Abolitionism Part One – The Need for the Movement

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1. People who are serious about agricultural and industrial poisons and who acknowledge that humanity and the Earth cannot “co-exist” with them must commit to the abolition of poison-based agriculture and the global transformation to agroecology and food sovereignty. That means building a true movement, and the first step in such movement-building is propagating the new and necessary ideas. My site is dedicated to these propositions.

 

By contrast we usually see only the call to reform existing corporate institutions, and to do so only within the existing framework of petitioning the government and corporations in various ways, including begging corporate regulatory agencies to change their mandates and become responsive to the people. We have a welter of writings fitting the same pattern. They give what’s often a decent overview of the health, economic, agronomic, and ecological crises being driven by poison-based agriculture.

 

But this almost always leads up to the same anticlimactic, lukewarm conclusion. A typical example runs: “Action is urgently needed to regulate and monitor corporate power to ensure that food sovereignty, the environment, and public health are not further compromised.”

 

Each time this is a call 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”, which 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 always implicitly is willing to grandfather in the existing level of how compromised those values and needs – food sovereignty, environment, public health – already are. This means so-called reformism always accepts the compromised status quo where humanity and the Earth have already lost so much ground, figuratively and literally, and it remains on the defensive. This means reformism always will accept further defeats and at best wants to slow the rate of defeat. This means in the end reformism offers no alternative to complete surrender and destruction. Are they waiting for a god to descend to save them? There will be no such unearthly god. The only salvation will come from within, from the abolition movement.

 

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. Therefore regulate-and-monitor could not 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 forecast that if the deployment of such a critically important sector as agropoisons ever were 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.

 

The Trump administration, as part of its continuity with the Reagan-Clinton-Bush-Obama line, is stepping up the aggression and lawlessness. The EPA is being further geared for escalated pro-corporate action. The FDA is being given a pro-GMO propaganda mandate. (This is a far more congenial task for the inherently pro-corporate FDA than the fantasy, so cherished by “anti-GMO” people, of stringent FDA labeling of GMOs. Of course the FDA’s sham GMO regulatory procedure in itself always has comprised pro-GM propaganda.) Reformism brought you Trump in the first place. It will not be sufficient for resisting his escalation of the longstanding corporate campaign. You really don’t like Trump? Then you probably need to change your thinking and your actions.

 

As this continues, regulate-and-monitor will become increasingly untenable even according to its own diminished criteria. At that point the only options left will be a full-scale abolition movement, or else surrender.

 

 

By then it’ll be late in the game to start 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 European example labelists like to cite proves something different from 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 either are 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, then 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. It’s no longer possible for anyone to be innocently ignorant of this, only willfully stupid about it.

 

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.

 

 

 

Help propagate the necessary abolitionist idea.