is a monolith, the government artificially creates corporations in the first place, corporations are an extension of government, a veritable fourth branch totally unaccountable to the constitution or under any other conventional theory of the legitimacy of government, and this monolith then imposes a planned economy based on corporate welfare and the “government” serving as corporate taxman and thug. (Seeing distinctions between “government” and “corporation”, “public” and “private”, is just as false and misdirectional as to believe in a distinction between the “two” corporatist parties.)

 

Some are such yahoos as to want to divide the government itself into at least two different governments:

 

“If you think the U.S. government is doing a sub-par job of keeping your food safe, brace yourself. You could soon be eating imported seafood, beef or chicken products that don’t meet even basic U.S. food safety standards. Under two new trade agreements, currently in negotiation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could be powerless to shut down imports of unsafe food or food ingredients.”

 

But the FDA is part of the same bourgeois government, and performs the same function. It aggressively uses the power it has to do what it’s designed to do: aggrandize Big Drug and Big Ag and assault alternatives to these. It will be just as happy to not “shut down imports” as it is happy to not shut down domestic operations like Wright Eggs. It doesn’t even need specific policy guidelines for that kind of omission! But small raw milk producers who have never sickened anyone? There the FDA supermen are very Can Do. They’ve been using raw milk as a practice ground for the more general assault on Community Food and small organic production which the Food Control Act is intended to give “bipartisan” legislative cover.

 

(Those who think you can separate governments from corporations, and different parts of the government from one another no matter how intensively their actions are coordinated, are usually the same who also support corporations which are psychopathic IN PRINCIPLE, but still idiotically dream of separating the proper use of corporations from their “abuses”. But there’s no such thing as a corporate abuse. Monsanto has never committed an abuse. Not one. It’s always done exactly what it was designed to do.)

 

I can also never get enough of those who are supposedly anti-corporate but who use the enemy’s own propaganda terms like “free trade”.

 

I wrote this to express again how one cannot cherry-pick one’s favorite parts of the corporate state monolith, and then through fantasizing compel these parts to work for humanity against the corporations. If people want healthy, safe, nutritious food, and an economy and polity of food which are socially, economically, and politically healthy for people, then we have to build that for ourselves. We have to do it without the help of the corporate government, and most likely in opposition to such “help”. Since Western NGOs, radical chicists, and “progressives” insist on running interference for the state, we have to reject their ideology and prescriptions as well. (They’re still often useful for their reporting.)

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Humanity’s Great Movement Against Corporate Hunger, Notes on Strategy (3 of 3)

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What must be done? As one living in the West, I’ll write mostly about what must be done in the West. Here we live in occupied territory. Monsanto is in power in the US and Canada. The governments of Britain and the EU want the same thing for Europe, and GMOs continue to infiltrate England (but not Scotland or Wales), but a much more vigorous rejection by the people has forced a stalemate on the continent. The much vaster trench line extends across the global South, and it’s there where GMOs, and global corporatism itself, shall persist or suffer a mortal defeat.

 

The 2012 report Combatting Monsanto gives a good overview of the action across the South and in Europe. GMOs now dominate North America and large parts of Latin America and Asia, but have mostly stalled out on these continents and are now achieving only ever-diminishing gains of ground at ever-increasing cost. More countries are resisting as a whole, thus for example Peru and Thailand have imposed moratoria on GM cultivation and importation. India is in a state of figurative civil war, where amid a farmer genocide (300,000 indenture-driven ”suicides”; but if gangsters hound a farmer literally to death, I’d call it murder) the states are increasingly defying the central government, which in turn is openly preparing to try to force its own pro-GMO policy on the states and the people. The same is true in Australia and New Zealand, where in spite of intense government aggression, the people continue to force retrenchments and even setbacks. (At least one Australian state has since banned the cultivation of GMOs.) In Europe as well the people continue to reject and resist GMOs in spite of the worst efforts of the EU bureaucracy and US diplomatic aggression. It’s gotten to the point that Germany’s BASF is removing its biotech division from Europe to the US, while Monsanto has announced that it’s putting plans for European expansion on the back burner.

 

In all these places the analogy to trench warfare is useful to describe not just the totality and viciousness of the combat, but also the increasingly costly futility of the aggressor’s action. In 1914 the Germans were able to rampage across Belgium and into northern France, but then stalled out and could achieve no further meaningful advance. Their temporary gains in 1918 were so costly as to deal themselves a mortal blow.

 

The final frontier, as I’ve been discussing, is Africa. Except for South Africa’s already devastating experience with cotton (repeating that of India), the continent so far has suffered only minor GMO infiltrations. That’s why the elites of the West view this as the soft underbelly of humanity, the front where they can get the stalled GMO juggernaut rolling again and achieve a decisive breakthrough.

 

How must the global movement evolve and fight? The people of each region and continent must decide for themselves. For example, whether or not they think they can “take back their governments”, ban GMOs, and restore the old-style public agricultural investment; or whether they end up having to build revolutionary movements; or anything in between and all at once. For now it looks like there’s not going to be any further constructive investment, but only the subjugating neoliberal “investment” of Monsanto and the Big Ag gang. 

 

We can figure out a few basic guidelines for action which will apply everywhere.

 

We need both a political advocacy and publicity movement, and also a movement for practical agroecological education, based on the horizontal exchange of information. The world standard for the political movement is La Via Campesina (the Peasant Road). In America the 19th century Farmers’ Alliance movement with its lecture system also offers an excellent model. Models for the practical educational movement include Latin America’s Campesino a Campesino (Farmer to Farmer), Africa’s PELUM (Participatory Land Use Management), and Asia’s Farmer Field Schools. This practical research and information exchange will have to continue to be done in an ever more decentralized, democratic way, since system agricultural research is already far more privatized and corporatized than even the police/military or the schools. 

 

These two kinds of movement need to be effectively coordinated, since neither can sustain itself without the other. Agroecological practice will be suppressed if it cannot politically fight for itself, while as we saw with the American Populist movement, no kind of innovative politics will suffice to rescue farmers still mired in the same commodity system practices which were indenturing and liquidating them in the first place.

 

This will have to be done by the Southern movement in a state of skepticism, at best, toward Western NGOs. Most of these are congenitally corporatist, and many are mere astroturfs running pro-Monsanto scams.

 

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We who are physically and legalistically in the West but are spiritually and, in a more profound way, physically of the Earth, must view our legal and system-political surroundings as the artifices of a destructive parasite squatter civilization. This regime shall soon pass from the Earth, however facially destructive its ravages are at the moment, and however long this moment seems to we who must live through it.

 

We’ll have to fight any way we can. If there were a real anti-corporate fortress somewhere, arguably our job might be to serve as a pressure group for it. No such regime exists, and we probably don’t want “regimes” of our own. But we can infer a global movement for Food Sovereignty and against GMOs and food corporatism in general. How can we assist the Southern movement? We in the West can envision this movement, then act: (1) as a post-Western primalist movement ourselves, (2) as a pressure group on behalf of grassroots movements in the South against Western globalization and corporatism.

 

Our view of Western NGOs, and of system reform strategy and tactics like labeling panaceas and lawsuits, must be the same combination of ambivalence and rejection as the South deploys. I think that on the whole we can find excellent reportage from many of the NGOs, and that they do lots of excellent publicity work, but that we must always consider them incompetent to give practical political advice, since at best they’re congenitally system-oriented, hierarchy-oriented institutions.

 

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What kind of action could a grassroots abolition movement take? At first it would mostly engage in publicizing the facts of GMOs, educating the public about this vicious poisoning of our bodies and our societies, impressing upon people the need for us to purge them from both our personal lives and from our public lives, from our politics, economies, and communities.

 

This won’t primarily be accomplished through any kind of corporate media interaction. The corporate media will never do anything but ignore, ridicule, slander, or patronize and misrepresent us. (The same goes for any democracy cause, and any anti-corporate cause. We know this well enough by now, so that we know any “leader” type who wants to focus on engaging the system media is some kind of astroturfer and misdirectional scammer.)

 

No, just as farmers need to retail directly to eaters, so we need to publicize directly to the people. We need a relentless, disciplined, systematic online writing project. As much as possible we need to disseminate information in print form. We need an ongoing campaign of public presentations and town hall discussions. All these could be publicized through social media as well as the time-tested physical means of signs on lawns, canvassing, etc. It will be the kind of grassroots campaign that should have been run during California’s Right to Know voting season (instead of the ”professionalized” disposable election campaign which actually was run), and it will be permanent, with the goal of constantly extending the range of people who know what GMOs are and what they do, who have purged them from their individual lives and present themselves as exemplars, and who have resolved to purge them from the Earth.

 

This resolve, if it reaches a critical mass, could possibly force bans and such from some levels of government (though probably not the central US government). Better, it can serve as the nucleus for a more general movement determined to abolish corporations and corporatism as such. At the same time the anti-GMO movement will complement and intertwine with the movement to aggrandize the rising Community Food sector, as an economic sector and as a way of life upon which we can forge a new beginning for our communities, economies, and politics.

 

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Corporate Hunger and Africa (2 of 3)

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As the great battle escalates in Africa, I should review what agroecology is, and why it’s the necessary and bountiful path forward for Africa and for all of humanity. I’ve written about it before many times, including here, here, and here. I also gave a basic account of the clash of agricultural corporatism against humanity in this post from a year ago on the plan for the recolonization of Africa.

 

To sum up, agroecology, a synonym for organic agriculture in the original sense of the term (not the degraded US government sense), is the practice of agriculture in imitation of nature. It strives to work within the rhythms of nature rather than against them, with it rather than against it, using natural features as reinforcements or remedies, keeping actions within the natural cycles of a regional ecosystem. All this makes for an agriculture which is most sustainable in producing the most nutritious food (and the most calories, acre for acre) using no artificial poisons, and doing so in a way which enhances ecosystems, economies, and communities, rather than destroying all these the way industrial ag does.

 

The term “agroecology” indicates its basis in the combined sciences of agronomy and ecology. It is truly scientific in the best sense of the term, in that its practitioners are constantly experimenting, and based on the results modifying and repeating their experiments, all toward the goal of sustainably producing sufficient calories and nutrition. Combined with the political philosophy of Food Sovereignty, AE then seeks to distribute this food, more than enough to feed everyone, so that everyone actually gets enough to eat.

 

(By contrast, science condemns the industrial ag experiment as having failed at everything it ever promised it would do, with the exception of using the temporary fossil fuel surplus to produce more gross calories. But it’s been an absolute failure in terms of ending hunger, food’s denuded nutritional value, food toxification, the destruction of the environment (including greenhouse gas emissions; the industrial ag sector is the worst emitter by a considerable margin), and the destruction of economies, polities, and communities. Food corporatism and its “Green Revolution” promised to solve all these problems, all of which industrialization generated or exacerbated in the first place. By any scientific standard it’s a proven failure. To wish to continue the experiment, now extending it to Africa in a more virulent form than hitherto, is proof that the experimenters were lying about their proclaimed goals all along. We know these facts: Corporatism is purely wasteful and destructive, does nothing for humanity, and accomplishes nothing but to enable a small group of criminals to further concentrate wealth and power and exercise domination. In the end power and domination are their only goals and their only reasons for being.)

 

Agroecology or organic agriculture is highly skilled work. It requires intimate knowledge of of the ways of the soil (building it with organic matter), weather, climate, plants (crops, other beneficial plants, potentially harmful plants called “weeds”), animals (livestock, other beneficial animals, potentially harmful ones called “pests”). AE’s innovative and highly productive techniques, eschewing monoculture and synthetic fertilizers and other poisons, include natural nutrient-cycling and soil-building, the use of manure, compost, and cover crops (AKA green manures), crop rotation, intercropping, alley cropping with leguminous trees, infusion of free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria into the soil, biological pest control (often called “integrated pest management”), agroforestry, better water management, rotation of livestock with annual crops, the whole art of integrating grass-fed livestock pasturage with vegetable production. It also requires the most efficient and effective use of energy and other resource inputs. All this knowledge is primarily built by the farmers themselves and distributed among them horizontally. (With some supplement and aggregation help from agronomy schools and NGOs.) All of it’s done with emphasis on the most appropriate specific application of general principles within a particular region/locality. All these factors will require even more precise knowledge as the fossil fuel crutch, required for each and every part of industrial ag, from the inputs and financing to the growing to the processing and distribution and preparation, is removed once and for all.

 

Agroecology is proven to be the most nutritionally productive form of agriculture as well as the most calorically productive, acre for acre. Peter Rosset testifies:

 

In fact, data shows that small farms almost always produce far more agricultural output per unit area than larger farms, do so more efficiently, and produce food rather than export crops and fuels. This holds true whether we are talking about industrial countries or any country in the third world. This is widely recognized by agricultural economists as the “inverse relationship between farm size and output.” When I examined the relationship between farm size and total output for fifteen countries in the third world, in all cases relatively smaller farm sizes were much more productive per unit area—2 to 10 times more productive—than larger ones.

 

A team at the University of Michigan led by Catherine Badgley did a survey of hundreds of organic trials and found that agroecology/organic production, using the same amount of land under cultivation right now, can maintain and improve upon current conventional bulk and caloric production for all significant food groups, and can do so while replacing synthetic fertilizers with natural nutrient cycling. They analyzed the data according to two models, one a best-case scenario and the other more conservative, and found that even by the conservative parameters organic agriculture would produce calories, including in grain production, comparable to today’s industrial output, and therefore more than enough to feed everyone on earth. By the best-case model, agroecology could produce over 50% more than the current industrial production.

 

The 2010 report on agroecology from the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food summarized a similar survey performed by a team led by Jules Pretty, with special emphasis on Africa.

 

17. Such resource-conserving, low-external-input techniques have a proven potential to
significantly improve yields. In what may be the most systematic study of the potential of
such techniques to date, Jules Pretty et al. compared the impacts of 286 recent sustainable
agriculture projects in 57 poor countries covering 37 million hectares (3 per cent of the
cultivated area in developing countries). They found that such interventions increased
productivity on 12.6 millions farms, with an average crop increase of 79 per cent, while
improving the supply of critical environmental services. Disaggregated data from this
research showed that average food production per household rose by 1.7 tonnes per year
(up by 73 per cent) for 4.42 million small farmers growing cereals and roots on 3.6 million
hectares, and that increase in food production was 17 tonnes per year (up 150 per cent) for
146,000 farmers on 542,000 hectares cultivating roots (potato, sweet potato, cassava). After
UNCTAD and UNEP reanalyzed the database to produce a summary of the impacts in
Africa, it was found that the average crop yield increase was even higher for these projects
than the global average of 79 per cent at 116 per cent increase for all African projects and
128 per cent increase for projects in East Africa.

18. The most recent large-scale study points to the same conclusions. Research
commissioned by the Foresight Global Food and Farming Futures project of the UK
Government reviewed 40 projects in 20 African countries where sustainable intensification
was developed during the 2000s. The projects included crop improvements (particularly
improvements through participatory plant breeding on hitherto neglected orphan crops),
integrated pest management, soil conservation and agro-forestry. By early 2010, these
projects had documented benefits for 10.39 million farmers and their families and
improvements on approximately 12.75 million hectares. Crop yields more than doubled on
average (increasing 2.13-fold) over a period of 3-10 years, resulting in an increase in
aggregate food production of 5.79 million tonnes per year, equivalent to 557 kg per farming
household.

 

The 2008 report from the World Bank’s own International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development, endorsed by all participating countries except the US, Canada, and Australia, insisted on the sufficiency and necessity of agroecology.

 

Today we need to build new food systems in light of this knowledge. Where the age-old organic practices persist, as in Africa, farmers need to sustain them and enhance them in light of modern agroecological knowledge. Where these have been marginalized or obliterated, they need to be rebuilt.

 

In the past public sector agricultural investment worked well to support farmers, although in emphasizing industrial ag it was building on sand, for farmers and for itself. But in principle there’s no reason there couldn’t be a “New Deal for Agroecology”, which would have to start with land reform. As Rosset explains,

 

In order to reverse these trends and provide a life with dignity for farming peoples, protect rural environments, and correct the structural causes of the food crisis, we need to revitalize family and peasant farming. That means restoring the public sector rural budgets that were cut under neoliberal policies, restoring minimum price guarantees, credit and other forms of support, and undertaking redistributive agrarian reform. The peasant and family farm sectors in most countries cannot be rebuilt without land reform, which redistributes land from export elites to food-producing peasants and family farmers. This is a central pillar of the alternative proposal for our food and agriculture systems that is put forth by the international farmers’ movement.

 

This could be the basis for a general program of farmer assistance, public credit, public sector research and education on organic practices and public domain plant varieties, policy favoring local/regional inputs and natural demand-based markets, storage of the harvest and maintenance of grain reserves, doing all of these with full farmer input and participation in decision-making. All this would recognize the fact that the basis of a healthy economy, polity, and society is the ability of the productive class to buy everything it needs for a decent life. So given the premises of modern civilization and the middle-class aspiration, agroecology is the most fruitful and healthful basis of agriculture. As always, where it comes to food issues the answer to any problem is along the same vector regardless of whether one’s a sincere reformist or a revolutionary. Either way one must be an anti-corporatist.

 

No such revival of public sector investment seems to be in the offing for much of the world. (It’s still working in parts of Latin America.) The system’s disaster capitalist response to the food price crisis of 2007-08 (NOT physical scarcity, which doesn’t exist) and the social unrest it provoked wasn’t to call for new investment, but new “investment”, meaning an escalated corporate agricultural assault, using the global financial crisis the banks themselves triggered as the pretext to accelerate and intensify corporate enclosure and domination. (That’s the definition of neoliberalism in this context: Corporatism’s use of globalization to seek and enforce total domination.*)

 

As Rosset put it, corporate agriculture has an “export-producing vocation”, what’s also called commodification, while real farmers have a ”food-producing vocation”. In the end this is the clear criterion by which to judge the benevolent or evil character of a type of agriculture: Does it seek to produce food, or does it seek to produce commodities, toward the goal of corporate power? This is also the measure by which to judge anyone who claims to care about “feeding the world”. As we already see with biofuels (for which there is no demand and no market; the sector is 100% the planned-economy creation of government subsidies and mandates), corporate agriculture has literally zero concern with producing food for anyone. If the most profitable thing to do would be to burn the crops in the fields instead of harvesting them, it would do so. (This would actually be less destructive than harvesting industrial crops for fuel.)

 

Corporatism offers nothing to humanity but destruction, and humanity can find no path forward on the same Earth with corporatism. We have what might be called a “clash of civilizations”, or the final conflict of humanity against the depraved corporate “civilization”. Or we can keep the best of the word civilization and call corporatism a post-civilizational Hobbesian barbarism.

 

However one connotes it, the denotation is that this is a struggle between agroecology, as the basis of a steady-state economy of, by, and for the people, with Food Sovereignty as its companion political philosophy, vs. the totalitarian “growth” economy, and the neoliberal anti-politics which is its appendage. (It’s totalitarian because it recognizes nothing but its own imperative.)

 

This is a global struggle, and the front line is everywhere. Today the continent of Africa is the site of an escalating battle which promises to be the most critical of all.

 

[*Just as corporatism cynically regards country, government, and property as tools and weapons to be exalted or disregarded according to convenience, so in the end it will be the same with money and profits themselves. They understand that money is a fiction, and that for those who greedily seek it power is the only thing that's real. The only thing corporatism wants, like prior forms of totalitarianism, is total power and total control.]

 

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Corporate Summit to Impose Hunger on Africa

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These people think that Africa is a country of animals, that we do not think, that we know nothing, but they are wrong. We are human beings, we know what we want and we will fight on to victory.

- Zimbabwean participant at the 2011 International Conference of Peasants and Farmers vs. land-grabbing

 

The aptly named ”Hunger Summit” is the one year anniversary of the inaugural conference of the “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition”, the corporatist strategy for the recolonization of Africa led by Big Ag and the G8. A year ago I called the opening session a Wannsee Conference for Africa. Obama was master of ceremonies at Camp David. This year Britain’s David Cameron has the honors. The criminal conference will deliver a progress report and issue a public strategy. African farmers, tribes, consumers, environmental and civil society groups are opposing this, with support from anti-corporatists and democracy activists from all over the world. Here’s the order of battle.

 

The whole project is being led by the US and UK governments (and paid for by their taxpayers), along with the rest of the G8. USAid is playing its usual role as “humanitarian” front group, “public” sector version, while Bill Gates and his “Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa” serve as its “private” counterpart. The corporate beneficiaries, who have signed “letters of intent” to join the ”investment” program (meaning they put up pennies to the taxpayer dollar, while being slated to extract 100% of the profits), include the GMO cartel led by Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, along with Norway’s Yara (earmarked to build a massive synthetic fertilizer factory), arch-commodifier Cargill, Unilever, Diageo, and others. Bono is reprising his role as useful idiot celebrity tinsel. An African fig leaf is provided in the form of the African Union’s Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program (CAADP), which is the Stockholm Syndrome blueprint African governments developed in the wake of the West’s ”structural adjustment” assaults, meant to beg for “investment” on the corporations’ own terms. The New Alliance is certainly the fruition of this radical corporatization of Western investment. Six African governments – Ethiopia, Ghana, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Mozambique, and Tanzania – have already joined up, while the accession of four more – Benin, Malawi, Nigeria, and Senegal – is considered by the regime to be imminent. (But the US remains frustrated by the ambivalence of Kenya, which was supposed to be the crown jewel member by now.) 

 

The people of Africa are opposing this, represented by a coalition of hundreds of democracy networks, tribal alliances, and groups representing real farmers and pastoralists. These comprise the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa and include the African Center for Biosafety, the African Biodiversity Network (ABN), the National Coordination of Peasant Organizations (CNOP, a member of the worldwide Via Campesina, the Farmer Way), the NGO Federation of Collectives (FECONG), the Coalition for African Genetic Heritage (COPAGEN), the Food Sovereignty Campaign, Comparing and Supporting Endogenous Development (COMPAS) Africa, the Participatory Ecological Land Use Management Association (PELUM), the Eastern and Southern African Small Scale Farmers Forum (ESAFF), People’s Dialogue, Rural Women’s Assembly, and many others.

 

Here we have a clear division between democracy and the criminal elite. We have the aggressive power of the 1%: the US and other Western governments, corporations, the corporate media and technocracy, and other elitists including racist liberals and NGOs. The whole project has had zero input or representation from the 99%, and from the people of Africa least of all. The roster of participants reads like a Tom Friedman dream guest list. It includes every illegitimate elite which is alien to the Earth, and excludes every part of humanity. Just like corporatism in general, and GMO imperialism in particular. Opposing this assault is a lineup truly representative of African farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, and the citizenry in general.

 

Even if one didn’t know the issues, it would be clear who’s right and who’s wrong, who represents democracy and freedom, and who represents evil.

 

The goal of the New Alliance is the corporate Gleichschaltung (coordination) of African agriculture and trade practices and policies for maximum plunder and domination. It’s the same slate of globalization and commodification practices which have already devastated much of humanity. African governments are to collaborate in dominating and exploiting the people and the land.

 

*A severe and rigorously enforced “intellectual property” regime, for the benefit of the GMO cartel and its patents, which were the result of piracy in the first place.

 

*The privatization of land. Indenture loans and distribution facilities for proprietary GMO seeds, synthetic fertilizer, industrial machinery, commodified crops bound for ethanol and industrial food processing, can’t be arranged with people farming a commons. As a prerequisite, corporate gangs who would dominate and exploit these people and their land first need government to enclose and parcel out the land. This has been a priority of the World Bank going back to the 1980s. USAid chief Rajiv Shad has emphasized that the goal is to accelerate land grabbing. As Via Campesina put it, “These policies aim to allocate title deeds to land in order to facilitate the purchase and sale of landed property. In the end, poor peasants and other rural people lose out to the benefit of those who have the means to purchase land.” (p. 14)

 

*The formation of economic hierarchies to centralize and integrate production, processing, storage, and distribution. All this is to be done according to corporate specifications, toward the goal of forcing most farmers off the land, and reducing the rest to indentured servitude or wage slavery within a cash-based commodification regime. Today the farmers of Africa are smallholders and commons managers producing food for their families and communities. This is what must be eradicated and replaced by industrialized corporatization.

 

*Open borders for corporate dumping and looting (“free trade” is the standard Orwellian term for this; a truthful term would be something like corporate command trade), where it comes to the government-approved and licensed “formal sector”. Meanwhile traditional markets and actual free trading among the people would be criminalized and repressed.

 

*”Free trade” zones, tax-free zones, laws licensing the total repatriation of profits by Western “investors”. The ravage of Asia is set to be reproduced in Africa.

 

*Impose expensive industrial infrastructure on farmers. Offer credit in order to indenture them and trap them on the cash-crop treadmill. The procedure is always the same everywhere, with only minor modifications. 1. Propaganda – you have no choice but to get on board with commodification, and you better do it fast or you’ll be left behind. 2. Enforce this with dumping and general coercion into a cash economy. 3. Offer the necessary product (GMO seeds, synthetic fertilizer, industrial herbicide and pesticide, machinery, oil) and the loan in order to buy it. 4. In this way destroy most independent farmers completely, turn the rest into indentured sharecroppers or wage slaves.

 

We already see the end result of this in Asia, Latin America, and in South Africa which already has a corporatized regime. Seeds and the land are largely enclosed, farmers have been reduced to servitude, profits are ruthlessly extracted and removed from the country.

 

Beyond the usual short run goal of corporate plunder, the ultimate goal of the “New Alliance” is to force GMOs upon Africa.

 

All this is being called a “second green revolution”, a “green revolution in Africa”. We already know what the first Green Revolution did. It drove up the population while accelerating the arc of enclosure. It drove ever more people off the land and into cities. Shantytowns have always been the direct, intended result of this agricultural policy. The goal was to further separate humanity from the land, to assault subsistence food economies and replace them with food commodification, forcibly turn subsistence farmers into “job”-seekers, drive up the population, drive up the proportion of the population which is food insecure, drive down wages. In all these ways it increases desperation and infighting among the destitute masses, and aggravates and accelerates the processes of colonialism and corporatism in general. Today’s GMO onslaught is an escalated version of all this. That’s why neoliberalism calls GMOs a “second green revolution”.

 

There are many idiots and criminals who still believe and propagate the lies of the “Green Revolution”. But it takes only a look at the historical record and current events to see that corporate agriculture has nothing to do with feeding people and everything to do with starving them for the sake of its profit and domination imperatives. How does it feed an African community to force it to stop feeding itself and start growing cash crops to be turned into ethanol for Western cars? How does it feed people to drive them off the land they farm and into shantytowns? How does it feed people to impose artificial scarcity on the abundance their work coaxes from nature?

 

Let’s cut through all the lies and filth. If you want humanity to eat, you want people to provide their own food, as organic communities. If you want corporations and governments to crush this normal, natural food system and replace it with their system of scarcity, coercion, domination, extraction, you want only the 1% to feed. (As for the Western middle class among whom this attitude is common, the bell is tolling for it as well, and if you wonder where the 1% intends for you, look to the farmers of Africa now. In the end you’re slated to be liquidated the same way, even if it takes a little more time.)

 

We see the results in Asia and Latin America: immense shantytowns, mass coercion of women into sex work, over 300,000 cotton farmer suicides (really murders) in India. We also have the African example of the Makhatini Flats cotton farmers of South Africa, who were similarly economically destroyed.

 

All this is now what’s being consciously planned for the people of Africa. It’s truly the plan for the second, far more vicious, colonization of Africa, this time not by ad hoc national rapacity, but coordinated and administered by disciplined totalitarian corporations led my Monsanto. This, I think, is the primary battleground on Earth today. In my next post I’ll write about the alternative to this, and what’s to be done.

 

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Yet Another GMO Contamination Outbreak

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Last week the USDA announced that for several months it has been conducting an investigation of environmental and economic pollution of the US wheat supply by illegal GMO wheat. 

 

The problem came to light when an Oregon farmer discovered a stand of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready spring wheat growing feral on his land. This is not a commercially available crop. Monsanto has done hundreds of field tests of genetically engineered wheat in at least 17 states, from 1997 to 2005 and resuming in 2011. This includes the last known testing in Oregon, from 1999 to 2001. But in the face of farmer opposition, fears over the viability of US wheat exports if the supply was contaminated, and other obstacles, the GM rackets never commercialized any GM wheat, and the government never approved it for sale.

 

Field testing in the US is usually rubber-stamped by the government and subject to little USDA scrutiny. In most cases the USDA doesn’t even know where the test plots are. Monsanto and the other rackets are given almost total license to draw up their own safety protocols and police themselves.

 

Today’s discovery is only the latest in a long history of contamination episodes. The USDA’s own Inspector General issued a 2005 report which criticized inadequate agency oversight. The GAO was more harsh in 2008, emphasizing the agency’s own data admitting over 700 violations of USDA testing regulations, including nearly a hundred which could lead to GMO contamination in the ecosystem. USDA “oversight” of the GMO cartel is a typical example of letting the corporations write up their own rules and police themselves, while the government’s only role is to rubber-stamp the process and then lie to the people, telling them a rigorous regulatory protocol exists. The government is looking out for us, so there’s no need to grow up, to educate ourselves, to take direct action for ourselves, to build a movement to take our politics and economy in our own hands.*

 

It’s further proof that even under “test” conditions, and even where unauthorized release is not deliberate (which we don’t know in this case), GMOs cannot be prevented from escaping into the environment and contaminating economic crops and wild relatives.

 

All this is giving GMOs some unusual bad press in the corporate media, because it’s causing major reverberations in the wheat export markets. Japan rejected a US wheat shipment, South Korea has suspends wheat imports from the US, other Asian countries and Europe announced intensified testing. This shall be another major economic headache for an $8 billion export industry, caused by a totally gratuitous product for which there has never been any demand, but which has been 100% forced on farmers, markets, and consumers by corporatist economic planning. The vast majority of people and institutions, including most other economic sectors, wish GMOs would just cease to exist. Their existence and power are 100% the command economy artifice of a handful of corporations and governments, 100% the creature of corporate welfare and government thuggery.

 

The escape of GMOs from test plots is just one part of the overall contamination problem. Commercialized GM crops promiscuously contaminate regular crops as well as organic crops, often destroying their economic value. To give two examples, organic canola is largely impossible in Canada, as are non-GM beets and chard in Oregon, because of GMO contamination. The USDA admits that this contamination is inevitable, and has further demonstrated its character as a Monsanto lackey by ruling that it’s the legal responsibility of organic farmers to protect themselves against this trespass and tort, not the responsibility of the intruder and vandal. A lawsuit asking the courts to override this policy was rejected, demonstrating again how the people will not find justice amid “the law”. On the contrary, it’s longstanding GMO jurisprudence that if, through negligent or deliberate contamination, a proprietary GMO pollutes a victim’s crops, the victim is then legally culpable for violating the aggressor’s patent rights.

 

(This is an example of the radical extremes to which patent law and the ”intellectual property” regime are being taken. This is one example of GMOs as the ultimate corporate frontier. GMOs are critically important to corporatism in themselves, as well as critically important for developing intellectual property as a totalitarian enclosure weapon.)

 

We’ve learned nothing new from this incident, just confirmation of everything which was already evident. Most of all, it’s further proof that there can be no “co-existence” (to use the system’s Orwellian term) with GMOs. Co-existence, compromise, conciliation, are impossible because GMOs are totalitarian. The definition of totalitarian is that a cadre aggressively seeks to carry out an imperative, recognizes no limits to this imperative, and believes that no value has any right to exist other than this imperative. This describes corporatism and corporate profit-seeking in general, and Monsanto and the GM rackets have been particularly frank that their goal is total domination of the world seed supply and, through this, total control over all the world’s food. We’ve seen the political and socioeconomic effects. The US, Canadian, UK, and many other governments and globalization cadres have made clear that they will accept no limits on Monsanto’s domination imperative, and will do all they can to aggrandize it. GMOs are politically totalitarian.

 

They’re also environmentally totalitarian in that given the chance they’ll contaminate any ecosystem of which they’re a part. This would be true of field tests even if these were conscientious about contamination protocols, which they’re not. It’s proven to be true of commercialized GM cultivation.

 

At least this environmental totalitarianism is still largely dependent upon aggressive, artificial (economic and political) pro-GMO action. Nature is highly resilient and prone to reject most contaminants. We’re still at the point where, if humanity politically abolishes GMOs, nature will probably be able to clean up the pollution mess. But as contamination escalates, this won’t be true for long. This is all the more reason we need to build an abolition movement now.   

 

[*This typical statement from the Center for Food Safety demonstrates how our liberal "food safety" NGOs offer no alternative to the Monsanto-USDA regime, even in principle.

 

“USDA has once again failed to protect the food supply from GE crop contamination,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director at Center for Food Safety. “This incident underscores why stronger regulation is long overdue. Congress needs to investigate how this occurred and the prevalence of contamination. Until then, USDA, at a minimum, should immediately place a moratorium on open-air field testing of genetically engineered crops.”

 

The USDA is proven to fail, and regulation is proven to fail, so we need the USDA and regulation. And of course "congress".

 

We see the total intellectual and strategic bankruptcy of the entire liberal NGO complex. It offers nothing to the future, and is not part of the necessary path forward.]

 

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Supermarkets as GMO Battleground

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1. Four British supermarket chains – Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer, and “the Co-Op” – have announced that they will begin selling poultry and eggs from chickens which were fed GM soy. The items won’t be labeled. This reverses their previous policy banning such items from their stores. They join Asda and Morrison’s who previously broke off from the boycott. That leaves only Waitrose among large British retailers maintaining the no-GM poultry/egg policy. All the chains sell unlabeled GM meat and milk.

 

2. Tesco put out a press release telling three lies about why they’re doing this.

 

A. LIE: There’s not enough non-GM soy available. TRUTH: ABRANGE, the Brazilian Association for Producers of Non-GMO Soy, and the certification groups CERT-ID and ProTerra, quickly put out releases and reports denying this. They say there’s more than enough non-GM soy to supply all of Europe. Retailers in Germany, Austria, and France confirmed this.

 

(Further confirmation came at the same time in China, where a consortium of Brazilian soy producers met with Chinese government officials about future soy exports to China. In response to Chinese requests for large amounts of non-GM soy, even the regular Brazilian trade group (primarily pro-GMO) assured them that Brazil could fill that order. So it’s not just the non-GM trade group saying so, but the regular industrial trade group saying so as well.

 

This is also another example of China showing up the West on GMOs.)

 

B. LIE: Genetically modified DNA doesn’t persist in the meat or eggs of animals fed GM feed. TRUTH: Many studies have found that, contrary to longstanding pro-GM dogma, GM DNA often does survive cooking and digestion. Even the British government, pro-GMO Food Standards Agency (FSA – analogous to the FDA, where it comes to food) has found that GM material may persist in animal tissue. Tesco is doing nothing here but regurgitating an old lie which was disproven long ago.

 

C. LIE: GM soy is a beneficial product vs. “pests and diseases”. TRUTH: There’s no GM soy which has any special qualities vs. pests and diseases. Indeed, the domination of proprietary GM varieties, worthless for this purpose, has suppressed the availability of public domain varieties which do have such resistance. The only commercialized GM soy is herbicide-tolerant, specifically “Roundup Ready”. It does nothing but enable ever more massive amounts of poison to be sprayed upon it. But this crop is failing, as superweeds resistant to glyphosate are becoming more and more prevalent. Roundup is collapsing around the world. That’s why the corporate system is trying to commercialize GM varieties resistant to even more toxic herbicides – 2,4-D, dicamba. These are precisely the virulent poisons Monsanto originally promised to render obsolete. We see what a lie that was, and we know that these poisons will also fail the same way glyphosate has. What, even more viciously toxic, poisons will be next? Isn’t this insanity? Why are we doing it? Ask yourself that.  

 

3. What’s the basic position of the abolition movement on these supermarkets?

 

In principle, this is a squabble within the system, a squabble within globalization. No matter how you shell them, these are commodified and globalized industrial soybeans, GMO or not. They’re part of rainforest-destroying, climate-change-driving industrial agriculture. We have reformists who want Better Globalization, and Better Big Ag. It’s similar to the labeling movement in the US, to the extent that labeling is advertised as a panacea. In themselves, these kinds of fights aren’t significant steps toward Food Sovereignty.

 

Big picture, this is a squabble within the malign and doomed industrial sector. But targeted, from the point of view of a GMO abolition movement, we can launch a precision strike by forming an alliance with the reformists for a supermarket boycott campaign. The goal would be to halt GMO progress, help non-GM producers, and open up space for POE (democracy Participation, Organization, Education).

 

This is a potentially winning tactical battleground, because supermarkets are vulnerable. The longstanding targeted campaigns of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) provides a blueprint for how to conduct the campaigns. One chain at a time. Since Tesco has chosen to be so obnoxious, maybe them first? The campaign must start right away, in order to take advantage of the current media spotlight on the issue.

 

It would be tougher to get started in the US. But if the CIW can do it, we can do it.

 

But real abolitionists and fighters for Food Freedom must treat this, and labeling, the way democracy activists must treat any fight for reform within the hierarchy. We can support examples like Card Check or workplace discrimination fights, but we take the opportunity to point out that efforts like these aren’t sufficient, that they rely on system attrition which is not favorable to the people, and that no nominal success can ever be taken as a sign to relax our efforts. On the contrary, each proximate fight is also the occasion to build a permanent abolition movement. The real, fully conscious goal is always to abolish GMOs and build the Community Food sector.

 

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Globalization, GMOs, Democracy

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“Free trade” is a corporate propaganda term which is promiscuously used not only by corporate cadres and media, but among those who vaguely oppose corporate domination. One step toward replacing this vagueness with coherent discipline would be to become more disciplined in our use of language. That means, for example, not using this term, or “free market” and similar terms, other than in carefully calibrated ways highlighting the fraudulence of these terms.

 

The US and EU are negotiating a new globalization assault, but the whole thing may yet fall through on account of an impasse on the key issue, agriculture.

 

European Union leaders don’t want the negotiations to include discussions on their restrictions on genetically modified crops and other regulations that keep U.S. farm products out of Europe. But Obama says it’s hard to imagine an agreement that doesn’t address those issues. Powerful U.S. agricultural lobbies will do their best to make sure Congress rejects any pact that fails to address the restrictions.

 

The US government is in typical Monsanto flunkey mode, raging against EU policies hostile to GMO cultivation, importation, and marketing. (I’ll note again in passing that Obama is the most aggressively pro-Monsanto president yet. This, like so many other things about him, starkly defines the side one is on, for or against humanity, and how Obama’s supporters have sided against humanity.)

 

Although the piece gives the impression that “the EU” is anti-GMO, this is false. European opposition to GMOs is a purely democratic, demand-driven grassroots phenomenon, and EU policies adverse to GMOs are a typical example of how, where a governmental structure feels vulnerable as the EU does, it can be forced from below to do things it doesn’t want to do. But the EU bureaucracy, like all corporatist bureaucracies, is pro-GMO. It’s been searching for years for a way to make an end run around citizen opposition. I wrote about it in 2010, commenting on an NYT piece which put on a clinic in anti-democracy attitudinizing and verbiage.

 

This is a good example of how “free trade” is, by its very nature, a command economy measure. Reading this or any other typical piece on the subject, you can see how it’s a supply-driven policy concocted by elites. Democracy and the good of the people are nowhere to be seen, other than as irritants which are “extremely negative…very difficult”, as an academic is quoted characterizing them. The 1% has the intent of creating forced markets for products which have no natural demand, forcing these markets upon the 99% in defiance of democracy, freedom, the environment, and any rational, demand-based economic policy, crushing all of these if necessary. Indeed, to crush democracy as such is a secondary goal of the globalization planned economy. The primary goal, as always, is corporate profit and domination.

 

Obama, in a talk with his export council this month, suggested this could be a deal-breaker.

“There are certain countries whose agricultural sector is very strong, who tended to block at critical junctures the kinds of broad-based trade agreements that would make it a good deal for us,” he said. “If one of the areas where we’ve got the greatest comparative advantage is cordoned off from an overall trade deal, it’s very hard to get something going.”

 

(I’ve previously mentioned this “export council”, a key group dictating policy for the corporate planned economy. Meanwhile, one wonders if Obama’s stupid enough to believe this “comparative advantage” drivel.)

 

We see the basic bullying arrogance and hypocrisy of the US, which simultaneously pontificates about European agricultural protectionism while refusing to dismantle massive welfare subsidies to its own agricultural sector. This highlights respective places on the totem pole. Monsanto is at the top level and is one of a handful of actors who dictate US government policy. US government muscle is predominant, though the EU has enough muscle that the US can’t use brute force the way it often can with smaller, non-white countries. Indeed the US may have to settle for defeat here, the way it has in the past.

 

I stress that this is all because European citizens have strongly resisted GMOs. They’ve done so primarily on the merits, though also out of distrust of the EU structure as such. In principle, there’s no reason Americans and Canadians can’t do the same.

 

I’ll close with the AP piece’s closing quote, which is just about perfect. I can’t tell if this symbolic revelation of Obama’s evil was conscious either on his part or the writer’s part.

 

Of course, the rhetoric at the beginning of talks might not preclude compromise in the end. In his talk with the export council, Obama expressed optimism. He noted that austerity measures in response to the debt crisis in the EU have caused European countries to look to a free trade deal as a rare opportunity to boost the economy and improve competitiveness.

“I think they are hungrier for a deal than they have been in the past,” he said.

 

It would be hard to find a more perfect and vicious revelation of the predatory disaster capitalist mindset than that. It’s a confession that corporate/government-caused economic crashes are intended to help force assaults like these. 

 
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What To Do – First Principles

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Here’s another try at clarifying first principles, something I think still has not been done except on a purely individual basis, and rarely even there.

 

I take it as empirically proven, and as common sense in the first place, that a fundamentally criminal system cannot be reformed. If it’s a car, you can’t make it act like a boat or a plane. We’ve seen the results of driving this car into a lake, or off a cliff, over and over and over. To insist we keep on trying, the way liberals insist, with things like the Food Control Act or GMO “co-existence” (any version) or Obama’s health insurance poll tax, can no longer be called ignorance or naivete. It’s intentional misdirection on behalf of evil.

 

So by now I take it for granted that “reformism” is impractical, inexpedient, and wicked. Again, it was common sense from the start (how can you get anything but psychopathic behavior from a thing, a “corporation”, which has been formally enshrined as a mercenary psychopath in principle, from the start? it’s not a plane, it’s a car), and has been proven by the evidence record beyond any shadow of a doubt, let alone a reasonable doubt.

 

Then why do liberals still exist in the West in such large numbers? Because they lie when they claim to oppose the evils of empire and corporate domination. Just as much as their conservative twin, they support organized crime because they’re still getting some of the crumbs, and because they enjoy the pathetic vicarious sadism of feeling like they have a piece of the power and violence, although they really have no power at all. The only difference between liberals and conservatives is one of temperament – a conservative is more conscious, more “honest”, about supporting organized crime, a liberal is more of a hypocrite, has more of a lingering fake “conscience” he needs to assuage by mouthing anti-criminal platitudes. But he supports the exact same array of criminal policies the conservative does.

 

This has always been true, although the seamless continuity from the criminal Bush regime to the identically criminal Obama regime has been the most extreme manifestation yet. It looks like Obama’s real significance has been to encourage more and more liberals to dump even the fake vestige of conscience, the “compliment vice pays to virtue”, as La Rouchefoucauld called hypocrisy, and openly avow their support for aggressive war, the police state, and a corporatist command economy. This wipes out the last meager shred of difference between liberals and conservatives. I think we can call the case closed, and from here on use those terms merely to denote the tribal supporters of the identical Democrat and Republican parties.

 

In that case, what can a decent human being, advocate of democracy, enemy of the toxification of our food and environment, do? One thing she cannot do is still be a “liberal”, still be a ”reformist”. These are evil in their essence, and will continue to try to suck nascent idealism into the corporate maw. I hope there won’t be many who decide in that case to give up and seek some private garden to tend. That’s a kind of desertion, and it won’t work - no matter how much you try to keep your head down and mind your own business, the enemy will still be coming for you eventually. That’s what totalitarianism does, and why it’s called by that name.

 

I think the only course open is to recognize the need for the abolition of empire, of corporatism, of globalization, of all top-down, supply-based organization; to abolish these, and replace them with purely bottom-up, demand-based organization. (Perhaps this distinction shall be more acceptable to those who still consider “hierarchy” as such to be too vague a term. Although I’d say that by definition hierarchy usurps power upward, concentrates it, and then imposes it in a top-down, supply-based way.)

 

To need this, to want it, to will it, and to fight for it, first by propagating the ideas of this fight, getting them into the public consciousness by whatever means possible; and by organizing a movement which intends to accomplish these goals, and which can sustain itself during the times of trial while the system is still strong.

 

In that case, here’s a few hypothetical questions people can ask themselves, to help clarify this first principle.

 

1. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you could press a button and abolish all supply-based modes of organization, the corporate form, centralized government, and all things which are leeches upon these. Let’s say pressing the button would somehow accomplish this painlessly, except for whatever “pain” would then be involved in communities having to live within their natural means and not by stealing from others. Would you press that button? It seems that most Western ”liberals” would not, because that would mean they could no longer live off the fruits of imperial crime. Many of their kinds of “jobs” would cease to exist, since all the phony “work” of maintaining corporatism would no longer exist. Only the real economy would still exist.

 

2. What if pressing the button would guarantee humanity’s victory, but it would also guarantee that the criminals would force lots of unpleasantness along the way. Would you still press it? This question is meant to distinguish between those who really want to abolish organized crime, which of course will use any means to try to preserve itself, and those who are really just radical-chic liberals who talk the radical talk but would run home to momma the moment things actually got rough.

 

3. What if there was no guarantee at all, other than that humanity will try to free itself from empire and create real democracy. Would you join that fight? This question is meant to get people to think about their endurance, their morale, their discipline and belly for a long fight.

 

I think time is running out for mere ad hoc contemplation. If the people are going to organize real anti-corporate movements in the West, now is the time to start doing it. That would mean agreeing on the basic principles, the basic will to renounce Western empire, deciding on a list of operational goals and necessary tasks toward those goals, and then getting to work on those tasks in a systematic, disciplined way.

 

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How A “Supreme Court” Should Be (Brazil GM Soy Extortion Case)

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Brazil’s Supreme Court of Justice denies one of Monsanto’s patent extensions. This will help bolster the ongoing “royalty” fraud case where a snowballing alliance of soy farmers has been winning court decisions and favorable supreme court rulings going back two years now. Monsanto’s already on the hook for over $2 billion in back royalties, taxes they fraudulently extracted from indentured farmers. (The term “royalty” is apt. It’s explicitly redolent of autocratic taxes imposed by monarchs. Modern “intellectual property” taxes are just as mystically based, just as arbitrary, just as tyrannical, as the most offensive monarchical extractions which provoked revolutions and beheadings.)

 

The reason the system in Brazil is more responsive to the people is because the people there are aggressive in forcing it to be, for example through the Landless Workers’ Movement.

 

(Not really responsive of course, no centralized hierarchy is. (And humanity should have a much higher aspiration than “responsive” elites anyway.) But more responsive than amid the pits of Western corporatism. We can compare this to the upcoming Bowman vs. Monsanto decision, where 9-0 for corporate totalitarianism wouldn’t surprise me. Of course there’s no anti-corporatists on the court, but only activist and more passive corporatists.)

 

What’s the world status of the aggressive but structurally very weak GMO onslaught? If we can just hold the line in Europe and especially Africa, and start rolling them back in Latin America and India, that might quickly be the end of them.

 

Sometimes I wonder if I should go to Africa, which may be the coming ground zero battlefield.

 
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Left vs. Right

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Is this spectrum meaningful? Was it ever? On what basis?

 

In my search for a rigorous definition, a while ago I settled on: “Left” and “Right” are different factions arguing over how to divvy up the oil surplus and the general wealth of oil-driven industrialization. The distinction doesn’t seem to work very well for pre-oil periods. I’ve read a lot on Ancient Greece and Rome, for example, and find it difficult to read this dichotomy back into those times and places.

 

So the Left-Right thing is a feature of modernity. (The definition of “modern”: The unique period of ahistorically high energy consumption on account of the fossil fuel drawdown.) It has little validity for normal pre-oil history, and will likely have little for the post-oil resumption of normality. It follows that this distinction will also have little validity for the relocalization and Food Freedom movement, since these are on the vector of normal history. Sure enough, Food Freedom cuts across conventional Left-Right boundaries in rejecting both government and corporate hierarchies, rejecting the entire “public-private” dichotomy as fraudulent, rejecting all centralized false culture from country-based patriotism to liberal “multiculturalism”, while respecting the precedents of traditional community life including and especially the tribal cultures of indigenous peoples. Those are a few examples. I’d also say that the gathering global civil war between humanity and those who wish to force humanity to literally ingest nothing but poison is an eschatology vastly transcending and dwarfing all the picayune squabbles of “left” vs. “right”.

 

Speaking of which, Left vs. Right was also often an argument over how to divvy up the fruits of crime as well, since most Westerners of either ideological persuasion agreed in principle on the total exploitation of the non-Western world. 

 

What are core Left principles? For me, for example, any meaningful distinction has to divide between pro- and anti-globalization. Is anti-globalization a left principle? Not historically – communism and liberalism have always been pro-globalization in principle. Industrial organic, “fair trade”, “sustainable development”, all are beloved of liberals and various motley radical chic-ists. While it can be argued that liberalism was always a “right”-tending ideology, to argue that industrial communism wasn’t “leftist” would seem bizarre. Certainly, there are anti-communist forms of socialism. But communism must surely be part of “the left”, if that term’s to have any historical meaning at all. But since it was pro-globalization, it also proves that “left-right” is not sufficient to humanity’s needs, since humanity needs to dissolve the globalist tyranny.

 

Is environmental stewardship a Left principle? It wasn’t for communism in practice. Indeed, for all the attempts of Monthly Review and others to reinvent Marx himself as caring about stewardship, this clearly wasn’t a mainstream element of his philosophy. But this stewardship principle is clearly part of humanity’s great need.

 

Those are just two examples of how “the Left” is insufficient for humanism, democracy, and freedom. That “the Right” hates those things was always self-evident.

 

So it’s pumping a dry well to keep framing things in terms of this obsolete, oil-dependent, and morally insufficient dichotomy. We seek a whole new politics which in many ways shall be old politics, but fertilized with the freedom and democracy ideology which was one of the two great gifts of modernity (the other was modern organic agroecological science).

 

Here’s some ways of expressing the only meaningful spectrum today:

 

Democracy vs. elitism.

 

Freedom vs. enclosure.

 

Natural abundance vs. artificial scarcity.

 

Democracy vs. corporatism.

 

Humanity vs. corporations.

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