Back to the Basics: Agrarian History 101

Among the legion of items glaringly absent from the mainstream political discourse in the United States is agrarianism.  This was one of the bedrock principles of the founding era, but it's demise -- in hindsight -- was predictable.  Its return is vital.

Human access to fertile land and clean water, for eons, was an assumption.  But as populations coalesced and divisions of labor in urban centers increased, not everyone was a farmer or hunter-gatherer (or both), anymore.  By the time of the early Industrial Revolution, it became quite apparent to the Lovers of Control that depriving people of these basic resources was a method of social control.  Once people are thus "proletarianized," (no land, nothing to sell but their labor), Power -- in all it's various forms -- can set the conditions whereby individuals might survive.  The "proles" will then have to seek gainful employment on Power's terms.

In the English-speaking world, most people had a vital connection to the land until the rise of the Tudor monarchs.  This coincided with the expansion of capitalism out of the Mediterranean, into the eastern Atlantic and beyond, creating a proto-global economic system.  Where rural communalism had been the basic social structure up to that point, "landlords" -- those given special privilege in the hierarchy of feudalism -- began to realize that agriculture could be made more efficient by growing New World crops like corn and minimizing labor expenses.  Rather than growing "food for the realm," landlords retained a small number of farmers to grow profits.  This made food production more efficient, and those who were allowed to remain on the land largely profited, as well.  But the vast majority of those rural communities went up in smoke (sometimes literally) when farmers who were seen as superfluous to the purposes of wealth accumulation were sent packing.  If they refused to leave, their homes would simply be burned down as they looked on.  This majority became homeless, landless, and were at the mercy of the elite-controlled market forces -- i.e., proletarianized.  They had nothing left to sell but their labor.

The old feudal system had at least a facade of mutual obligations up and down the social hierarchy, but as the capitalist revolution continued to gain ground, ownership of the land became nearly absolute, and these landowners could and did restrict access to those resources.  The rural folk who did not "make the cut" found themselves roaming the highways and byways searching for seasonal labor, often begging, or they headed for London, Edinborough, or other urban centers to try and sell their labor.

With the expansion of Britain into the global economic game of Empire, a new class seized the center of power.  Known as the "Glorious Revolution," in 1688 the merchant-banker-landowning class, (AKA the "bourgeoisie"), gained control of the British government creating an entity generally known as "King-in-Parliament," where the monarch would now have to share power with them.  Obligations to the peasant-artisan (AKA"working class") were minimized.

The empire uprooted indigenous villagers in a the New World, as well.  These villagers fought back and found themselves out-numbered and out-gunned.  Deracinated individuals from the Old Country (or their descendants), jumped at the chance to obtain some fertile land and fresh water to realize their dream of independence from dire poverty, obligation, and a brutal work-cycle forced on them when they (or their descendants) had lost their access to such resources.  A desperate struggle between these Euro-Americans and Native Americans defending their own access to land and water ensued which continues to this day.  The open violence of this struggle continues in Latin America, but it has largely moved into the courtroom in the U.S.

Often, these Anglo-Celts began their New World experience by working as slaves (indentured servitude) for several years as the price for their passage to America.  Because the British expansionist power structure needed inexpensive "shock troops" to continue the process of appropriating land from the Indians, this nascent class of agrarian producers was given some measure of self-determination and, because of the distances involved, they were able to take for themselves still more independence.

By the mid-eighteenth century, this agrarian class, many of whom were fairly well-educated -- they had read of the Demos of the Greek city-states, of the Roman Republic's representative government, of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance -- and they understood the importance of access to resources in the struggle for self-determination (AKA "independence").  If one can produce one's own food supply, one's life will be much more stable and much less threatened than if one has nothing to sell but your labor to obtain needed sustenance.  The subjugation of African slave labor -- among the most brutal of labor systems ever devised by humankind -- helped seal the deal.  There was now a permanent underclass that could be forced to produce wealth almost unconditionally, allowing more self-determination for the Euro-American Anglo-Celts as they were not needed for that purpose.  The socio-economic creation of "race" allowed for social control, dividing the producing class by skin color and ethnic origin, not unlike the way livestock is divided by breed and provenance.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the new republic of the United States had grown into a major producer of food as well as staple crops through the plantation complex.  But the Industrial Revolution, fed by machinery, immigrant labor, banker finance, and the U.S. Civil War, boomed.
Immigrants -- usually deprived of their access to fertile land and fresh water in Europe and China -- came by the millions.  Cities expanded at unprecedented rates.  The rise of Industrial Capital gave new impetus to appropriating lands already appropriated from the natives by the agrarian class.

By 1920, the majority of people in the U.S. lived in cities.  To resist virtual enslavement, urban artisans had joined together to form labor unions utilizing the only resource they had other than their labor: each other.  The war over control and ownership of the means of production was full-throttle at this point, although the First World War had given the power structure an excuse to purge and/or outlaw those who refused to accept the appropriation of the wealth they produced with their labor.  The economic crash of 1929 was particularly devastating because so many people were city-dwellers and access to fertile land and fresh water had not been part of the urban planning, much less an urban social contract.

By the time the Great Depression was at its nadir in the mid-1930s, dire want sparked the realization that access to fertile soil and clean water could alleviate much suffering.  This neo-agrarian "back-to-the-land" movement remained in the shadows, however, as government used its access to credit (another, parallel story), to create infrastructure jobs for the society.

All went by the boards, however, with American involvement in the Second World War.  In the aftermath of that sublime conflagration, a superficial consensus of conformity to a bourgeois-dominated social order emerged in the U.S.  Power declared as its enemy any regime on the planet that might question this bourgeois domination -- a phenomenon reminiscent of the appropriation of lands from Native American peoples.  At this point, agriculture began to embrace the industrialization that had spawned other industries in the previous century.  By the 1980s, the slogan "Get big or get out" could be seen on t-shirts and billboards throughout the American Midwest.  The American Agriculture Movement, a last gasp of the old independent agrarian class, breathed its last with the "Tractorcade" to the Washington, D.C. mall in 1978.

Access to essential resources for the "rank-and-file" was nevertheless nurtured by members of the '60s' and '70s' counterculture, giving rise to a new "back-to-the-land" movement.  Urban gardens and farmers' markets have expanded on this vision in recent years, and such spaces are beginning to be incorporated into American cities from coast to coast.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the agrarian movement -- access to arable land and fresh water -- for people traditionally categorized as the "working class."  The whole concept of the "working class" is flawed in that it implies that all most people are good for is producing wealth for landowners or factory owners.  People, on the whole, are "good" for much more than that, but most have never really been given the chance to find out for themselves in the modern world; indeed, most do not even consider pursuing such a goal realistic.  This is a travesty and a tragedy, and it is completely unnecessary. 

Just as liberating enslaved people of African descent in the nineteenth century gave rise to sophisticated art and literature as well as advances in science and medicine -- phenomena such as the Harlem Renaissance, the work of people like George Washington Carver or Booker T. Washington, blues, jazz, rock and roll, and on and on -- liberating the so-called "working class" from forty-plus hours of drudgery every week would produce a cultural flowering the likes of which we can scarcely imagine.  The return of agrarianism and true independence points in this direction.  I think it essential to take this journey.  The legacy of agrarianism holds great potential for realizing our true human potential and independence from power systems that squelch such things, but it is also necessary for the survival of our species, and possibly our planet, as well.
 

Parasites Lost

Parasites Lost

©Douglas S. Harvey 2012

I once asked a Native American if he thought whether North America was in any way in a post-colonial period.  His response was, “Have they left yet?”  Of the New World republics that came about as a result of colonization, the United States is going to have the hardest time dealing with its past.  Recently, we’ve see a lot of people willing to strut about with their guns and imagine themselves in some pre-pubescent fantasy of John Wayne’s “unbridled individualism.”  Some become so deluded as to be willing to use these guns on perceived “enemies.”  But this is symptomatic only; it is useful to remember how the actual land of North America came to be claimed by European and Euro-American colonists.  More importantly, the causes of these neuroses can be better understood when one realizes what separating people from their resource base means.

            For over ninety-nine percent of human history, the earth and its human offspring were united.  Humans were unique in their ability to fashion bits of the earth into useful items.  With our minds, hands, and intuition we made the stuff of the earth more useful to us.  Nothing came between us and our resources – we were one with our environment and what we did to improve our surroundings and make our lives better we ourselves enjoyed.  As the Thoreau disciple and wilderness advocate Bradford Angier once pointed out, “The hardest part about roughing it is smoothing it.”  We were pretty good at “smoothing it.”  Even cave paintings, figurines, Petroglyphs and the like helped people to understand their relationship with the world into which they had emerged.  Contrary to the assumptions of the old “Whig” histories, people were generally time-rich – indeed, they could easily make more than they needed.  These surplus goods could be traded for others’ surplus goods and the fruits of individuals’ skills could be shared.  At some point someone began to think about accumulating these surplus goods.  How, the calculating mind asked, might I enjoy these manufactures and the potential wealth they represent without having to engage in this difficult work myself?  Many methods were tried with varying degrees of success.  But one that did work and continues to work was coercion – physical, political, legal, economic – forcing a wedge between people and their resource base (the land) and make their reunion with it conditional.  The condition for this reunion with the “means of production” is a controlling cut of the wealth produced by the interaction of human and other-than-human nature. 

            This division between people and nature put us on a path many are beginning to question.  Besides the sense of alienation being cut off from our natural relationships with the other-than-human world produces, we are separated from our own means of production.  Now, instead of using our wits and our hands to mold the stuff of the earth into usefulness, we have to go to the bourgeois “owner” and ask him to buy our labor, since it is often all we have since being deprived of access to resources.  The bourgeoisie figured out that if you usurp the land and resources, you have control of interaction between human and other-than-human – also known as labor power, which is the only real power humans have. 

            This defense of the relationship between humans and their resources should in no way be construed as a defense of, say, corporate access to the minerals of the Grand Canyon or oil in the Arctic.  That is a looting of both nature and labor that I have discussed elsewhere.  No, we have come so far down the path of exploitation of both human and other-than-human nature that assumptions and myths regarding the righteousness of this path remain unquestioned from the halls of power to the public discourse.

            The surplus of useful goods that was often so abundant in pre-modern communities – under the influence of market-obsession, has acquired an exchange-value separate from its use.  The result is “capital,” or surplus-value flowing to the bourgoisie but which they themselves did not produce.  Capital bought and still buys power and influence to entrench this economic system and heavily skew it toward the bourgeoisie – a sort of modern feudalism.  A wedge was driven between people and their resources.  Having been deracinated – alienated from their resources, homes, families, and livelihood – people had nothing to sell but their labor, and oftentimes the going rate was at starvation levels.  In some regions where this deracination is at full throttle, many have chosen suicide over this type of slavery.

In North America, this separation of the land from the indigenous peoples took on an unprecedented scope.  While there was certainly plenty of room in North America in 1492, there were still no fewer than five to ten million people who, in most respects, lived off the fat of an abundant land.  Then, Europeans and unwilling and unwitting Africans came to the New World.  With varying degrees, separating indigenous people from the land became an institution and was developed to the point of becoming a national myth: of course the Indians must be removed in the face of “progress” – removed or exterminated.  Cold hard fact that it is we have yet to internalize this as a society; denial or ignorance of this history is rampant in the U.S.

The denial becomes increasingly difficult as the separation of people from property takes on new dimensions, (if nothing else, the “bourgeois” class is very creative about accumulating wealth and power).  Now, newcomers as well as descendents of the original colonizers – who themselves usurped the land – have found themselves being separated from their resources by a rigged system in which they have no say.  Some might call this karma and that may be true, but it is certainly a continuation. 

Working people took a stand in the U.S. from the Industrial Revolution to the post-World War II era and created the wealthiest working class in history.  It was so successful that this working class took to calling itself the “middle class,” a democratization of the original turf held by the bourgeoisie and characterized by untitled wealth.  Many people once again had a say in their relationship between themselves and their tools and resources.  They did not go to the so-called “owner” with hat in hand begging to sell their labor, they collectively bargained with him to get a reasonable share of the surplus value they were producing.  Some would say these negotiations were a gift to the bourgeoisie from producers who cut them more slack than they deserved.  The abandonment of the American working class by the bourgeoisie, by their politicians, and even by their unions, has been nothing short of a betrayal and indeed a form of robbery.

The wealth accumulated by hook or by crook and now used to manipulate the economy and political power structure is turned against the people who produced it.  The old tried and true strategy of divide and conquer – white and blue collar, black and white skin, English- and Spanish-speaking, male and female, etc., etc., ad nauseum – so far still works.  The financialization of the economy has turned Wall Street into a kind of giant Las Vegas, detached from actual production, subsidized and insured by taxing those who actually do produce wealth.  It must keep moving fast, though, because something is gaining on it.  The separation of workers from the wealth they produce; of workers from their resources; of humans from nature, is a contrivance that cannot last. 

People are looking for that part of themselves that is connected to everything else.  There is a deep cognitive dissonance in the U.S. resulting from a simple historical truth: wealth enjoyed by many American citizens came from resources acquired through systematic conquest and pillage.  It makes it particularly hard to defend your resources on moral grounds when they were stolen to begin with.  Much easier to deny or invent an alternative narrative. 

Parasites often kill their hosts.  To the extent that humans have become parasites, of labor and/or the resource base, we act for our own destruction.  The short-term thinking institutionalized in this system is an indulgence we can no longer afford.  One alternative to the path of exploitation remains vaguely familiar to us: the path of husbandry and cooperation.  But alternative paths require introspection, a difficult facing of fears and facts and, finally, understanding what the relationship between humans and the earth means.  As people have known for over ninety-nine percent of our history, the earth is literally our mother – our source of life.  It is human nature to interact with our environment and treat it with the respect it deserves – as a part of ourselves.  We act self-destructively when we assume the exploitative attitude of parasites.  As with most problems, the answers are in the mirror, which is why they don’t get solved.

January 28, 2012

Nature Regards Itself

Nature Regards Itself

©Douglas S. Harvey, 2012

Growing up in a household that worshipped capitalism, (Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was the de facto family Bible), in a Catholic community that had defended the faith from Bavaria to the Volga to the heart of North America, I was confronted early on by two significant conundrums.  One involved the usual questions thinking people experience with religious dogma: if God is omnipotent, can He make a rock so big that He Himself can’t lift it?  The second was, if capitalism is the epitome of unrestrained virtue, why is there so much war, poverty, and environmental degradation?   

             Historical geographer David Harvey has shown how Capital flies from crisis to crisis to avoid facing the music of its own contradictions.  Phenomena ranging from the simultaneous growth of homelessness and empty houses to the boom of the storage unit in the face of dire want and a “working poor” are symbolic of capitalism’s absurdity.  As a young man growing up in Small Town, America, I appreciated the general rhetoric about individual freedom although the connection was never made to anything that might be called “self-realization.”  But where the capitalist mythos lost me was when I saw first hand what capitalism did to the environment without apology or explanation, much less a voluntary effort to clean up after itself.  The social reform movements of the early 1900s and again in the 1960s and ‘70s forced the issue; otherwise, Big Capital has made no willing effort to acknowledge that dead rivers, clear-cut forests, eroded hillsides, and poisonous fumes were a bad thing for both humans and other-than-humans.  Indeed, the assumption was that this was the price we had to pay for the wonders of modern life – automobiles, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, electric toothbrushes – in short, capitalism.  Stuff – the myth tells us – that’s what we need and that’s what will make the people happy and the capitalists rich, which is all good.  In this mythology, the resource base, (i.e. Earth – to all appearances the complicated speck of dust that produced us all), plays second fiddle to that great concertmaster, Mankind; or, more to the point, “Man as Capitalist.” 

            There are several events that epitomize the real world consequences of this fantasy.   One is the degradation of the world’s forests – over half have been cut since 1850 and it does not look good for most of the rest without concerted effort.  The fact of climate change is beyond question among reasonable people who read the evidence.  When Rachel Carson exposed the abuses of the chemical industry and its collusion with government in Silent Spring; when Cleveland’s Cuyohaga River caught fire in 1969; when the horrors of Agent Orange came home to roost, many people in the U.S. began waking up to the dire consequences of this mythos.  This awakening has been tamped down since the 1980s, but very recently the #Occupy movement has begun to rekindle awareness of these and other contradictions in our dominant mythos.

            The prevalent attitude of the modern era in the so-called western world has been the result of the combination of capitalist and Christian mythology.   Culturally, we have separated ourselves from the resource base.  We have cut ourselves off from Earth.  But we are not separate – we ARE the Earth.  And it is time to wake up, smell the coffee, and look at what is before us in stark relief.  Most people in the western world incorporate some form of the 3,000-year-old myth that our forebears were expelled from Paradise and deposited on this wretched plane of existence with the inclination to kill, rape, plunder, and otherwise use pointy objects to the detriment of our fellows.  Elsewhere, it says that we are to subdue the Earth and the things therein.  It seems clear that Yahweh was predisposed to capitalist exploitation.  What a coincidence!  Yet, a clear-eyed appraisal of where we stand shows that we see the Earth beneath our feet and “above us only sky.”  Heaven, Hell, the angels, demons, saints and all the rest are right here, right now, in our psyches – fears and dreams manifested in psychic imagery. 

            What capitalism has done and continues to do to workers – degrade them, force them to work for lower wages, fewer benefits, longer hours, etc., it does also to Earth.  Philosopher Howard Parsons once observed that Capital similarly extorts labor from the worker, fertility and productivity from the soil – all for short-term goals.  It robs both of “vitality, freedom, and independence.”

            We humans are organic critters, much like chimps, dogs, frogs, bugs, and trees. To violate human nature through the exploitation and extortion of value from workers has a direct equivalency in violating other-than-human nature for short-term gain.  The heart of this equivalency centers on a very simple fact: human beings ARE nature.  To violate nature is to violate ourselves and vice versa.  We are Nature regarding itself.  Mythic assumptions that once upon a time perhaps lessened the degree of bloodlust among humans or dispersed economic power among a broader population and freed creative energy are reaching a threshold.  Letting go of our old mythical assumptions is key to moving forward into a more realistic view of our situation and, ultimately, our survival as a self-aware planetary organism.  We have a right to sustain ourselves in a way that contributes BOTH to the health of the individual and the health of the planet.  But we do not have a right to do so at the expense of the future.

            Both our dominant political and economic systems here in the U.S. (and elsewhere) are notorious for their focus on shortsighted goals.  Instant profits and votes – some people will literally do or say anything to acquire these, including wreck the economy of our society and the ecology of Earth, which are ultimately identical.  To this, one simply asks, what about the rights of our now-voiceless offspring?  What about the rights of those whose energy is yet to emerge into this realm of dualities – to engage in what the late comedian Bill Hicks said was “just a ride.”  Don’t they have a right to be born into a functional environment with the hope and opportunity to live a fulfilled life and enjoy the “ride” in a fruitful and healthy way?  If THAT right isn’t worth guarding, what IS? 

            Yes, we humans are Nature, but that doesn’t mean that we should cater to our basest instincts, petty shortsightedness, and the political expediency of the day.  Bad habits gained at the expense of others – human and other-than-human – have been inculcated into our pantheon of assumptions.   We are Nature regarding itself, but that does not give us license to trash the resource base.  Many of us deem it unwise to jab a screwdriver into our eye sockets; yet, cutting all the tropical forests, for example, is no different.  We are Nature regarding itself, and we owe it to ourselves and to our descendants to embrace rational, long-term resource policies and institutionalize them.  In spite of what the narcissistic, grasping capitalist mythos tells us from the cradle to the grave, the Earth is “an inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race,” as well as other-than-human generations upon which all are dependent.  We are Nature regarding itself, and to embrace the real world consequences of our actions and take remedial steps is the ultimate act of humanism. 

These condundrums with which I struggled mightily in my youth have largely been resolved.  My allegiances are no longer divided.  To quote Howard Parsons’s cogent essay again, “[T]he true humanist turns out to be the true naturalist and the true radical to be the true conservative.”[1]  Damn it!  I ALWAYS thought that, but I was protected from such insight in the prison of an ideological mythos.  We ARE Nature regarding itself – and at some level, I knew it all along.

           

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[1] Howard L. Parsons, “Introduction,” Marx and Engels on Ecology (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1977), 19.  It is interesting to revisit the critics of capitalism in the post-Cold War era.   They made some very important points and we ignore their critique to our own detriment.