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1. This morning for the thousandth time I read a piece giving a decent overview of the health, economic, agronomic, and ecological crises being driven by poison-based agriculture.
The conclusion was lukewarm as always: “Action is urgently needed to regulate and monitor corporate power to ensure that food sovereignty, the environment, and public health are not further compromised.”
And thus we can chalk up another one for reformism within the corporate framework, and implicitly against the necessary call to a fully committed abolition movement. Reformism is the call to “co-existence”, something we all know is impossible in the long run. Worse, it validates the corporate framework. I’ve described in dozens of pieces what I call the corporate triangulation template of regulators, the scientific establishment, NGOs, reformists in general. And as we see in the quote above, this reform call is always implicitly willing to grandfather in the existing level of how compromised those values and needs – food sovereignty, environment, public health – already are.
2. “Regulate and monitor” is the ideology and strategy of system NGOs which focus on petitions and public comments to regulators, lawsuits, and the apparently permanent and permanently vague campaign of “public education”. This has been ongoing for decades.
But look at the facts: At best this strategy has slowed down the corporate poisoner assault in America, but nowhere has it halted it and started rolling it back. On the contrary, slowly but surely the enemy gains ground.
Obviously the status quo is untenable as well as unacceptable on any agronomic, ecological, public health, economic, or political level. Ipso facto, any position thinking in terms of preventing “further compromise”, even if that were possible, is insufficient.
3. To be clear about my position: I’m a skeptic as to whether regulate-and-monitor could be effective even if this seemingly lukewarm call really could muster a fighting movement.*
But more importantly, this is not a call to battle which will resonate with anyone. The evidence is that this is the kind of call which, by its nature, implies that everyone should remain in their pre-assigned positions and roles within the corporate capitalist framework. Therefore it never can muster and organize the latent energies which sometimes inspire large numbers of intrepid, determined people to break out of these pre-assigned roles and form movements in opposition to the existing system.
4. Based on my knowledge of history, I think if the deployment of such a critically important sector as agropoisons were ever to be hindered severely enough (i.e., once Monsanto and the US government become fed up once and for all with the obstructionism of regulate-and-monitor), the system will become far more aggressive and lawless than it’s already been in forcing its poisons into the food and ecology. We already see the USDA in the process of abrogating the entirety of its oversight authority toward expanding ranges of poisons.
We can expect the Trump administration to step up the aggression and lawlessness.
When this starts, regulate-and-monitor will become untenable even according to its own diminished criteria, and the only options left will be a full-scale abolition movement, or else surrender.
By then it’ll be late in the game to be getting started building such a movement. The time to start is now, among those who can learn from history and prepare ahead of time for its cycles. Indeed the time was years ago, just as I’ve been saying all this for many years now.
There was a time for lawsuits and labeling campaigns. (Ironically, the Europe example labelists like to cite proves something different than what they think: The time for those was in the 1990s, at the outset of the deployment; America missed the boat where it comes to that.) There was a time for exalting the precautionary principle and calling for more and better testing. There was a time for educating the public within the framework of regular system politics and media. And there was a time for campaigners to educate themselves about all the facts of agropoisons and their role in agronomy, politics, economy, religion, science, ecology.
But today all these tasks are either complete, or are obsolete, or have been demonstrated to be ineffective, or need to transcend the prior political and philosophical frameworks.
Today and going forward is the time wherein humanity must find its soul and its will to organize and fight this global attempt to force an apocalypse of poisoning upon us, our children, our children’s children, and upon the entire life system of the Earth. From a purely secular point of view, not to mention the various religions, we see how the axis of corporate power, government power, and the scientism cult wish to turn the 21st century into a veritable end time for humanity and the Earth. Poisonism, extermination of biodiversity, and forced climate chaos combine to form what’s indisputably a willful, intentional campaign of global destruction for the sake of power. This century will decide once and for all the final question of power. Will humanity redeem itself, or will the corporate persons be the infinite tyrants of tomorrow?
Make no mistake: If you’re a flesh-and-blood human being, a corporate person regards you as literally nothing but a resource to be exploited where profitable, cast out to die where unprofitable, actively killed where a danger. How is it even possible for anyone to be so willfully stupid that in this day and age this isn’t universal knowledge?
And therefore we have the absolute need for a full scale social and political movement dedicated to the clear goal of abolishing corporations. This is necessary against every corporate sector. A movement to abolish agropoisons looks like the obvious place for abolitionists to commence and to set the standard for all the necessary action going forward. As for the public education, we see the great need to transcend anything redolent of “regulating and monitoring” so-called “abuses” perpetrated by alleged “bad apples” among a corporate system otherwise inertially and implicitly taken as normal and normative. By now this inertia and implication kills more surely than any physical poison.
On the contrary, the message which begins, suffuses, and concludes all thought and communication must be the need to abolish corporate power, in this context starting with poison-based agriculture, before it succeeds in its campaign to destroy us all.
*To clarify another point about my position: Although I reject liberalism/reformism on principle for many reasons, the main reason I reject it is that it’s cowardly and fraudulent even where it comes to fighting on the line it proclaims for itself. In theory it’s possible to have a “moderate” position but be a ferocious, uncompromising fighter at that moderate line. But in practice almost all moderates where it comes to theory are moderate really because they’re craven in action. The first example that always jumps to mind is the “Progressive Block” scam during the Heritage/Obamacare debacle. The “progressives” in Congress swore they’d reject anything without a “public option” (another scam), then unanimously reneged on their solemn promise. This kind of lying and cowardice is typical of progressives. That is, they become progressives in the first place because as people they are indelibly liars and cowards. They’re also not very bright, which is why they seem congenitally incapable of breaking free of the cult of electoralism, learning what corporate rule is, what the corporate state is, how it works, what it does, and how to fight it. That’s why we have the typical phenomenon among “anti-GMO” people of a progressive who actually does come to understand some aspects of corporatism where it comes to food and agriculture, but remains utterly incapable of inducing a general idea and applying it across all corporate sectors and to the US government and media as such.
