Anecdote

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I still can’t get over all the ruckus our relocalization group’s innocuous little fundraiser stirred up, and all because there would be some wine there. Our mistake was to publicly advertise it. We should’ve communicated only with our e-mail lists and through word-of-mouth. The first sign of trouble was a cop calling one of our people, telling her she needed to talk to the town clerk. (I’ll mention that the cops have a nice little racket going in town, having their security services “required” for anything bigger than a lemonade stand, at exorbitant hourly rates of course. That’s probably why they ratted us out to the town, because if they weren’t going to get paid, an event shouldn’t happen at all.)

 

The clerk then regaled her with stories of all the permits and bonds that would be needed. Hearing of this, the wine supplier pulled out, on grounds of who needs the hassle. I can’t say I blame them. (They were basically donating the wine for a tasting, for community goodwill and to advertise themselves.) With that, the whole program had been gutted, so there was nothing to do but cancel the event. We’re scrambling to come up with an alternative on short notice.

 

But that wasn’t the end. At our most recent farmers’ market, two dirtbags in ratty-looking street clothes from the state alcohol bureau showed up to interrogate us about this upcoming event which had actually been canceled over a week earlier. Our guy was diplomatic with them but sent them on their way. They’d driven several hours from the state capital just to investigate this affront to the majesty of their authority. Afterward even liberals among us were griping like tea partiers about “our tax dollars” and nodded for once (instead of staring uncomprehendingly) when I used the word “thugs”.

 

I wouldn’t be surprised if we still haven’t heard the last of it. 

 

BTW, it’s not the same thing as, for example, a motorcycle track being built on farmland in a quiet rural neighborhood. Mass-produced machines are a creature* of big government, and so it’s a government responsibility to regulate them. (That it systematically abrogates this responsibility, as part of transferring nominally democratic government power to its anti-democratic corporate extension, doesn’t change the fact.) But people getting together on an ad hoc basis to drink wine and perhaps buy/sell some doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with government at all.

 

*For example, ORVs wouldn’t exist without big government, as mass-produced things. Sure, a tinkerer here and there could build one (if he had the fossil fuel to run it), but a handful of tinkerers aren’t a problem. Things become problems when they go onto globalized assembly lines, which can’t exist without big government.

 

Part of what’s sound about anarchism, how it’s intellectually and strategically elegant, is that not only does it want to abolish government/corporate structures on account of their intrinsic evils. Anarchism also recognizes that most of the bad features (and all the worst ones) of lots of other things are the result of corporate welfare and government thuggery. An anarchist never needs even to contemplate the question of “banning” something, or get bogged down in wonkery about how to “regulate” everything, because the answer is almost always, “without corporate welfare that thing would cease to exist, or wouldn’t be anywhere near as much of a problem.” In that sense anarchists are also the only TRUE “free market” believers. By definition a free market has no corporate welfare or corporate formation in the first place.

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Corporate Tribalism Part 2: Steven Pinker and Sublimated Violence

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In my first preliminary post on corporate tribalism I described how jurisprudence has tried to define corporate persons as more human than human beings. Another aspect of this anti-human inversion has been the ideological attempt to strip humanity of its naturally cooperative traits and repose these only in elite structures, while smearing humanity as being infected with what’s really the psychopathy of elites. 

 

It was Hobbes, personally traumatized by the English Civil War and wishing to justify the modern State, who gave the classical description of man’s alleged inherent depravity. Without firm, severe rule from above, we were doomed to the “state of nature” where our lives would inevitably be “nasty, brutish, and short”. Today Hobbes is the hero of numerous prominent intellectuals who crusade to represent humanity as naturally wicked, aggressive, destructive, wasteful, deceitful, manipulative, depraved. They’ve enlisted the modern sciences and social sciences, especially genetics, to support the modern neo-Hobbesianism. The direct goal is always to claim that only political elitism, only the State, can organize any kind of constructive endeavor. At least implicitly it’s always a cry of the heart for economic elitism. Only capitalism and especially corporatism can organize any kind of productive endeavor. Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Napoleon Chagnon and others have been prominent in this campaign. The goal is always the same, to render the class war and kleptocracy on a biological/racist basis, but in a pro-capitalist, pro-state way.

 

The latest, much-hyped installment is Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. Here the claim is that the level of violence has declined with the rise of the modern state and capitalism. Once again the nasty, brutish primal humanity has to be tamed and put to work by the state, capital, elites. On its face this is absurd. Throughout history elites have always been vastly more violent than peoples, who have generally served as the cannon fodder (military and economic) for the predations, extractions, and wars of these elites. No matter what level of violence one discovers at any place or time, this violence will have been predominantly caused or greatly aggravated by, as anthropologist Brian Ferguson puts it, “the pursuit of practical self-interest by those who actually make the decision.”

 

But if this weren’t self-evident, no problem. Real scholars like Ferguson and David Graeber have assembled the evidence of anthropology which proves that all the tales of the natural greed and violence of humanity are a fraud. On the contrary, the evidence supports the view of people as naturally prone to cooperation. Perhaps not “noble savages”, but inherently likely to prefer cooperation, nonviolent solutions, and limits on material acquisitiveness. In particular, the evidence is that the state and monetary debt have their origins only in violence and have always comprised embodied, sublimated violence. Tribal violence as a rule involved scarcity competition, but this scarcity has seldom been natural. On the contrary, almost all scarcity competition has been over artificial scarcity. Tribes didn’t find themselves at odds over game or grazable land where there wasn’t enough to go around in an absolute sense. Rather, elites sought to monopolize the resource at the expense of both foreign tribes and their own people. These rival elite claims, not to necessity but to hoarded superfluity, have been the usual engine of violence and war. Today in capitalism we have the most complete and fully rationalized ideology and practice of artificial scarcity. This is the scarcity Pinker has dedicated his life to exalting.

 

Meanwhile the “evidence” of Pinker and company, just like that alleged for primal barter, is cherry-picked and largely fabricated. Pinker’s project is to remove all violence from its socioeconomic context. He then divides history into the period of the modern State and all other times. Violence prior to* the state is then dogmatically declared to be “natural”, “anarchic” violence. But there’s no evidence for this natural violence, and plenty for the violence organized by proto-state elites.

 

[*Pinker's chronology is also eccentric.  His most cited example seems to be this account of public cat-burning:

 

In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, “[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.” Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world.

 

But as many have immediately pointed out, this isn’t an example of pre-state anarchic depravity. On the contrary, 16th century France was a starting point for the modern state, which was just starting to explore its own nature with charming activities like this one.]

 

Pinker’s not here to let the evidence induce truth, but to propagate dogma:

 

The first is that Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbors to steal their resources. The resulting fear of attack will tempt the neighbors to strike first in preemptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them preemptively, and so on. This danger can be defused by a policy of deterrence—don’t strike first, retaliate if struck—but, to guarantee its credibility, parties must avenge all insults and settle all scores, leading to cycles of bloody vendetta. These tragedies can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation.

 

Like Hobbes himself, this is nothing more than myth. Hobbes never thought his “state of nature” had actually existed. On the contrary, he considered this the state of “civilized”, tamed man where not kept brutally in line. Hobbes’ view was similar to the phenomena Graeber documents on the real incidence of barter. Barter as a spot trade is not primeval, but occurs only following the collapse of a money economy. People indoctrinated in the use of money and market exchange will try to replicate their training with whatever’s at hand, however impractical the result. That’s what Hobbes thought would happen where already domesticated man ever had the reins relaxed. He then, as a device, read this special circumstance back into primal humanity. That’s how he derived the “state of nature”. So barter and the Hobbesian state of nature go together, conceptually and in practice. Somalia is a good example of this collapse of state/capitalism. But it has nothing at all to do with natural tribal life.

 

Pinker and his fellow scribblers simply ape their master Hobbes in this procedure. Nietzsche accused every kind of historian, sociologist, scholar of being prone to simply read the present back into the past. Graeber exposes how economists have propagated such a Big Lie. Here we have the “sociobiologist” version. (I did a few searches trying to find anyone else citing Graeber against Pinker but found none. I guess that’s a measure of how Graeber’s findings haven’t yet been widely comprehended.)

 

So we have the twin lies of nasty brutishness and natural scarcity, when in fact there’s only post-state brutishness and artificial scarcity. These are precisely what Pinker and company try to obscure. In the end a hack like Pinker is just plagiarizing Malthus.

 

His thesis also depends upon a monumental accounting fraud worthy of Wall Street. He whitewashes the radical escalation of tyranny and coercion under modern structures through the simple fraud of defining violence as only when a gun is fired, while excluding the infinitude of violence involved in people being driven at gunpoint. That’s the only way today’s academic liars can try to camouflage the overwhelming violence embodied in all state and capitalist structures.

 

But how can any measure of violence be legitimate which doesn’t account for every cent stolen at gunpoint, for example through wage slavery, whether the gun be physically immediate or just threatened for the time being? How can any measure of violence be valid without including on the daily ledger the entire sum of the violence involved in all enclosures and other propertarian thefts, including the ongoing modern land grabs? What other than violence keeps productive human beings off our rightful farmland, forces us to seek “employment”, to accept “unemployed” status, when the bountiful earth exists for us as it always did? Pinker’s job is to elide all this sublimated violence, defining it out of existence. Indeed in this sublimated neoliberal elitist form, what Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism”, Pinker exalts violence as the highest form of human existence. He’s the ideologue of sublimated violence.

 

Meanwhile studies also reveal how psychopaths concentrate at the higher levels of coercive hierarchy, since hierarchy is their natural habitat. Contrary to Pinker’s lies, those truly prone to Randian greed and aggression always have a much harder time in cooperative communities. (Meanwhile, contra Pinker’s lies about the greater violence of tribal peoples, what’s your chance of being assaulted and murdered today if you try to live with the same freedom the people of these tribes knew? If you find Pinker’s argument convincing, try to live without command money and in accord with natural usufruct, and see how much violence you bring down upon you. Whatever the primal assault rate, it was vastly less than the 100% guarantee of today.)

 

If there is in fact a “selfish gene” and an innate propensity to violence, it’s to be found concentrated at the higher levels of state and corporate hierarchies. And if this biological difference actually exists, it simply defines those who are aggressively subhuman, who must be regarded and dealt with as nothing but rabid dogs.

 

But ivory tower flunkeys like Pinker try to accomplish an Orwellian inversion. They want to slander the soul of humanity. They want to smear us with the filth of their corporate masters while bestowing the mantle of the “noble” elite upon these gutter gangsters. Pinker defines statism as the measure of nobility and the embodiment of our ”better angels”. But this is just a gutter devil calling itself an angel. So he adds blasphemy to injury.

 

This is a (metaphorical?) theology of corporate tribalism, the sublimated satanism of the 1%. If there’s a biological/neurological abyss, it’s between the 99 and the 1. Pinker and the rest of the sociobiologist crew perform their fraudulent inversions and slanders of the 99 on behalf of the 1.

 

This is also meant to disparage the prospects of harmonious, prosperous relocalization. How can we have peace and prosperity without the Leviathan State? But the evidence proves the contrary. As human beings we’re naturally fitted to cooperate and mutually assist. We’re ready to build, live, and work in communities where we credit one another and in that way achieve the general good. Today we also possess something new, a clear democratic philosophy and knowledge, in addition to all the new agronomic knowledge we’ve gathered.

 

Having all this going for us, we need only to purge ourselves of the criminals and parasites. On that day we’ll find sufficient resources and good will to finally live fully as human beings. Dismantling all the structures of embodied violence and getting rid of the practitioners of elitist violence, we’ll finally and truly live in the post-violent world.

 

The Constitution

 

There are two complementary reasons for a Constitutional Convention. The first is that such an exercise in democratic participation is a value in itself which can help clarify our principles of resistance and self-liberation, and help develop an organizational framework for this resistance and self-liberation movement. The second is that it can possibly succeed in bringing democratic and anti-corporate amendments to the Constitution, which would be a step toward true federalism, true positive democracy.

 

My premise in proposing changes to the Constitution is that the 1788 Constitution betrays the ideals and spirit of the American Revolution. Some critical provisions run directly counter to federalism and democracy, while others have been severely perverted through long corruption of practice.

 

I find the right to critique and change the Constitution in the fact that the American Revolution’s ideology established the sovereign constitution to be prior to any written Constitution, and therefore according to sovereignty*, as explicated and practiced in the course of the Revolution, the Constitution is legitimate only to the extent that it’s faithful in principle to the sovereign constitution and useful in practice to empower the sovereign people. Where it is not so faithful and so useful, we may and must convene and change it.

 

[*For more on the fact that sovereignty is inalienable, cf. Rousseau's Social Contract, Book 2 section 1. Consider also the usually abused idea, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact". If we turn this right side up and take it as a severe restraint on aggressive government power and constitutional readings which would support that aggression, it puts something like Citizens United in the proper perspective even if it had been technically the "correct" decision, although for many reasons it was not.]

 

Are these ideological matters important? Historically, they have been. Movements have sustained themselves through time and travail where they squared things with themselves, philosophically and morally. Real activists need to be satisfied before the court of their conscience that they’re doing the right thing, and that they had the right to act in the first place. The Israelites’ ideal of the Promised Land, and the Greek classical theory of the right and obligation to resist usurpation and tyranny were perhaps the earliest examples of this in Western history. Fighters who understand exactly, in the deepest sense, not only what they’re doing but why they’re doing it, not only that they fight for freedom but the philosophical basis of this freedom and its fight, have always been the most successful activists. No doubt many think modern America is different, and that for once “exceptionalism” would be correct, but I sure don’t see any evidence for that. I think we need to rigorously work this stuff out.

 

So in a series of posts I propose to analyze critical points of the Constitution, in what ways it was anti-democratic in its inception (in particular its structural anti-federalism), how it’s been subverted in practice (in particular how jurisprudence has enshrined and empowered corporations) and discuss possible amendments to solve these problems.

 

Here’s a few amendment possibilities. Some of these already have one or more proposed drafts offered by various groups, which we’ll discuss in their turn. For now I’ll just list some basic ideas.

 

* The enshrinement of Food Sovereignty as a basic right. (This would certainly have been the First Amendment if anyone in 1788 could have contemplated a day when the federal government would explicitly deny we have a right to grow and eat the foods of our choice. But even the opponents of the centralized government who demanded the inclusion of a Bill of Rights, as suspicious as they were, never contemplated such an obscene assault on our liberty and dignity.)

 

* Corporations are not persons and have no constitutional rights. Only humans have rights.

 

* If corporations are to exist at all, an amendment could explicitly limit them to the purposes and constraints which would have been familiar in the 1780s.

 

* The Full Faith and Credit clause shall not be construed to include corporate charters. All corporate activity shall be subject to the chartering laws of the state, except as restricted by one or both of the two previous amendments.

 

The point of these would be to prevent races to the bottom (since e.g. Delaware’s not all that big a market, and outside Delaware a corporation chartered in Delaware would be subject to the provisions of those other states, not those of Delaware)

 

* The federal government power shall be strictly construed according to the explicit letter of the Articles.

 

* “Interstate commerce” is only commerce which within a discrete transaction crosses a state line.

 

* Some way to declare that globalization “treaties”, i.e. contracts of adhesion, are most definitely not “the Law of the Land”, overriding federal, state, and local law.

 

* Clarify Article 1, section 8, to specify that the government may not alienate the sovereign power to coin Money. That is, the Fed and all private bank money is unconstitutional and to be abolished.

 

Those are the examples that first come to mind. I’m sure there’s other good ideas. My way of reading the Constitution is that the central government described in the main body must have its power greatly diminished, while the real spirit of the document is to be found in the negative provisions of the Bill of Rights and the wide open, implicitly positive 9th and 10th Amendments. So I’d want to amend toward the structural goals of constraining everything in the regular Articles and confirming that the 9th and 10th more closely represent the spirit of the constitution.

 

Up till now, the debate over loose construction, or strict, or originalist, has been parochial and wrongly focused. The procedure must not be to apply one standard of interpretation (let’s leave aside that almost all such ideologues have been hypocrites who were lying about their constitutional jurisprudence) to the whole Constitution, but rather to apply the Constitution according to the logic and spirit of the American Revolution. So we must look to the ideals of the Revolution, where we find the basic ideology of power and liberty as necessarily, existentially engaged in a fierce struggle. We find that the Revolution recognized that:

 

1. Sovereignty reposes only in the people.

 

2. The constitution is the social embodiment of this sovereignty.

 

3. Any power which is concentrated in government form must be rigorously constrained.

 

So any Constitution worthy of the American Revolution would be, to put it in today’s interpretive terms, loose with regard to the people’s rights, strict where it comes to government power. This was the original intent of the American Revolution, so to any extent that the so-called “federalists” of 1787-88 violated this intent, their intent would be invalid, since the intent of the Revolution itself is the only intent which has authority.

 

So as part of our project to take back our country, let’s take back our Constitution. In these posts I’ll provide documentation for all the points of the Revolutionary ideology of the 1760s-70s, although Bernard Bailyn has already done the hard work in his Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, and I’ll mostly be drawing on his reportage. (I already documented the real nature of constitution here, and of liberty’s necessary struggle against power here.) From there I’d like to have a mock Convention on this blog, discussing possible amendments, drafting our own wording or adopting drafts already written by others. It should be a worthwhile and even fun exercise in figuring out exactly what we want out of a more democratic, humanistic Constitution.

The Seed War (1 of 2)

 

Food sovereignty is a human right. It’s utter nonsense and fraud to even speak of democracy, freedom, or human dignity if people are chronically hungry under conditions of food abundance. Nature and human labor collaborate to produce a great bounty, and yet it disappears. It is stolen. The power structure seeks to artificially generate food scarcity. This has always been the case with food.

 

The situation is far more dire than is the case with mere money. The worst of the banksters’ crimes isn’t the theft of mere money itself, but that they have organized the mass plunder of our very food. This is the starkest metric of how our governments have abdicated sovereignty. They have surrendered control of our food to corporate monopoly rackets, whose only interest and will is to commodify, monopolize, drive us into economic ghettos to dominate and starve us.

 

It’s out of this dire need that there has arisen one of history’s most important movements, the Food Sovereignty movement.

 

Food sovereignty is the RIGHT of peoples, countries, and state unions to define their agricultural and food policy without the “dumping” of agricultural commodities into foreign countries. Food sovereignty organizes food production and consumption according to the needs of local communities, giving priority to production for local consumption. Food sovereignty includes the right to protect and regulate the national agricultural and livestock production and to shield the domestic market from the dumping of agricultural surpluses and low-price imports from other countries. Landless people, peasants, and small farmers must get access to land, water, and seed as well as productive resources and adequate public services. Food sovereignty and sustainability are a higher priority than trade policies.

 

So says La Via Campesina, a pioneer of this movement for human redemption.

 

· The right to food and food sovereignty: NGOs/CSOs affirm that the right to safe, adequate and nutritious food and healthy water is a fundamental human right of individuals and groups and food sovereignty that of peoples and nations, as well as the right of farmers, peasants and fisherfolk to produce food for their own families and their domestic markets. These fundamental human rights have to be respected by international institutions, governments and the economic actors.

 

That’s the words of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty.

 

Our Commitment to the Land
*Translated from a poster that hangs in many MST offices, settlements and encampments throughout Brazil.*

MST Commitments to the Earth and to Life

Human beings are precious, for their intelligence, work and organization can protect and preserve all forms of life.

1. Love and care for the Earth and all natural beings.
2. Always work to improve our understanding of nature and agriculture.
3. Produce food to eliminate hunger. Avoid monoculture and pesticides.
4. Preserve the existing forest and reforest new areas.
5. Take care of the springs, rivers, dams and lakes. Fight against the privatization of water.
6. Beautify the settlements and communities, planting flowers, medicinal herbs, greens, trees…
7. Take care of trash and oppose any practice that contaminates or harms the environment.
8. Practice solidarity and revolt against any injustice, aggression or exploration practiced against a person, the community or nature.
9. Fight against latifundia for all that possess land, bread, studies and freedom.
10. Never sell conquered land. Land is the ultimate commodity for future generations.

 

We must fight to realize this vision of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement.

 

Any contract abdicating food sovereignty is the equivalent of a contract for slavery. Even by our rigged law, this is considered an impossibility. Or let’s consider what the author of The Social Contract, Rousseau himself, has to say about it:

 

If an individual, says Grotius, can alienate his liberty and make himself the slave of a master, why could not a whole people do the same and make itself subject to a king? There are in this passage plenty of ambiguous words which would need explaining; but let us confine ourselves to the word alienate. To alienate is to give or to sell. Now, a man who becomes the slave of another does not give himself; he sells himself, at the least for his subsistence: but for what does a people sell itself? A king is so far from furnishing his subjects with their subsistence that he gets his own only from them; and, according to Rabelais, kings do not live on nothing. Do subjects then give their persons on condition that the king takes their goods also? I fail to see what they have left to preserve.

It will be said that the despot assures his subjects civil tranquillity. Granted; but what do they gain, if the wars his ambition brings down upon them, his insatiable avidity, and the vexatious conduct of his ministers press harder on them than their own dissensions would have done? What do they gain, if the very tranquillity they enjoy is one of their miseries? Tranquillity is found also in dungeons; but is that enough to make them desirable places to live in? The Greeks imprisoned in the cave of the Cyclops lived there very tranquilly, while they were awaiting their turn to be devoured.

To say that a man gives himself gratuitously, is to say what is absurd and inconceivable; such an act is null and illegitimate, from the mere fact that he who does it is out of his mind. To say the same of a whole people is to suppose a people of madmen; and madness creates no right………

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts. Finally, it is an empty and contradictory convention that sets up, on the one side, absolute authority, and, on the other, unlimited obedience. Is it not clear that we can be under no obligation to a person from whom we have the right to exact everything? Does not this condition alone, in the absence of equivalence or exchange, in itself involve the nullity of the act? For what right can my slave have against me, when all that he has belongs to me, and, his right being mine, this right of mine against myself is a phrase devoid of meaning?……

So, from whatever aspect we regard the question, the right of slavery is null and void, not only as being illegitimate, but also because it is absurd and meaningless. The words slave and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. It will always be equally foolish for a man to say to a man or to a people: “I make with you a convention wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I shall keep it as long as I like, and you will keep it as long as I like.”

 

(Since the entire passage is relevant and profound to our purpose, I reproduced it whole here.)

 

Along with the land itself, the most important battlefront is the Seed War. The biotech rackets want nothing less than world domination through control of the seed supply. They’re getting lots of help from our corrupt anti-sovereign governments. As one example, take a look at the Food Tyranny bill looming in Congress. The House version, passed in 2009, implicitly clamps the government’s metallic grip onto the life-giving seed:

 

(3) include with respect to growing, harvesting, sorting, and storage operations, minimum standards related to fertilizer use, nutrients, hygiene, packaging, temperature controls, animal encroachment… and water….

Ah, such a little paragraph, and so much evil packed in it. Notice they mention harvesting, sorting and storage operations? Notice they never mention seeds, but they are precisely what those words cover.

Now, watch how they will be able to easily criminalize seed banking and all holding of seeds. First, to follow how this will be done, you must understand that:

1. There is a small list inside the FDA called “sources of seed contamination” and
2. The FDA has now defined “seed” as food,
3. So seeds can now be controlled through “food safety.”

Those seeds (so far) include:

*seeds eaten raw such as flax, poppy sesame, etc.;
*sprouting seeds such as wheat, beans, alfalfa, most greens, etc.;
*seeds pressed into oils such as corn, sunflower, canola, etc.;
*seeds used as animal feed such as soy ….

That includes most seeds. It may even be all seed, given how they are skilled at ‘new’ definitions.

And what are the “sources of seed contamination” per the FDA? They include only six little items:

*agricultural water;
*manure (but not chemical pesticides or fertilizers);
*harvesting;
*transporting equipment;
*seed cleaning (sorting) equipment; and
*seed storage (storing) facilities.

Did you know that seed cleaning equipment is THE single most critical piece of equipment for sustainable agriculture? It is how we collect organic seed. It is the machinery used after the season, when plants “go to seed,” to separate out (sort) the seeds from the plant material so the farmer can collect (harvest) and then save (put in storage) seed for the next year at little cost. With his own seed, the farmer also stays free of patented, genetically engineered, corporately privatized seeds.

 

This is typical of the governmental assault on seeds on behalf of the corporate pirates. But most of the assault is more oblique and ideological. “Intellectual property” (IP) is one of the key concepts corporations are using to force their version of a command economy upon many sectors which are vulnerable to economic relocalization and detachment from predatory rents. In the case of food, the goal of Monsanto, Syngenta, Dupont, ADM, Cargill, Tyson, Smithfield, and others is to force us to use only proprietary Terminator seeds. These are seeds which sprout only once as sterile plants.

 

GMOs should not be tolerated regardless.

 

1. They don’t work. They don’t increase yield, contrary to the lies of MSM hacks. They only reinforce monocropping industrial agriculture. Farmers were foolish enough to like this at first. Although they weren’t producing more per acre, what they did produce was cheaper to produce. But this was predictably a false economy. How reliable was faith in Monsanto, that it wouldn’t jack up the price once you were hooked?

 

Mr. Begemann [a Monsanto cadre] said that Monsanto used to introduce new seeds at a price that gave farmers two thirds and Monsanto one third of the extra profits that would come from higher yields or lower pest-control costs. But with SmartStax corn and Roundup Ready 2 soybeans, the company’s pricing aimed for a 50-50 split.

 

2. They don’t work, but they do have tremendous risks. I’ll get to those shortly. First let’s get back to the command economy assault.

 

There are several tactics here:

 

1. Attain an expansive pseudo-legal concept of IP in the first place. This means:

 

  A. Trying to patent the genome itself. This concept is universally rejected by everyone but biotech cadres  and globalization extremists. Even the US government recently backpedaled from this extreme position, its previous default.

 

  B. Patent any synthetic modification of it, and make the legal range of this modification as expansive as possible. This too is invalid. The genome is a creation of nature, and modifications of it are simply tinkerings. (That is, from any “innovation” perspective, the one we’d have to be taking if we’re talking about the alleged validity of IP. I’m not referring to the potential effects, but only how much work a corporation contributed.) The research on this was publicly funded. The USDA developed the Terminator seed.

 

Most crop varieties are the result of thousands of years of breeder selection. All such work is in the public domain. Genetic engineering is just a tweak, in terms of the work done. If somebody changes a light bulb in your house, does he now own your house? That’s basically what the biotech rackets are claiming.

 

For both those reasons – the ”innovation” is merely a minor adjustment of public ideas, and the research was public funded – it’s not legitimate to grant patents for GMOs. If the genome belongs to anyone, it belongs to society. As the modification of the genome is a cooperative effort, that definitely belongs to society. All IP in plants is invalid.

 

IP in food is also unacceptable from the points of view of national sovereignty and national security. If a society as a society is unable to control its own food supply, if it’s impotent before either external or internal enemies (and by now who knows which kind of enemy a multinational corporation is), can it be said to exist at all?

 

According to Hobbes himself, such a “sovereign” would have abdicated, and we’d be in the state of nature. Since the corporations want to put us there, and the government is putting us there, why don’t we respond by calling only ourselves the society, let the outlaws be outlawed, and restitute all that’s ours? We worked for it, we paid for it. And the Earth itself provides all the materials.

 

2. Force proprietary seeds upon the producers. The basic plan is to use GMOs as a form of Walmartization, drive out all non-GMO producers, render all alternatives uneconomic, indeed cause the literal extinction of many heirloom varieties, get all farmers hooked, and then jack up the price.

 

A. Market pressure – dumping, lowballing, other anti-competitive practices, the whole fencerow-to-fencerow government propaganda and subsidy policy.

 

B. Globalization adhesion contracts – These allow the “protection” of only GMO varieties, which gives them another monopoly advantage.

 

C. Structural adjustment and “austerity”, the extortion born of the globalist debt-sharecropping system, also force it.

 

D. The seed contracts themselves are also indentures. If not literally crop liens, they impose lots of restrictions extending far into the future for any farmer who chooses not to renew the contract.

 

3. Ban alternatives. For example, I mentioned above the FDA’s definition of “seed” and how the Food Tyranny bill modifies that. In principle, this bill would empower the FDA to ban any particular heirloom seed, or heirloom seeds as such. [Heirloom seeds are those which can be saved to replant the same plant variety. Hybrid seeds are prone to have screwed-up offspring, and are therefore too unreliable for the grower. Therefore hybrid seeds can't be saved but must be repurchased each year.] We already know they have the corporate corruption motive. The raw milk raids and the FDA’s legal brief in a lawsuit over this demonstrate the intent. This bill seems to provide the opportunity.

 

(Once again, we must always remind ourselves and others, if the health racket mandate is allowed to stand, there will be ZERO constitutional barrier to the government’s mandating any private product upon any flimsy pretext. In this case, the FDA will feel it has added authority to mandate proprietary hybrid or GMO seed purchases. Or for that matter to mandate that food be bought only from approved sellers, like ADM and Kraft, and only at approved retailers like Walmart. If the logic of the health insurance mandate is valid, then that of Orwellian “food safety” sure is.)

 

So there’s how they want to enclose the natural and cooperative food wealth and then force us to buy it back from them in infinite extortion increments. Monopoly is the water torture of civilization itself. Every rent extraction is both an injury and an insult.

 

And in this case it’s literally a threat to our lives. Islamic terrorism is no existential threat to America. But corporate food monopolies are. They constitute a clear and present danger to all the world’s people.

 

This joins the two types of threat, biological/environmental and socioeconomic. What is this IP Sword of the Terrorist Damocles?

 

1. It’s a terrorist assault on biology itself.

 

A. They intentionally seek monoculture, heirloom variety extinction, and all the biodiversity knock-on effects of that. (Monocultured fields are a desert, inhabited mostly by vermin species like rats and cockroaches, and invasive weeds.) And with the total dependency upon synthetic herbicides, we’re seeing the predicted rise of Superweeds. That’s why Monsanto has been paying farmers to use competitors’ herbicides against the Superweeds impervious to Monsanto’s poisons. They’re trying to get everyone to sign legal waivers.

 

B Seed homogenization renders us extremely vulnerable to any kind of economic or ecosystem collapse. (All of industrial agriculture encourages this vulnerability.) Picture the subprime bubble, but instead of trillions in digital “wealth” being vaporized, picture vast amounts of our food failing to be produced because of a superbug, soil collapse, acute oil or natural gas crunch, etc.

 

C. If the Terminator technology escapes, it can have horrific effects.

 

This hybrid is produced only to prevent the germination of anything a farmer might grow in her field. This strips the productive, life giving quality from the earth and turns it over to a research lab. This product will mean much more than massive profits and high food prices. Besides violating the age-old techniques of farming, the engineered seed also poses immediate risks to the environment and entire ecosystem as well. It has already been shown that genetically altered seeds can spread its sterile pollen to other plant species also making them unable to reproduce or otherwise altering the genetic makeup of the species. Molecular biologists reviewing the technology are divided if there is a risk of the Terminator function escaping the genome of the crops into which it has been intentionally incorporated. Many biologists warn that there is a threat of the crops moving into surrounding open pollinated crops or wild, related plants in fields nearby (Shand and Mooney, 1998). There have already been dozens of instances of genetically modified foods creeping into the general food supply and threatening food safety. In the case of the Terminator seed, the means of this “infection” would be by way of pollen from Terminator altered plants. Given nature’s incredible adaptability, and the fact that this technology has never been tested on a large scale, the possibility that the Terminator may spread to surrounding food crops or to the natural environment is a real risk of potentially limitless proportions.

 

This leads to:

 

2. What if they intentionally release Terminators into the ecosystem, as anti-ecological terrorism? Of course, their negligence and the inevitable leaks of any such system have already allowed and will continue to allow this technology to enter the environment.

 

A. This could in theory wipe out non-GMO crops.

 

B. It’s already being used as a tool of persecution.

 

We already know Monsanto’s goal is to achieve world domination through seed domination. As we’ll see in Part 2, even before GMOs, seed hybridization was already recognized as sublimated human genocide. This virtual mass murder, by now very literal, has advanced tremendously. We’re entering upon the final conflict.

Rousseau on Contracts and Slavery

 

This is Chapter 4 of Rousseau’s great work, The Social Contract. I’m excerpting it for my next post, but I wanted to include the whole thing, since it’s directly applicable to our economic situation.

 

4. SLAVERY
SINCE no man has a natural authority over his fellow, and force creates no right, we must conclude that conventions form the basis of all legitimate authority among men.

If an individual, says Grotius, can alienate his liberty and make himself the slave of a master, why could not a whole people do the same and make itself subject to a king? There are in this passage plenty of ambiguous words which would need explaining; but let us confine ourselves to the word alienate. To alienate is to give or to sell. Now, a man who becomes the slave of another does not give himself; he sells himself, at the least for his subsistence: but for what does a people sell itself? A king is so far from furnishing his subjects with their subsistence that he gets his own only from them; and, according to Rabelais, kings do not live on nothing. Do subjects then give their persons on condition that the king takes their goods also? I fail to see what they have left to preserve.

It will be said that the despot assures his subjects civil tranquillity. Granted; but what do they gain, if the wars his ambition brings down upon them, his insatiable avidity, and the vexatious conduct of his ministers press harder on them than their own dissensions would have done? What do they gain, if the very tranquillity they enjoy is one of their miseries? Tranquillity is found also in dungeons; but is that enough to make them desirable places to live in? The Greeks imprisoned in the cave of the Cyclops lived there very tranquilly, while they were awaiting their turn to be devoured.

To say that a man gives himself gratuitously, is to say what is absurd and inconceivable; such an act is null and illegitimate, from the mere fact that he who does it is out of his mind. To say the same of a whole people is to suppose a people of madmen; and madness creates no right.

Even if each man could alienate himself, he could not alienate his children: they are born men and free; their liberty belongs to them, and no one but they has the right to dispose of it. Before they come to years of discretion, the father can, in their name, lay down conditions for their preservation and well-being, but he cannot give them irrevocably and without conditions: such a gift is contrary to the ends of nature, and exceeds the rights of paternity. It would therefore be necessary, in order to legitimise an arbitrary government, that in every generation the people should be in a position to accept or reject it; but, were this so, the government would be no longer arbitrary.

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts. Finally, it is an empty and contradictory convention that sets up, on the one side, absolute authority, and, on the other, unlimited obedience. Is it not clear that we can be under no obligation to a person from whom we have the right to exact everything? Does not this condition alone, in the absence of equivalence or exchange, in itself involve the nullity of the act? For what right can my slave have against me, when all that he has belongs to me, and, his right being mine, this right of mine against myself is a phrase devoid of meaning?

Grotius and the rest find in war another origin for the so-called right of slavery. The victor having, as they hold, the right of killing the vanquished, the latter can buy back his life at the price of his liberty; and this convention is the more legitimate because it is to the advantage of both parties.

But it is clear that this supposed right to kill the conquered is by no means deducible from the state of war. Men, from the mere fact that, while they are living in their primitive independence, they have no mutual relations stable enough to constitute either the state of peace or the state of war, cannot be naturally enemies. War is constituted by a relation between things, and not between persons; and, as the state of war cannot arise out of simple personal relations, but only out of real relations, private war, or war of man with man, can exist neither in the state of nature, where there is no constant property, nor in the social state, where everything is under the authority of the laws.

Individual combats, duels and encounters, are acts which cannot constitute a state; while the private wars, authorised by the Establishments of Louis IX, King of France, and suspended by the Peace of God, are abuses of feudalism, in itself an absurd system if ever there was one, and contrary to the principles of natural right and to all good polity.

War then is a relation, not between man and man, but between State and State, and individuals are enemies only accidentally, not as men, nor even as citizens,3 but as soldiers; not as members of their country, but as its defenders. Finally, each State can have for enemies only other States, and not men; for between things disparate in nature there can be no real relation.

Furthermore, this principle is in conformity with the established rules of all times and the constant practice of all civilised peoples. Declarations of war are intimations less to powers than to their subjects. The foreigner, whether king, individual, or people, who robs, kills or detains the subjects, without declaring war on the prince, is not an enemy, but a brigand. Even in real war, a just prince, while laying hands, in the enemy’s country, on all that belongs to the public, respects the lives and goods of individuals: he respects rights on which his own are founded. The object of the war being the destruction of the hostile State, the other side has a right to kill its defenders, while they are bearing arms; but as soon as they lay them down and surrender, they cease to be enemies or instruments of the enemy, and become once more merely men, whose life no one has any right to take. Sometimes it is possible to kill the State without killing a single one of its members; and war gives no right which is not necessary to the gaining of its object. These principles are not those of Grotius: they are not based on the authority of poets, but derived from the nature of reality and based on reason.

The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest. If war does not give the conqueror the right to massacre the conquered peoples, the right to enslave them cannot be based upon a right which does not exist. No one has a right to kill an enemy except when he cannot make him a slave, and the right to enslave him cannot therefore be derived from the right to kill him. It is accordingly an unfair exchange to make him buy at the price of his liberty his life, over which the victor holds no right. Is it not clear that there is a vicious circle in founding the right of life and death on the right of slavery, and the right of slavery on the right of life and death?

Even if we assume this terrible right to kill everybody, I maintain that a slave made in war, or a conquered people, is under no obligation to a master, except to obey him as far as he is compelled to do so. By taking an equivalent for his life, the victor has not done him a favour; instead of killing him without profit, he has killed him usefully. So far then is he from acquiring over him any authority in addition to that of force, that the state of war continues to subsist between them: their mutual relation is the effect of it, and the usage of the right of war does not imply a treaty of peace. A convention has indeed been made; but this convention, so far from destroying the state of war, presupposes its continuance.

So, from whatever aspect we regard the question, the right of slavery is null and void, not only as being illegitimate, but also because it is absurd and meaningless. The words slave and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. It will always be equally foolish for a man to say to a man or to a people: “I make with you a convention wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I shall keep it as long as I like, and you will keep it as long as I like.”

Where shall we find the Law?

As our political and economic situation becomes ever more precarious, the people will be increasingly faced with the most basic questions of power, constitution, and law. While we may think we understand these things, the course of our history does not seem to bear out the idea that we have correctly understood them.

 

Where power has been distilled and distorted to its most venal manifestations; where constituted bodies are just the waterboys, flacks, and rubber stamps of corporate greed; where law itself becomes the weapon of special interests against the people; where these prevail it becomes time for the people to re-examine the power relations, and their governmental and legal manifestations.

 

At the dawn of our supposedly revolutionary era, born of the Enlightenment, resolved to overcome and destroy forever the decrepit feudal system, the new ideas and actions of philosophers and political attempters were supposed to liberate us once and for all.

 

The core revolutionary idea was that power comes only from the people. Both the American and French Revolutions agreed upon this. But as Hannah Arendt discusses in chapter 4 of On Revolution, there was a divergence of thought on the derivation of law. Both theories had their origin among the French philosophes.  The American founders, following Montesquieu, believed law could be enacted only by the legislative body which the people’s power first constitutes. Thus they naturally sought to establish a republic.

 

The French, following Rousseau, saw both power and law as expressions of the General Will, which is simply the direct interest and aspiration of the people as a whole. By this concept legislative bodies are at best mediators and facilitators of this Will, and the law they produce is the expression of it. At worst, where such bodies become the playgrounds of special interests, they are tyrannical, usurpers, worthy of being destroyed according to classical political theory.

 

So how do we judge which theory is the better? By its results. And what have the results of American republicanism been? Have our legislative bodies consistently acted in the public interest? If you believe they have, you can support the American founders’ concept of the legislature as the real repository of legislative authority, of the Law itself.

 

But if they have not (and I think this is clear), we must find that legislatures cannot be the ultimate source of the People’s Law, that they are more likely to seek to hinder its expression and enact a special interest reactionary feudal law, and that we must return to the Rousseauvian General Will as the real and justified source of the Law as well as power. We must regard the concept of the allegedly different sources of power and law as being a flawed concept, or even as used today a class war fraud.

 

So that’s one issue, to which I’ll return in a bit. First I’d like to deal with another issue Arendt discusses as having vexed our forebears, the question of the derivation of any absolute concept of law. Once the revolutionaries had dispensed with god they still felt the need for some authority beyond the laws, to be the ultimate source of Law. This unfortunate crypto-theological hangover reached its most absurd expression in Robespierre’s ”Cult of the Supreme Being”, which was meant to enshrine reason itself as pseudo-divine. This pathetic attempt at the pious fraud failed miserably and helped lead to Robespierre’s discredit and downfall.

 

But we have the benefit of two centuries more of political maturation. In particular, we can integrate the thought of Nietzsche and Marx to attain the correct concept of the General Will and its law, where we’ll find the key to the riddle.

 

Nietzsche discusses the origin of law in Toward the Genealogy of Morals Essay II, section 11. Here he differentiates between the active Law handed down by the affirmative lawgiver who seeks to impose justice and order on the seething, recalcitrant mass of egoisms, and the reactive, hijacked law of those motivated by the most petty manifestations of this egoism: hatred, gutter greed, class resentment. This is a spiritual and political delineation. At the same time Marx has described for us how law arises out of class conflict, and is always the instrument of the ruling class.

 

So Nietzsche and Marx have released us from the compulsion to look for our law beyond the clouds, residing among the gods. We now know there is no “absolute” law, only action/reaction perspective law (Nietzsche), and that these perspectives are class-dictated (Marx). We need only to reconcile Nietzsche’s contention that the struggle will never end with Marx’s vision of the stable classless society, and we find that while we cannot assume we’ll ever achieve universal goodwill, and we’ll still need “laws” to restrain the petty violences and jealousies of rogue individuals, the Law will no longer have to mediate, and often be weaponized on behalf of, structural class conflict. (This can be achieved if we’re willing to fight for our rights).

 

[I also take this opportunity to modify Rousseau's concept of civilization as corrupting the naturally good individual, and stress that it is class war civilization which so corrupts us. Again, not that the end of class war means the end of all strife. But it means the end of large-scale, systemic and systematic conflict and crime.]  

 

So when we ask, in light of these insights, where do we find the General Will, it’s clear that for most of history selfish parochial Particular Wills, in the form of parasite classes and feudal strata, dictated the law. Now with the advent of the modern economic system the proletariat, the true source of all social wealth, has finally come into full cohesion as a class (though it hasn’t necessarily attained self-consciousness yet). It is now mature and ready to rule itself with its own affirmative law. This is the Law which, politically and socially speaking, will not have a “perspective”, since it will be the Law of the people, by the people, for the people. This, the law of the classless society, the law actively instilled by the people themselves as the rightful owners and enjoyers of all social wealth, will finally be the direct, uncompromised expression of the General Will.

 

Now we get back to the question of the basis of republic. Has the constituted legislature acted, actively, to facilitate the active law of a unitary people? It has not. It has done the opposite: it has become completely and absolutely corrupt, captured, rotted, rancid, stagnant. It acts purely reactively to defend reactionary paleointerests. It is fighting in a last-ditch effort to prop up calcified feudalism.

 

There are three reactive obstructions to the people’s active Law. The first is the structural fact of the feudal class struggling to hold on to its monopoly and privileges. Toward this goal it weaponizes the law, in reaction versus the natural progress of the people.

 

The second is the “human nature” aspect of Particular Will egotism and greed, along with the naturally hateful psychology of right-wing cadres.

 

Finally, there’s the petty resentment of the lumpenproles. The “cornpone nazis”, as James Howard Kunstler calls them, are economically distressed and have nowhere to go but down. But thanks to political and religious brainwashing they furiously resist any class identification as being part of the proletariat (let alone “the poor”). They cling desperately to their delusional ”middle-class” identification (when there is no longer anything more than a steadily sinking zombie middle class), and see this as a cultural rather than an economic category.

 

Instead they let their exploiters manipulate them into acting as the political shock troops of reaction, desperately joining in with the demonization of any scapegoat they can latch onto: unions, “commies”, the poor (meaning blacks and hispanics), environmentalists, so-called “liberals”, etc.

 

So these are the reactive forces which have consistently captured our “legislatures”. It is clear that this social model does not express the General Will but only thwarts it.

 

But do we, in our drive to overcome these obstructions, also embody a reactive impulse? Arendt writes of the rage of the downtrodden which played such a pivotal role in the French Revolution, how it came close to sweeping the Revolution along with itself. This revolutionary rage is reactive against the crimes and insults of the feudal calcification. In that sense it is reaction vs. reaction, but enlisted for the sake of positive action.

 

So we have a dialectical dynamic of action enlisting reaction toward action. Or, reaction on behalf of the people’s will is reaction toward a higher action. We fight not for revenge, not merely for the negative freedom from oppression, not just to mitigate suffering; but for the active, positive Freedom beyond suffering, transcending all petty oppressions.

 

We fight a corrupted reactionary system, for action, for progress, for positive freedom.

 

And what does this mean for the Law? The law as we have known it has abdicated. We now have a Hobbesian free-fire zone, the anarchy of every kind of greed and selfishness reduced to its most gutter level.

 

The revolution affirmatively seeks to restore the rule of law by instituting the rule of Law, the law serving the people, for the people’s weal.