Food is Dead

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When Nietzsche wrote “God is dead”, he didn’t mean that if you polled people they wouldn’t avow belief in god, or that they don’t consciously think they believe in god when it occurs to them at all.

 

He meant that in people’s regular lives, their day-to-day actions, their day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute thoughts, god and religion play no role. God is no longer a significant part of the lives of people in general, as a guide to action or as a feature of our inner lives. Modern Westerners live as atheists, they think as atheists, so they actually are atheists. The fact that upon request they’ll consciously “believe in god”, like a dog salivating when it hears a bell, doesn’t change that fact.

 

We have the same decadent* phenomenon with food. Where does food comes from? Does it come from healthy soil and a stable farming culture, organic within a healthy ecology and socioeconomic environment? Or does it come from the supermarket? Most people, if specifically asked, would consciously agree that food comes from farms. But that’s not what people really think and do. In people’s regular lives, their day-to-day actions, their day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute thoughts, farms play no role. The possible existence (or extinction) of farms is no longer a significant part of the lives of people in general, as a guide to action or as a feature of their inner lives. People think and act as if food comes from the supermarket. The imminent lifting of New York’s fracking moratorium is a perfect example. Forget the committed fascists like Cuomo and Bloomberg – for people in general to have any doubt about fracking’s evil is to demonstrate their disbelief in farms and their compensatory faith in supermarkets.

 

We should see supermarkets as cult shrines. At the moment they do indeed seem to produce food (at least for those who can afford it and can physically get there). But to believe, in direct defiance of all the evidence of physical energy and the environment, that these totem plots will continue to bring forth food once the farms hidden behind them perish, is a nadir of pseudo-religious compensation for people’s lost connection with the Earth.

 

Cults have often called upon their believers to relinquish all their earthly possessions and gather passively awaiting the end. In this case, we’re to relinquish all human responsibility for our very food, its production and distribution, our human right to the land, our very presence on the land, and gather passively awaiting our next feeding.

 

But while the promised end never came for other cults, the promised bounty of the supermarket cult will indeed come to a brutal end. The common thread is the failure of the cult promise. This is because food does not in fact come from the supermarket, or from the car, or from wars for oil, or from government, or from the corporate form, or from “property”, or from any of the other things people try to psychologically and spiritually substitute for the farm. I fear that many will have to learn this the hard way, since for Western humanity at large, Food is Dead.

 

That’s why the Food Sovereignty movement must be, in all ways, a completely new beginning.    

 

[*This blog's not about religious matters, so for now I won't elaborate on what I mean by religious decadence. I'll just say that part of the human condition is a spiritual and cultural life, which has to be an organic part of a human community. The mass functional atheism characteristic of modernity is inhuman. We see how desperately people strive to fill the void, with everything from consumerism to pseudo-religious ideology.]

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Occupy and Occupation

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It lately occurred to me (correct me if lots of commenters have already had this idea, but I haven’t seen it) that there’s a nice symmetry between the Occupy terminology and the use of occupation as a term for “job”, what one does.

 

Since we need to transcend and abolish the whole malign employment model, we have use for a term which can replace “job” (too laden with cash-seeking implications), connoting the entire scope of the human economy, the whole world of our natural, rightful work, and also adding how we must take back our work from those who stole and enclosed it, in the same way we must take back physical space. Occupy has become the seminal term for this physical campaign. So we could revalue and insist upon occupation as the plan to take back our work, the actions of doing so, and the sum of whatever meaningful work we now do, whether monetarily “paid” or not.

 

We must Occupy our Work, we must Occupy our Occupations. This is a core democracy value and practice, living and working one’s ideal, at the same time that one’s work seeks to fully attain this ideal in every realm including the political.

Our Labor Sovereignty and Birthright

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The fabricated world has, by design, alienated us from the natural world. But we’re also alienated from the artificial world since we remain natural beings. Nothing can debase us into the inhuman, anti-human caricatures of economists’ and technocrats’ nightmares. We can survive and thrive as human beings, if we purge ourselves of the corporate and government parasite; or we can be destroyed as slaves, and soon enough go physically extinct, if we continue on the corporatist path.

 

This is the physical existential dilemma posed by food corporatism (among other toxic sectors). Meanwhile corporatism in general poses history’s ultimate philosophical, spiritual, moral dilemma.

 

Our communion with our work is at the core of our humanity, essential to our happiness, dignity, and organic health and wholeness. Corporatism, in stealing the fruits of our work, and blocking us from free access to our work in the first place, alienates us from our work, and from our humanity. This emotional, psychological, and spiritual robbery practiced by economic elites is an even worse crime than the material deprivation and use or monetary value stolen.

 

Work is our human birthright. Productive work is necessary for hominid existence, but productive and fulfilling work is also necessary for human existence. It’s our right as humans and our responsibility as citizens. No institution can legitimately block us from our rights and prevent us from exercising (or, if you like, absolve us of) our responsibilities. Under the fraud of economic and political hierarchy, we’re supposed to substitute an increasingly fraudulent “opportunity” for work, property, hierarchical position, and an empty view of “rights” to these things, for the universal reality of them. The universal practice of humanity performing its natural work, rather than struggling against artificial barriers to gain access to it. Our universal natural presence on the land, fruitfully stewarding its resources, rather than struggling against artificial barriers to gain access to it and then, for a select few who are most talented at crime (or at being born out of the correct womb), dominion over it. Our universal position as full human beings in real natural communities, rather than struggling as desolate atoms to enter and ascend artificial hierarchies.

 

All this must be scoured from the stained Earth. We have to assert ourselves as food growers and scientific workers. We have to abolish corporatism. We have to tear down the barbed wire and toll booths which interpose between us and our birthright. We have to redeem our work and through it our humanity.

 

Our work, in itself, prior to the necessary distribution and use of its fruits by those who participated in the work, is our human sovereignty. This is the core principle of human economic sovereignty. Food Sovereignty, which for practical, strategic, and tactical reasons must be our number one focus, is still only one element of this human whole. The next stage of our human resurgence, whether it be a resurgence of Occupy, or another form (there shall certainly be many forms), must, if it is to be worthy of its goal, renounce all half-heartedness, all obsolete self-limitations and timidity, all the temporizations and compromises and sham “pragmatism” and utopian reformism, all of which have been empirically proven to be delusions, and are therefore by now nothing but lies.

 

The next stage of the American Revolution must demand (of itself) and seek nothing less than the full redemption of our human birthright, our full sovereignty over our natural work; the work itself, management and control of it, 100% of the distribution and use of its fruits. Nothing less is worthy of humanity. Nothing less could continue to render us human, as opposed to something far diminished.

 
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Notes on the Food Sovereignty Revolution

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Humanity is at a bottleneck. Reformism is proven not to work, and instead to be a misdirectional dead end. The only way forward is revolution.

 

So what’s to be the form of this revolution, its philosophical basis and the wellspring of its goals, strategy, and tactics? I think the basis is Food Sovereignty. The basics of this are summed up well in La Via Campesina’s Seven Principles of Food Sovereignty. I’ve written about these basics several times, for example here (suggesting how relocalization movement strategy can be applied to them), here (showing how they coordinate with the basic principles of a food freedom movement), and here (how they coordinate with a democratic view of constitutionalism).

 

The imperatives are clear. Industrial agriculture is based on cheap, plentiful fossil fuels, and on mining the soil. For both of these reasons it must soon collapse, dooming billions to hunger, malnutrition, and starvation. Corporate agriculture is also slated to be the basis of humanity’s enslavement under a restored feudalism, far more vicious and miserable than the medieval variety. This is how the 1% intends to survive and maintain its luxuries post-oil. These are the physical and political imperatives forcing the Food Sovereignty revolution.

 

Agronomic science has established that smallholder-based organic agriculture outproduces industrial agriculture, in terms of calories and nutrients, even now. Post-fossil fuels, this margin will become infinite. This smallholder and cooperative organic farming will also serve as the anchor of true democracy, since it’s the most difficult mode of social organization to force into a centralized top-down hierarchy. (Conversely, the total dependency and biological weakness fostered by industrial ag provides the most favorable basis for centralization and subjugation, far beyond the inherently hierarchical nature of industrial ag.)

 

I’ll add that with a society based on agroecology, for the first time in history humanity shall achieve full, permanent employment as self-proprietors, partners, and cooperatives. (But this revolution shall render “employment” itself an obsolete concept and term, as far as the way it’s used now.)

 

The Seven Principles express or imply the basic elements of our world view:

 

1. Humanity has the right to sufficient healthy food, as such.

 

2. Humanity has the right to democratic control (and “ownership”) of production, distribution, and consumption. This includes all natural resources.

 

3. These imply social justice and full political and economic democracy.

 

Since we have to undergo this post-oil, post-soil mining transformation anyway, let’s do it actively, exuberantly, to the full, and to the 99%’s benefit, rather than suffer it passively, horrifically, as slaves, for the 1%’s benefit. Let’s turn humanity’s final crisis into humanity’s great liberation and new beginning.

 

We’ll have to muster and actively assert the evidence, that this revolution is:

 

1. Practically, biologically necessary.

 

2. The only thing that makes sense rationally.

 

3. The only thing that makes sense morally, philosophically, spiritually.

 

4. How to do it.

 

The goal (as an initial goal) of creating tens of millions of small, autonomous farmers and growers in America (and elsewhere) shall provide:

 

1. A single focusing idea which is affirmative and inspiring, as well as rationally necessary.

 

2. A complex of day-to-day actions upon which economically and politically to build.

 

3. A righteous basis for any resistance action which is forced upon us.

 

The broad Food Sovereignty philosophy and goal shall in turn dictate the mindset and goal for every other issue. It shall define the form of the democratic movement. It shall be our guide and our beacon. While it won’t provide the full answer to every question, it will answer the biggest ones, and will be a necessary part of the answer to them all.

 

So this is the idea, the cause, and the struggle which humanity must embrace and see through to the end. There’s no other way forward, to survival and to prosperity, to subsistence and to abundance. We can have it all, or we can have nothing. There’s no longer any middle ground left. That space, if it ever existed, has been squeezed out of history. The only roads left are heroism and slavery. As I wrote once before, since we’re to be conscripts anyway, let’s be Volunteers.

 

 

We’re All Lumpenproles Now – GMO Death Camps

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The Green Revolution is still fraudulently touted as having helped to “feed the world”. This Big Lie is necessary to justify the sequel, that a second GMO revolution is necessary to continue this feeding.

 

In reality, agriculture doesn’t strive to feed a population which spontaneously increases. Cause and effect go in the opposite direction – industrial agriculture is a supply-driven process, and to the extent this extra food is available to the populace, population will increase in response.

 

What the Green Revolution really did was drive up the population while accelerating the arc of enclosure, driving ever more people off the land and into the cities. Shantytowns were the direct, intended result of this agricultural policy. The goal (as proven by the fact that it’s been the clear result, and that elites have continued the policy in light of this result; that proves that they intend the result) was to further separate humanity from the land, further 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 up the number of unemployed, in both of the latter ways increase the desperation and infighting among the destitute masses, and in all these ways aggravate and accelerate 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”.

 

It doesn’t increase yield (temporarily cheap, plentiful fossil fuels, along with age-old traditional breeding, did that), and it’s not intended to. It’s not more efficient, and it’s not intended to be. It’s more “efficient” only from the point of view of purging human labor from the corporate economy and purging human beings from the land.

 

I defy anyone to explain how the logic isn’t that human beings (except for a rump slave class) must be physically purged from the Earth itself.

 

A real Nazi like Hitler at least had intellectual and moral clarity regarding his policy, unlike corporate liberals or conservatives. They follow the exact same logic, but out of cowardice or stupidity remain willfully ignorant of the fact.

 

But what could it mean to want to purge all people from the land, but not want their physical deaths? A shantytown makes zero sense from ANY point of view – moral, rational, practical. Even from the point of view of the most predatory, exploitative corporation, a shantytown is nothing but a waste dump, filled with potentially dangerous toxic waste. (It’s rare, but the inhabitants do sometimes rise up against the system.) The only way to make any sense whatsoever of the phenomenon is to view shantytowns as putative death camps.

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The CELDF Strategy, and Similar Actions

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We’re trying to build a new society, and rebuild a natural one, based on Food Sovereignty and true democracy. The negative aspect of this is to abolish corporations and dissolve centralized hierarchies in general.

 

Finding focus on these simple goals is hard enough. But even among those of us who agree on the basic goals, there’s great strategic and tactical uncertainty. We can agree that in the end on bottom-up action, especially direct action, movement-building, and mutual assistance, will work. We can agree that the officially allowed modes of “action”, electoral voting and other passive, process “politics” and consumerism, cannot work.

 

But there’s an array of possible actions while lies somewhere between direct action and kettled process reformism which may, depending on the circumstance, the operational goal, and the execution, lie on the vector toward the great democratic goal.

 

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) strategy for local-level constitutionalism and anti-corporate ordinances is a good example of this. The CELDF was formed to fight back against several kinds of corporate assaults which are especially tyrannical at the immediate local level – CAFOs, fracking, dumping sewage sludge on fields, water privatization and plunder; and also against the overarching legalistic/constitutional framework for these assaults, such as federal pre-emption (anti-federal, by any non-Orwellian definition of the term), the captivity of the electoral system to money (but they want to focus on local ordinances banning corporate money in local elections) as enshrined by Citizens United, and the general regime of corporate personhood and “rights”.

 

The basic plan is for communities to enact ordinances asserting local sovereignty and proclaim local constitutions, really bills of rights, enshrining this. The people should take back their local governments and force these to serve the community against assaults from alien governments and corporations. Better yet, we can form our own democratic councils to parallel the “official”-track action shifting the initiative from the derivative government to the direct democracy of the people. These dual-track actions would bring power and authority much closer to the true sovereign level of the people. It would reverse the pre-emption doctrine enshrined in 1788, turning it right side up. These councils/municipalities would then confederate for mutual support, and to organize broader-scale constitutional assemblies.

 

The CELDF recognizes that central and state level process action, including electoralism, is largely “dead”, as co-founder Thomas Linzey puts it. It recognizes the real nature of regulatory bureaucracy is to assist top-down assaults on communities rather than restrain them. It rejects the notions of corporate property and rights in principle. It would exalt the rights of citizens, communities, and nature above these. It has assisted over 120 communities and larger towns in Pennsylvania, New England, and California in passing ordinances and/or drawing up constitutional charters asserting local democracy against corporate invasions. The largest action has been Pittsburgh’s law banning fracking within city limits. As I write Vermont is on the verge of banning fracking in the state. The Local Food Sovereignty ordinances passed in several Maine towns comprise a similar campaign. Meanwhile the movement of counties and towns banning GMOs goes back decades to Marin county in California, which was followed by Mendocino and Santa Cruz counties.

 

GMO labeling initiatives, such as those pending in California and Oregon, are another crucial form of this movement. Meanwhile state-level legislative attempts don’t work for this, as we’ve recently seen in Vermont and Connecticut. I’ll add that Label It Yourself is the direct action which should accompany all labeling initiatives. The California initiative, assuming the election isn’t rigged, will pass but won’t necessarily be enforced in the absence of unrelenting pressure from below, such as where this direct action alternative is not only mentioned but enacted.

 

(If it sounds inconsistent to be optimistic about Vermont’s anti-fracking law even as it just gutted its GMO labeling law, remember that most tactical precepts aren’t carved in stone. They need to be applied to specific circumstances. The Monsanto contingent is much stronger in Vermont than the pro-fracking forces, since it’s far from clear that there’s any fracking to even be done there.)

 

In Europe the Network of GMO-Free Regions has deployed a full range of tactics, from passing laws to directly destroying test plots. It’s developed into a Europe-wide confederation which now coordinates and mutually assists, achieving a great multiplier at every local point. This is just like the CELDF confederation goal, which I’ll describe shortly.

 

Other possible ordinances could deny bank or corporate ownership of land. In North Dakota corporations are legally prevented from owning farms. That’s a great model right there.

 

The General Public License for Plant Germplasm (GPLPG) is an attempt to bring the Creative Commons/general public license movement to the seed front, to contest corporate seed enclosure on its own battlefield. This kind of thing is at best a supplement to decentralized, confederated heirloom seed banking and direct action against proprietary seeds. Meanwhile Creative Commons, Copyleft, etc. comprise a good alternative to the intellectual property regime and self-defense against it, but are not a substitute for complete abolition of it.

 

Then there’s public interest lawsuits (which also have self-interest goals; as always, the right action is an inextricable mix of altruism and self-interest) like the anti-patent enforcement Monsanto lawsuit, the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund’s (FTCLDF) suit against the FDA’s persecution of raw milk, and the recent Save Our Crops Coalition (SOCC) action against the USDA on Agent Orange corn. Predictably, even though they’re obviously right by common sense and according to the evidence, these suits are losing so far. Unlike in the case of the CELDF, the groups bringing these suits and coordinating the efforts seem to really hope to win in court, and that’s their main goal. They’re failing to use the lawsuits as participation/organization/education toward an alternative to the legal system as such. But as the CELDF shows, any such lawsuit could serve as a democratic vehicle.

 

The CELDF strategy isn’t meant to succeed according to the system’s own rules, but rather to provide a political and organizational framework for resisting the system’s depredations and for building a democratic relocalization movement. It’s not so much to level the playing field as to set up a new one.

 

Food sovereignty and positive democracy are, first of all, a set of principles. We must internalize it like the air we breathe, feel it assimilated to our very bodies, and experience any contradiction of it as an outrage. Every part of it is common-sensical and self-evidently moral and just. So we need to build the mindset, this is right. Then, wherever we see the system reject, resist, and repress it, we have a stark lesson in the illegitimacy of the system.

 

The CELDF isn’t naive about how well these ordinances and bills of rights are likely to fare in the system courts. The strategy doesn’t depend on “winning in court”. The plan is for communities to organize around their ordinances and constitutions, then confederate toward larger-scale constitutional conventions which would turn pre-emptive ”federalism” right side up. So each community draws up its own bill of rights, and then this constitutional network is used toward building an amend-the-constitution movement. (Let me stress again, I don’t consider this sufficient, but it’s a piece of the overall movement strategy.) None of this is to say that the ordinances are “only” symbolic, or that we concede being ignored in court. This is just, this is the real law, this is the constitution, this is the right thing to do. Any legitimate court will uphold it.

 

Here’s the plan in their own words.

 

This idea that people have rights and that the state has no authority to license violation of those rights,
is the core principle, the underlying premise, for mounting a new civil rights movement for the legal recognition and protection of community rights…

The larger strategy behind organizing locally to assert rights has zero to do with relying on the courts. Adopting community rights ordinances and banning corporate activities that violate rights is an organizing strategy, not merely a legal strategy. The courts likely will not vindicate our rights; they may, on behalf of the corporations, strip them, as they have done for many years. But community rights ordinances force them to do so publicly, clearly, and not in a quiet blizzard of legal mumbo-jumbo hidden away from public attention or interest.

Exposing the oppressive conniving of state and corporate power publicly, in sharp contrast to the people’s
aspirations and sense of public justice – this is the legal goal.

Why take this route? If we are to have our rights stripped, let it not be because we failed to exercise them; let it not be because we surrendered them and settled for regulating the rate of destruction; let it not be because we zoned where our community rights could be denied, or because we adopted conditional use
regulations that amount to little more than terms of surrender. If we are to have our rights stripped by the state on behalf of wealthy and powerful corporations, let us expose it to the world as the tyranny that it is…

As it turns out, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There have been successful movements in the United States that have achieved constitutional change – including abolishing slavery and winning the right to vote
for women. Those movements didn’t focus on building a regulatory agency dedicated to regulating the number of lashes for slaves or new rules for how husbands should treat their wives – they focused instead on driving constitutional change by illustrating how the existing system was unjust and immoral. To do that, they broke existing law, forcing the system to punish them, as a clear, explicit, and public illustration of how the system functioned.

Northern juries violated the law by refusing to send slaves back to their owners, blacks sat at lunch counters
in violation of the law, women illegally cast ballots at voting places, and American revolutionaries illegally
declared their independence from England. Each of those actions served to illustrate how the existing system operated and what a new structure might look like. In the process, those actions galvanized people to join together to build movements that eventually undid the existing system permanently – not through the courts, but through changing the very structure of the existing system.

Eventually, there will be a thousand lawsuits just like the one in Blaine Township. And then a thousand more. As Frederick Douglass once noted, “power concedes nothing without demand.” We’ve become so obedient that we’ve forgotten how to refuse to submit to a structure of law that is harming us.

Some of those lawsuits may be appealed and, in others, elected officials will sacrifice their communities to
maintain the municipal treasury. Some cases may win, many will lose – but together, they will give birth to a
peoples’ movement that this country hasn’t seen since the late 1800s – a movement aimed at throwing off the authority that enables a small number of people to override community decisions dealing with energy, food, waste, and resource sustainability…

What’s the long-term goal of adopting ordinances?

Constitutional change. Since many of the doctrines – like corporate “rights,” for example, or corporate
commerce rights – are wrapped up in the constitution, State legislatures are powerless to change them (even if they wanted to). Thus, long-term, the ordinances aren’t really ordinances at all – they’re mini-constitutions which embody what constitutional change must eventually look like. To achieve that constitutional change, enough communities in enough places must begin to push-back against the structure of law, and then knit themselves together to drive changes to the state constitution, and eventually, to the federal constitution….

The inevitable result of these local refusals to follow illegitimate State law is the binding together of hundreds of municipalities to force constitutional change that overrides the authority of the State to gut community self-government. That means driving a right to local self-government into the Pennsylvania Constitution which enables our communities to begin to actually protect our health, safety, and welfare, rather than continuing to be at the mercy of gas and other corporations who solely seek to use our communities for resource extraction…

If your community hasn’t already adopted a local “bill of rights” that bans gas drilling, do it tomorrow. Without a critical mass of communities in Pennsylvania joining together, constitutional change that liberates our communities to determine their own futures will remain beyond our reach. And we will saddle our children with cleaning up the mess – and whatever is left of our communities and environment – that happened on our watch…

Here is no hypothetical calling of the corporate state to account. The question posed is this: What will lead to the exercise and protection of our unalienable rights, including the right to local, community self government? And the answer is: Nothing but the exercise and protection of unalienable rights through the exercise of our right to local, community self-government!

 

The activism of organizing and passing such laws, which are obviously more legitimate than the alien “laws” of the central government, and then having to fight against these alien forces for the simple right to rule ourselves, is intended to expose the truly tyrannical nature of the central corporate-government system and bring more people into the true federalist movement. That in turn will bring us to the point where we can change the Constitution, or achieve victory through bottom-up political attrition as the tyrants are unable to function once stripped of local support.

 

A goal here is to codify Food Sovereignty, positive democracy, and relocalization as explicit legal/constitutional principles. The more we go on record as wanting to redeem our democratic sovereignty, and the more the kleptocracy has to resort to brute lawlessness to assert its prerogatives, the more its true barbaric thug essence will be clear.

 

On a general level, all pro-democracy grassroots action is a tonic. Citizens are taking action, however small to begin with, directly against corporate and central government power. We’re answering “federal” arrogation and usurpation with our own version of pre-emption. We’re declaring that our people’s law supersedes, overrides, overthrows their illegitimate might-makes-right. We’re declaring the principles of true federalism, which is a vector opposed to all centralization and concentration. This is a value in itself.

 

If hierarchy and centralization ever made sense, it was only because the vast energy unleashed by the fossil fuel binge required them. By the same logic we must then recognize that post-oil, where the energy vector is toward far less consumption, and the economic vector is to relocalize, we must harmoniously refederalize political and economic power to the local/regional level. This is to obey the laws of history, as formulated here by the physical imperatives of energy and therefore of economics.

 

Constitutionalism means to govern according to the natural economic vector. Today that means Food Sovereignty, positive democracy, and relocalization. We don’t even have to dispute the motives of 1788. All we need to say is that its vector was the opposite of today’s. For that reason alone we have to turn it right side up.

 

As predicted, the system has so far been hostile to this effort. The earliest ordinance, an anti-mining ordinance in Blaine, PA, was forced to be repealed by corporate pressure. In response to the growing Pennsylvania insurgency the state legislature passed a pre-emption law which would turn the state into a veritable petrostate and fracking free-fire zone, with all democratic sovereignty legally abolished. In Maine prosecutors are carefully selecting a test case toward a more thorough assault on the local food sovereignty laws.

 

Where we fight this way, we force a more ”de jure” demonstration of tyranny. Trampling a law is more easily understood by the masses than suppressing activism in general. In this sense, the movement’s use of laws and constitutionalism is a device to achieve better middle-class understandability. In this sense it’s educational, “symbolic”, movement-building. It states a “demand” which describes why citizens engage in direct action. In this way it supplements direct action. In the end it can only supplement direct action, not substitute for it.

 

The CELDF strategy and related actions are, in the end, trying to use these actions as exercises in direct democratic participation, as organizational campaigns, and to educate the public about corporate/government assaults on the people’s sovereignty and rights. (I call this POE: Participate-Organize-Educate.) The more we learn, the better organized we become, the more experience of democratic participation we get, the more of a taste for this participation we develop, the more we’ll build a movement which will actually fight for our food sovereignty, true democracy, and self-rule. Using the ordinance/bill of rights strategy as the vehicle toward attaining local power, within the official government as well as parallel sovereign councils, will be a self-perpetuating organizing process, and will also help build these quasi-governmental forms into real fighting structures which will render the assaults from outside and above less and less effective against us.

 

This stuff is important for anyone looking toward full transformation. The time isn’t yet ripe for a full-scale transformational movement. Occupy, for example, seems to be in a sophomore slump. We’re gradually, inexorably, but so far slowly building toward it. In the meantime, we need outlets for action, and we need our characteristic actions in the eyes of the public. Plus, most people will still need to try many sorts of “reform” before they finally realize that reformism does not and cannot work. While we do as much personal prepping, food-growing, reskilling and relocalization action as possible, and while we do all we can to propagate transformational ideas and evidence, we also need a suite of political action, right here right now.

 

We need actions which meet these criteria:

 

1. As bottom-up and relocalizing as possible.

 

2. On a vector toward abolishing the system.

 

3. Providing philosophical refutation of system sacred cows, and always explicitly refuting the system as such.

 

4. Affording real POE opportunities and execution.

 

This has to mean everyone’s on a vector and never stagnant. It means that every time a bottom-up reform action is smacked down, we must raise our aspirations and escalate our proclaimed goals. Above all, we must not keep doing the same thing that’s already proven to fail (the proverbial measure of insanity), and we must never regress. These comprise appeasement, which we know cannot work.

 

 

The Essence of Food Sovereignty

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The essence of Food Sovereignty is that agroecology and democracy are mutually reinforcing.

 

Positive democracy dispenses with all forms of coercive hierarchy in favor of the cooperative economies and societies which are natural to human beings. This is the culture which would expunge all tyranny and minimize violence. It’s the most favorable environment for all forms of autonomous and cooperative production, including the agroecology which already has the highest yield of all forms of agriculture, and whose yield advantage shall increase exponentially post-fossil fuels. Conversely, conditions of material scarcity and unemployment are conducive to anti-democratic ideas and forms.

 

The Big Lie that industrial agriculture outproduces organic is based on simple accounting fraud. Corporate propagandists isolate one crop, for example corn, and then compare industrial vs. organic monocultures* of that crop. But monoculture is antithetical to the organic framework. On the contrary, the right comparison is between the industrial monoculture and the integrated, diversified, holistic organic farm. When this correct account is tallied, we find that organic outproduces industrial in terms of calories and macronutrients, and vastly outproduces it in terms of vitamins and minerals. (GMOs, by the way, are especially nutritional dead weight, on account of how their glyphosate-resistant and Bt-expressing cellular traits physically block nutrient uptake from the soil.)

 

But this mode of organic production – diversified, geared to local conditions, intensively using skilled labor, producing abundance, providing fulfilling work for all - cannot be concentrated into an assembly line. So it’s naturally resistant to hierarchy. It naturally resists power and wealth concentration.

 

Therefore agroecology is in the spirit of the original principle of the American Revolution, that concentrated power naturally assaults liberty, and that the responsibility of a citizen is to be vigilant toward power, or better yet not allow it to concentrate in the first place. Organic food production, by its very nature, presents a great hurdle to concentration, and therefore lessens the burden of vigilance. It also does this by providing local/regional food security. By training for self-reliance, it also affirmatively trains us to be the active citizens we need to be.

 

In all these ways, therefore, agroecology helps foster and strengthen democracy, just as democracy provides the most constructive environment for it. Food sovereignty is an essentially democratic philosophy and practice. It’s the most purely human philosophy, and it’s the practice most tending toward our human fulfillment.

 

[*Even granting this fraudulent monoculture comparison, organic's production is competitive with industrial, and often outproduces it.]

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History As the War of Abundance vs. Scarcity

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Very true.

 

Baudrillard was, I think, on the mark when he asserted that the transformation from primitive to feudal to mercantile to capitalist society was instigated by a human desire for hierarchical differentiation, and not by material scarcity, as claimed by Marxists.

 

(Except for the part about it being a “human desire”; humans are naturally cooperative.) I haven’t read the Baudrillard on this, but it’s long been clear to me that the normal circumstance of humanity is abundance. Since our earliest days, the human brain has been capable of producing extraordinary bounty, in necessities, leisure, and the opportunity for happiness.

 

Natural scarcity has never been a problem for us. Our human capability transcends it. On the contrary, it’s always been abundance which subhuman criminals, lusting after elite parasite status, have viewed as the most dire problem, but also as a great opportunity. Naturally flush with all we want, the people could never be dominated or enslaved. But the construction of hierarchy could steal this abundance, use it to concentrate luxury wealth and power for this criminal elite, and at the same time artificially impose scarcity upon everyone else.

 

This has always been the purpose and function of all economic and political hierarchies. Fossil-fueled capitalism and the modern state represent the most extreme development of this organized crime trend.

 

With the end of the Oil Age, history now reaches its final crossroads. This shall be the final conflict between history’s democratic movement and its criminal movement. The latter will try to use the crisis of Peak Oil to lever civilization into a terminal slave system, the most vicious ever, once and for all.

 

But the end of oil is also democracy’s great opportunity. Humanity has come of age. We have complete knowledge of how to economically organize ourselves to produce abundance. We have complete knowledge of how to politically rule ourselves. A critical mass is reaching full democratic consciousness. With the end of oil, we resume history’s normal path of energy consumption. But we can now do it with a fully human consciousness, free of all the superstitions of the pre-oil age, and armed with all the immense knowledge we’ve accrued during the time of fossil fuels.

 

We can achieve the full triumph of humanity, once and for all. The only need left is the will to fight.

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What Is Organic? (2 of 2)

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Earlier I wrote about how the term and concept organic applies to a network of relations and vectors, a holism, rather than to a discrete, stagnant item which can be removed from or plugged into any context at will.

 

In part 1 I focused on the use of the concept to describe food production and distribution. I emphasized that organic has to mean maximizing sustainability, resiliency, interdependency rather than dependency. This implies, even if it doesn’t directly demand, social and economic justice, since any extractive hierarchy reduces our sustainability. By definition any parasite reduces this. It definitely means minimizing dependency on fossil fuels as such (and not just fossil fuels in the direct farming inputs), which means that globalization and the organic are mutually exclusive. It excludes any significant environmental destructiveness (this too means it must minimize fossil fuels in general). 

 

I’ll add here that organic has to mean the abolition and transcendence of the artificial producer/consumer dichotomy. Even within the food sovereignty movement this dichotomy is often insensibly taken for granted. But in truth these concepts can never be separated. One way or another they meld and define one another. Any producer also consumes, and if she’s induced or forced to separate her production from her consumption, that actually removes her producer quality and renders her a system cog, a passive and dependent consumer only. Passive consumption in general is meant to render us stagnant, and this in turn makes possible the calcification of the entire economy and polity, under corporate control. The goal of all consumerism is to eradicate all that’s organic and human and replace it with sterile conformity to tyranny.

 

By contrast, where we stop being passive consumers and become full economic citizens, as much as possible democratically producing our own food, and at least being fully active in knowing our food and those who produce it, we regain control over our lives and render ourselves far more resilient and sustainable, and far less vulnerable to any threat. (I’ll add that this can help reclaim our political democracy.) The producer who is organically enmeshed in such a sovereign food network is himself more resilient and less vulnerable, since he’s now part of a natural network rather than being a fungible, replaceable, expendable cog. (I’ll add in passing for now that this applies to dependency on all system concepts – the corporate form, property, legality, contracts, anything which is fraudulently purported to be part of nature but is actually a tool and weapon of an artificial, hierarchical system based on Might Makes Right.) 

 

This leads to another general point, that the organic is mutually exclusive with corporatism. Corporatism, even leaving aside the subjective greed and malevolence of its cadres (although this too is dire), necessarily means the maintenance of large parasitic hierarchies (the corporations themselves, the corporations as extensions of government, the government as bagman and thug for these corporations). It also necessarily means globalization, since profit extraction (the absolute imperative for any corporation) cannot function other than within an infinitely expanding growth economy. The only limit* to this is the limits of the globe itself, so corporatism must if possible expand to completely fill out this limit.

 

[*Soon I'll be writing about how GMOs, as an imperialist phenomenon, are intended to as it were generate a second globe for the corporate rampage.]

 

This leads us to a broader vision of the organic. I’ll just mention a few examples.

 

1. Time banking has to be seeking the holism of a system free of money. Time banks must be envisioned as seeds of a thriving forest, not as potted flowers to be put out in the harsh cold of the command money economy.

 

So organic time banking and organic co-production, since it can’t sit still amid this harsh environment, must be on a vector away from and against it. For example, anywhere there’s a time bank and an Occupy action, these must seek to complement one another. If there’s no local/regional Occupy, the time bank should try to help get one going.

 

2. I’ve written before about how the commons is an organic thing which depends upon its environment, and the basic intellectual fraud of plunking the concept in the midst of a predatory, mercenary world, as in the Big Lie of the “tragedy of the commons”.

 

Just as it proves nothing about the inherent sustainability of a commons where an artificially dominant corporatism assaults and destroys it, so anyone who wants to uphold and reclaim the commons must necessarily fight to eradicate corporatism, as the two are mutually exclusive. One or the other must perish completely.

 

3. In the modern world, the individual is ripped out of all context, atomized, dissolved within a mass, but is still called a “citizen”. He’s even lectured by the system about his “free will” and moral agency. But in truth an organic citizen must be a full political and economic participant, fully active and self-directing within the network of community relations and vectors, enjoying the full benefit of her labor and her political sovereignty. 

 

David Graeber wrote extensively about this in his book Debt. This is part of how money systems were first imposed on what were previously organic economies. As I wrote here:

 

First, and for the vast majority of humanity’s natural history, organic communities based themselves upon close social networks, moral relations, and the sense of community obligation, including in transactions among individual community members.

Then, nascent elites, previously basing their power on direct violence and plunder, saw how they could accelerate class stratification and magnify their power by sublimating this violence by formalizing exchange and debt. To do this, they came up with money, and began measuring transactions and recording debts based upon it.

 

Similarly, Hobbes took the modern “civilized” individual, i.e. one domesticated into fear and mercenary greed, pictured this monster in the absence of the overawing state power, how ”nasty and brutish” such persons would be under those circumstances, and then fraudulently called this the state of nature, when in fact such an atomized, distorted hominid has nothing whatsoever in common with an organic human being living within a natural economy. This fraud is at the core of the bogus ”competition” ideology, which is in fact 100% artificial, and indeed requires massive propaganda, bribery, threats, fear, and violence, in order for it to make any headway against our natural humanity at all. In nature, organic human beings are cooperative.

 

(This is another reason the organic is mutually exclusive with corporatism, capitalism, all fetishes of competition.) 

 

4. Voting within electoralism, even if you admire it, could make sense only within the holism of an active, self-educating, fully informed, participatory, vigilant citizenry. This was a core principle of the first stage of the American Revolution.

 

But to render the individual passive, ignorant, benighted (including by systematic top-down secrecy on the part of government and corporations), “participating” only on election day, and otherwise conformist and asleep, is to render him the political equivalent of a passive consumer. The voting ideology and consumerism go hand in hand. They are identical in concept, intention, and effect.

 

This lays bare the fraud of calling the members of neoliberal systems “citizens”. The term organic citizen would be redundant, while to call the atomized, passive individual a ”citizen” because he technically has and sometimes exercises the franchise, is a typical lie of liberals and conservatives. This is one of the many ways they join to conspire against democracy and humanity, and on behalf of corporatism.

 

5. There’s lots of policy ideas like MMT, the VAT, renewable energy subsidies, cap and trade, which could in theory be constructive within a holistic reform environment, if such a thing were still possible. As parts of a vast and vigorous reform front these could be good ideas.

 

But for any of these, you can’t wrench it out of all context, synthesize a version to be enacted within a corporatized environment, and expect it to be anything but another extractive scam in practice. (During the “debate” over the health racket bailout, professional liars like Krugman liked to compare Obamacare to structures in Switzerland and the Netherlands. As if there can be any comparison between structures which gradually developed in welfare state environments, and tossing the same thing into a gangland shooting gallery, which is what Obama has done.)

 

This is true of most aspects of “progressive” prescriptions. They’re non-holistic, and therefore fruitless at best, more often fraudulent and collaborationist.

 

6. In the end, every kind of reformism is a version of the same mentality which would take apart a natural whole food, dismantle it into a few of its identifiable discrete nutrients, declare it to be the sum of these, and proceed to synthesize each, toward a regime of processed, enriched, fortified, synthetic “food”.

 

The result is corporate enclosure, malnutrition, obesity, toxification, disease, impoverishment, starvation, and death.

 

The same is true of the entire economic and political realm. It’s true of society itself. We need a truly organic polity, an organic economy, an organic society.

 

 

The Struggle of Vernon Hershberger and Food Sovereignty

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The “Food Safety” regime is a gaggle of perps who fit the description of cowardly bullies in every way.

 

For example, their goal is to enforce the total criminalization of milk, legalizing only pasteurized corporate milk product. They proclaimed in principle their prerogative to arrest and prosecute people for possessing and consuming real milk.

 

In its March 16 response to the judge’s questions, FDA took the position that “a person who purchases unpasteurized milk in one state with the intent to take it to another state (either for personal use or to distribute to others) is engaging in interstate commerce.” As for consumers who cross state lines intending to take raw milk back home for personal use, FDA stated that it “has never sought to bring an enforcement action against a person because he or she crossed a state boundary to purchase and return with raw milk solely for his or her own use, and FDA has no present intent to bring an action against such a person in the future. Nevertheless…the hypothetical interstate traveler in this example would have ‘caused’ raw milk ‘to be delivered into interstate commerce’ in violation of 21 C.F.R. §1240.61.

 

But in practice they’ve steered clear of such inflammatory action. And when directly defied by the Raw Milk Freedom Riders, the thugs backed down and publicly declared they had no intention of persecuting individual milk drinkers. (This was a fine example of direct action accomplishing what “channels” had failed to accomplish and could never accomplish.)

 

Instead, the battle plan is to attack the dairy farmers. The strategy is to target them and shut them down one at a time, in the process generating enough of an atmosphere of intimidation and fear that the rest will give up. Targeted persecution has already claimed at least one scalp, that of Pennsylvania Amish dairyman Dan Allgyer. So far I haven’t heard of any farmers shutting down on their own, though.

 

While we can’t criticize individual farmers for doing what they feel they need to do, we do know that we need as many farmers and milk drinkers as possible to defy this assault and refuse to knuckle under.

 

That’s why the struggle of Vernon Hershberger is so important and deserving of support. Here’s one of the targeted farmers refusing to comply, directly defiant, refusing to give up. Although under indictment for selling milk in defiance of Wisconsin bureaucratic fiat and free on bail under conditions forbidding him to continue producing milk, he has continued to supply his customers.*

 

[*If you go to milk blogs like David Gumpert's The Complete Patient, you'll find lots of discussion of the technical contractual nature of the operations of Hershberger and others, how these are purely private contracts beyond state purview, etc. While this sometimes may be important in the courtroom (in practice it seldom seems to be; judges decide according to their pro-corporate prejudices, or, rarely, their lack of such prejudice), it's a technical detail from the point of view of Food Sovereignty principle. Our principle is our right to produce and eat the foods of our choice. The corporate/government system has no right to interfere, period. To get mired in technicalities, as a matter of principle, is at least implicitly to concede that in some contexts the system has any authority or legitimacy whatsoever, as long as they're punctilious about the right procedure.]

 

Hershberger, now slated to go on trial September 25th, just won a round in court. The judge, with some asperity, refused the prosecution’s demand that Hershberger’s bail be revoked on account of his continuing to supply his customers with milk. This does indeed flout the conditions of his bail, and Hershberger openly declares that he revokes his previous agreement and will continue his civil disobedience.

 

If our farm stopped feeding its owners’ families, there will be literally hundreds of children who will suffer malnutrition and even starvation. Your honor, I would much rather spend the rest of my life behind bars or even die than to be found guilty of such a gross sin before the Almighty God.

I am proud of what I am doing. There is nothing wrong with peacefully providing food to members of my community who want it. The state might put me in jail, but they cannot stop people from feeding their neighbors.

 

Nevertheless the judge let him go, albeit with new warnings. Hershberger says he’ll continue on his course of action. Hundreds in Wisconsin are rallying to his cause, assembling at the courthouse and heading over to the farm to help out and to bear witness.

 

Upon leaving the courthouse, Hershberger was the first to sign a new document, the Declaration of Food Independence.

 

Unfortunately, this document is wrongly conceived. We see the problem in the first clause.

 

In a spirit of humility and with respect for both the just law of the land and Natural Law, we declare that, inherent in every individual is the God-given right to procure the food of one’s choice from consenting farmers and producers.

 

The first principle of Food Sovereignty is that we the people have the right to grow and produce our own food. Only second to that, where we choose not to or cannot produce for ourselves, do we come to the right to procure food from the farmer of our choice.

 

This distinction is critical for economic and political democracy, since democracy requires that we abolish and transcend the artificial dichotomy of producer vs. consumer. This dichotomy is the basis of every kind of economic tyranny. The Declaration clause as written remains mired in this false dichotomy, and therefore leaves the door open for all sorts of “co-existence” with corporate and government concepts, structures, and thug mechanisms. (It’s also incoherent to say we have a ”god-given right” to buy food wherever we want, but not to grow it ourselves. That would be one strange god.)

 

The problem for many of these people is that real food rights like that to grow our own food imply the right of access to the land to grow food. In its strong form, Food Sovereignty means only those who grow food or are otherwise productive have any right to be on the land at all. In other words, it would overthrow the existing regime of property in land. (Which would be in accord with John Locke’s original labor theory of property. But the whole practice of Western practical system ideology, starting with the later, well-invested Locke himself, has been to flout the productive principle in favor of parasites. Food Sovereignty, and economic democracy in broad form, would purge all parasites from the earth.)