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Title: Radical Agriculture Author: Murray Bookchin Date: 1972 Language: en Topics: agriculture, nature, technology, food, organization, society, capitalism, anti-capitalism Source: https://libcom.org/library/radical-agriculture-murray-bookchin; Radical Agriculture (1972) Notes: An essay in which Murray Bookchin outlines his ideal system of food cultivation and criticizes the existing, capitalistic system. Appeared in Radical Agriculture (1972), ed. Richard Merrill.
Agriculture is a form of culture. The cultivation of food is a social
and cultural phenomenon unique to humanity. Among animals, anything that
could remotely be described as food cultivation appear ephemerally, if
at all; and even among humans, agriculture developed little more than
ten thousand years ago. Yet, in an epoch when food cultivation is
reduced to a mere industrial technique, it becomes especially important
to dwell on the cultural implications of "modern" agriculture—to
indicate their impact not only on public health, but also on humanity's
relationship to nature and the relationship of human to human.
The contrast between early and modern agricultural practices is
dramatic. Indeed, it would be very difficult to understand the one
through the vision of the other, to recognize that they are united by
any kind of cultural continuity. Nor can we ascribe this contrast merely
to differences in technology. Our agricultural epoch—a distinctly
capitalistic one—envisions food cultivation as a business enterprise to
be operated strictly for the purpose of generating profit in a market
economy. From this standpoint, land is an alienable commodity called
"real estate," soil a "natural resource," and food an exchange value
that is bought and sold impersonally through a medium called "money."
Agriculture, in effect, differs no more from any branch of industry than
does steelmaking or automobile production. In fact, to the degree that
food cultivation is affected by nonindustrial factors such as climatic
and seasonal changes, it lacks the exactness that marks a truly
"rational" and scientifically managed operation. And, lest these natural
factors elude bourgeois manipulation, they too are the objects of
speculation in future markets and between middlemen in the circuit from
farm to retail outlet.
In this impersonal domain of food production, it is not surprising to
find that a "farmer" often turns out to be an airplane pilot who dusts
crops with pesticides, a chemist who treats soil as a lifeless
repository for inorganic compounds, an operator of immense agricultural
machines who is more familiar with engines than botany, and perhaps most
decisively, a financier whose knowledge of land may be less than that of
an urban cab driver. Food, in turn, reaches the consumer in containers
and in forms so highly modified and denatured as to bear scant
resemblance to the original. In the modern, glistening supermarket, the
buyer walks dreamily through a spectacle of packaged materials in which
the pictures of plants, meat, and dairy foods replace the life forms
from which they are derived. The fetish assumes the form of the real
phenomenon. Here, the individual's relationship to one of the most
intimate of natural experiences—the nutriments indispensable to life—is
divorced from its roots in the totality of nature. Vegetables, fruit,
cereals, dairy foods and meat lose their identity as organic realities
and often acquire the name of the corporate enterprise that produces
them. The "Big Mac" and the "Swift Sausage" no longer convey even the
faintest notion that a living creature was painfully butchered to
provide the consumer with that food.
This denatured outlook stands sharply at odds with an earlier animistic
sensibility that viewed land as an inalienable, almost sacred domain,
food cultivation as a spiritual activity, and food consumption as a
hallowed social ritual. The Cayuses of the Northwest were not unique in
listening to the ground, for the "Great Spirit," in the words of a
Cayuse chief, "Appointed the roots to feed the Indians on."[1] The
ground lived, and its voice had to be heeded. Indeed, this vision may
have been a cultural obstacle to the spread of food cultivation; there
are few statements of the hunter against agriculture that are more
moving than Smohalla's memorable remarks: "You ask me to plough the
ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's breast? Then when I
die she will not take me to her bosom to rest."[2]
When agriculture did emerge, it clearly perpetuated the hunter's
animistic sensibility. The wealth of mythic narrative that surrounds
food cultivation is testimony to an enchanted world brimming with life,
purpose and spirituality. Ludwig Feuerbach's notion of God as the
projection of man omits the extent to which early man is stamped by the
imprint of the natural world and, in this sense, is an extension or
projection of it. To say that early humanity lived in "partnership" with
this world tends to understate the case; humanity lived as part of this
world—not beside it or above it.
Because the soil was alive, indeed the mother of life, to cultivate it
was a sacred act that required invocatory and appeasing rituals.
Virtually every aspect of the agricultural procedure had its sanctifying
dimension, from preparing a tilth to harvesting a crop. The harvest
itself was blessed, and to "break bread" was at once a domestic ritual
that daily affirmed the solidarity of kinfolk as well as an act of
hospitable pacification between the stranger and the community. We still
seal a bargain with a drink or celebrate an important event with a
feast. To fell a tree or kill an animal required appeasing rites, which
acknowledged that life inhered in these beings and that this life
partook of a sacred constellation of phenomena.
Naive as the myths and many of these practices may seem to the modern
mind, they reflect a truth about the agricultural situation. After
having lost contact with this "prescientific" sensibility—at great cost
to the fertility of the land and to its ecological balance—we now know
that soil is very much alive; that it has its health, its dynamic
equilibrium, and a complexity comparable to that of any living
community. Not that the details that enter into this knowledge are new;
rather, we are aware of them in a new and holistic way. As recently as
the early 1960s, American agronomy generally viewed soil as a medium in
which living organisms were largely extraneous to the chemical
management of food cultivation. Having saturated the soil with nitrates,
insecticides, herbicides, and an appalling variety of toxic compounds,
we have become the victims of a new type of pollution that could well be
called "soil pollution." These toxins are the hidden additives to the
dinner table, the unseen spectres that return to us as the residual
products of our exploitative attitude toward the natural world. No less
significantly, we have gravely damaged soil in vast areas of the earth
and reduced it to the simplified image of the modern scientific
viewpoint. The animal and plant life so essential to the development of
a nutritive, friable soil is diminished, and in many places approaches
the sterility of impoverished, desertlike sand.
By contrast, early agriculture, despite its imaginary aspects, defined
humanity's relationship to nature within sound ecological parameters. As
Edward Hyams observes, the attitude of people and their culture is as
much a part of their technical equipment as are the implements they
employ. If the "axe was only the physical tool which ancient man used to
cut down trees" and the "intellectual tool enabled him to swing his axe"
effectively, "what of the spiritual tool?" This "tool" is the "member of
the trinity of tools which enables people to control and check their
actions by reference to the 'feeling' which they possess for the
consequences of the changes they make in their environments."
Accordingly, tree-felling would have been limited by their state of mind
as early people "believed that trees had souls and were worshipful, and
they associated certain gods with certain trees. Osiris with acacia;
Apollo with oak and apple. The temples of many primitive peoples were
groves...." If the mythical aspects of this mentality are evident
enough, the fact remains that the mentality as such "was immensely
valuable to the soil community and therefore, in the long run, to man.
It meant that no trees would be wantonly felled, but only when it was
absolutely necessary, and then to the accompaniment of propritiatory
rites which, if they did nothing else, served constantly to remind
tree-fellers that they were doing dangerous and important work...."[3]
One may add that, if culture be regarded as a "tool," a mere shift in
emphasis would easily make it possible to regard tools as of culture.
This different emphasis comes closer to what Hyams is trying to say than
does his own formulation. In fact, what uniquely marks the bourgeois
mentality is the debasement of art, values, and rationality to mere
tools—a mentality that has even infiltrated the radical critique of
capitalism if one is to judge from the tenor of the Marxian literature
that abounds today.
A radical approach to agriculture seeks to transcend the prevailing
instrumentalist approach that views food cultivation merely as a "human
technique" opposed to "natural resources." This radical approach is
literally ecological, in the strict sense that the land is viewed as an
oikos—a home. Land is neither a "resource" nor a "tool," but the oikos
of myriad kinds of bacteria, fungi, insects, earthworms, and small
mammals. If hunting leaves this oikos essentially undisturbed,
agriculture by contrast affects it profoundly and makes humanity an
integral part of it. Human beings no longer indirectly affect the soil;
they intervene into its food webs and biogeochemical cycles directly and
immediately.
Conversely, it becomes very difficult to understand human social
institutions without referring to the prevailing agricultural practices
of a historical period and, ultimately, to the soil situation to which
they apply. Hyams's description of every human community as a "soil
community" is unerring; historically, soil types and agrarian
technological changes played a major, often decisive, role in
determining whether the land would be worked cooperadvely or
individualistically—whether in a conciliatory manner or an exploitative
one—and this, in turn, profoundly affected the prevailing system of
social relations. The highly centralized empires of the ancient world
were clearly fostered by the irrigation works required for arid regions
of the Near East; the cooperative medieval village, by the openfield
strip system and the moldboard plough. Lynn White, Jr., in fact, roots
the Western coercive attitude towards nature as far back as Carolingian
times, with the ascendancy of the heavy European plough and the
consequent tendency to allot land to peasants not according to their
family subsistence needs but "in proportion to their contribution to the
ploughteam."[4] He finds this changing attitude reflected in
Charlemagne's efforts to rename the months according to labour
responsibilities, thereby revealing an emphasis on work rather than on
nature or deities. "The old Roman calendars had occasionally shown genre
scenes in human activity, but the dominant tradition (which continued in
Byzantium) was to depict the months as passive personifications bearing
symbols of attributes. The new Carolingian calendars, which set the
pattern for the Middle Ages, are very different: they show a coercive
attitude towards natural resources. They are definitely northern in
origin; for the olive, which loomed so large in the Roman cycles, has
now vanished. The pictures change to scenes of ploughing, harvesting,
wood-chopping, people knocking down acorns for the pigs,
pig-slaughtering. Man and nature are now two things, and man is
master."[5]
Yet not until we come to the modern capitalist era do humanity and
nature separate as almost complete foes, and the "mastery" by human over
the natural world assumes the form of harsh domination, not merely
hierarchical classification. The rupture of the most vestigial corporate
ties that once united clansfolk, guildsmen, and the fraternity of the
polis into a nexus of mutual aid; the reduction of everyone to an
antagonistic buyer or seller; the rule of competition and egotism in
every arena of economic and social life—all of this completely dissolves
any sense of community whether with nature or in society. The
traditional assumption that community is the authentic locus of life
fades so completely from human consciousness that it ceases to exercise
any relevance to the human condition. The new starting point for forming
a conception of society or of the psyche is the isolated, atomized man
fending for himself in a competitive jungle. The disastrous consequences
of this outlook toward nature and society are evident enough in a world
burdened by explosive social antagonisms, ecological simplification, and
widespread pollution.
Radical agriculture seeks to restore humanity's sense of community:
first, by giving full recognition to the soil as an ecosystem, a biotic
community; and second, by viewing agriculture as the activity of a
natural human community, a rural society and culture. Indeed,
agriculture becomes the practical, day-to-day interface of soil and
human communities, the means by which both meet and blend. Such a
meeting and blending involves several key presuppositions. The most
obvious of these is that humanity is part of the natural world, not
above it as "master" or "lord." Undeniably, human consciousness is
unique in its scope and insight, but uniqueness is no warrant for
domination and exploitation. Radical agriculture, in this respect,
accepts the ecological precept that variety does not have to be
structured along hierarchical lines as we tend to do under the influence
of hierarchical society. Things and relations that patently benefit the
biosphere must be valued for patently benefit the biosphere must be
valued for their own sake, each unique in its own way and contributory
to the whole—not one above or below the other and fair game for
domination.
Variety, in both society and agriculture, far from being constrained,
must be promoted as a positive value. We are now only too familiar with
the fact that the more simplified an ecosystem—and, in agriculture, the
more limited the variety of domesticated stocks involved—the more likely
is the ecosystem to break down. The more complex the food webs, the more
stable the biotic structure. This insight, which we have gained at so
costly an expense to the biosphere and to ourselves, merely reflects the
age-old thrust of evolution. The advance of the biotic world consists
primarily of the differentiation, colonization and growing web of
interdependence of life-forms on an inorganic planet—a long process that
has remade the atmosphere and landscape along lines that are hospitable
for complex and increasingly intelligent organisms. The most disastrous
aspect of prevailing agricultural methodologies, with their emphasis on
monoculture, crop hybrids, and chemicals, has been the simplification
they have introduced into food cultivation—a simplification that occurs
on such a global scale that it may well throw back the planet to an
evolutionary stage where it could support only simpler forms of life.
Radical agriculture's respect for variety implies a respect for the
complexity of a balanced agricultural situation: the innumerable factors
that influence plant nutrition and well-being; the diversified soil
relations that exist from area to area; the complex interplay between
climatic, geological and biotic factors that make for the differences
between one tract of land and another; and the variety of ways in which
human cultures react to these differences. Accordingly, the radical
agriculturist sees agriculture not only as science but also as art. The
food cultivator must live on intimate terms with a given area of land
and develop a sensitivity for its special needs—needs that no textbook
approach can possibly encompass. The food cultivator must be part of a
"soil community" in the very meaningful sense that she or he belongs to
a unique biotic system, as well as to a given social system.
Yet to deal with these issues merely in terms of technique would be a
scant improvement over the approach that prevails today in agriculture.
To be a technical connoisseur of an "organic" approach to agriculture is
no better than to be a mere practitioner of a chemical approach. We do
not become "organic farmers" merely by culling the latest magazines and
manuals in this area, any more than we become healthy by consuming
"organic" foods acquired from the newest suburban supermarket. What
basically separates the organic approach from the synthetic is the
overall attitude and praxis the food cultivator brings to the natural
world as a whole. At a time when organic foods and environmentalism have
become highly fashionable, it may be well to distinguish the ecological
outlook of radical agriculture from the crude "environmentalism" that is
currently so widespread. Environmentalism sees the natural world merely
as a habitat that must be engineered with minimal pollution to suit
society's "needs," however irrational or synthetic these needs may be. A
truly ecological outlook, by contrast, sees the biotic world as a
holistic unity of which humanity is a part. Accordingly, in this world,
human needs must be integrated with those of the biosphere if the human
species is to survive. This integration, as we have already seen,
involves a profound respect for natural variety, for the complexity of
natural processes and relations, and for the cultivation of a
mutualistic attitude toward the biosphere. Radical agriculture, in
short, implies not merely new techniques in food cultivation, but a new
non-Promethean sensibility toward land and society as a whole.
Can we hope to achieve fully this new sensibility solely as individuals,
without regard to the larger social world around us?
Radical agriculture, I think, would be obliged to reject an isolated
approach of this kind. Although individual practice doubtless plays an
invaluable role in initiating a broad movement for social
reconstruction, ultimately we will not achieve an ecologically viable
relationship with the natural world without an ecological society.
Modern capitalism is inherently antiecological: the nuclear relationship
from which it is constituted—the buyer-seller relationship—pits
individual against individual and, on the larger scale, humanity against
nature. Capital's law of life of infinite expansion, of "production for
the sake of production" and "consumption for the sake of consumption,"
turns the domination and exploitation of nature into the "highest good"
of social life and human self-realization. Even Marx succumbs to this
inherently bourgeois mentality when he accords to capitalism a "great
civilizing influence" for reducing nature "for the first time simply
[to] an object for mankind, purely a matter of utility...." Nature
"ceases to be recognized as a power in its own right; and the
theoretical knowledge of its independent laws appears only as a
stratagem designed to subdue it to human requirements...."[6]
In contrast to this tradition, radical agriculture is essentially
libertarian in its emphasis on community and mutualism, rather than on
competition, an emphasis that derives from the writings of Peter
Kropotkin[7] and William Morris. This emphasis could justly be called
ecological before the word "ecology" became fashionable, indeed, before
it was coined by Ernst Haeckel a century ago. The notion of blending
town with country, of rotating specifically urban with agricultural
tasks, had been raised by so-called utopian socialists such as Charles
Fourier during the Industrial Revolution. variety and diversity in one's
workaday activities—the Hellenic ideal of the rounded individual in a
rounded society—found its physical counterpart in varied surroundings
that were neither strictly urban nor rural, but a synthesis of both.
Ecology validated this ideal by revealing that it formed the
precondition not only for humanity's psychic and social well-being but
for the well-being of the natural world as well.
Our own era has gone further than this visionary approach. A century ago
it was still possible to reach the countryside without difficulty even
from the largest cities and, if one so desired, to leave the city
permanently for a rural way of life. Capitalism had not so completely
effaced humanity's legacy that one lacked evidence of neighbourhood
enclaves, quaint life-styles and personalities, architectural diversity,
and even village society. Predatory as the new industrial system was, it
had not so completely eliminated the human scale as to leave the
individual totally faceless and estranged. By contrast, we are compelled
to occupy even quasi-rural areas that have become essentially urbanized,
and we are reduced to anonymous digits in a staggering bureaucratic
apparatus that lacks personality, human relevance, or individual
understanding. In population, if not in physical size, our cities
compare to the nation-states of the last century. The human scale has
been replaced by the inhuman scale. We can hardly comprehend our own
lives, much less manage society or our immediate environment. Our very
self-integrity, today, is implicated ill achieving the vision that
utopians and radical libertarians held forth a century ago. In this
matter, we are struggling not only for a better way of life but for our
very survival.
Radical agriculture offers a meaningful response to this desperate
situation in terms not of a fanciful fight to a remote agrarian refuge,
but of a systematic recolonlization of the land along ecological lines.
Cities are to he decentralised—and this is no longer a utopistic fantasy
but a visible necessity which even conventional city planning is
beginning to recognize—and new ecocommunities are to be established,
tailored artistically to the ecosystems in which they are located. These
ecocommunities are to be scaled to human dimensions, both to afford the
greatest degree of self-management possible and personal comprehension
of the social situation. No bureaucratic manipulative, centralized
administration here, but a voluntaristic system in which the economy,
society and ecology of an area are administered by the community as a
whole, and the distribution of the means of life is determined by need,
rather than by labour, profit or accumulation.
But radical agriculture carries this tradition further—into technology
itself. In contemporary social thought, technology tends to be polarized
into highly centralized labor-extensive forms on the one hand and
decentralized, craft-scale labor-intensive forms on the other. Radical
agriculture steers the middle ground established by an ecotechnology: it
avails itself of the tendency toward miniaturization and versatility,
quality production, and a balanced combination of mass manufacture and
crafts. For side by side with the massive, highly specialized
fossil-fuel technology in use today, we are beginning to see the
emergence of a new technology—one that lends itself to the local
deployment of many energy resources on a small scale (wind, solar and
geothermal)—that provides a wider latitude in the use of small,
multipurpose machinery, and that can easily provide us with the
high-quality semifinished goods that we, as individuals, may choose to
finish according to our proclivities and tastes. The rounded
ecocommunities of the future would thereby be sustained by rounded
ecotechnologies.[8] The people of these communities, living in a highly
diversified agricultural and industrial society, would be free to avail
themselves of the most sophisticated technologies without suffering the
social distortions that have pitted town against country, mind against
work, and humanity against itself and the natural world.
Radical agriculture brings all of these possibilities into focus, for we
must begin with the land if only because the basic materials for life
are acquired from the land. This is not only an ecological truth but a
social one as well. The kind of agricultural practice we adopt at once
reflects and reinforces the approach we will utilize in all spheres of
industrial and social life. Capitalism began historically by undermining
and overcoming the resistance of the traditional agrarian world to a
market economy; it will never be fully transcended unless a new society
is created on the land that liberates humanity in the fullest sense and
restores the balance between society and nature.
[1] T.C. McLuhan, ed., Touch the Earth (New York: Outerbridge & Lazard,
1971), p.8.
[2] Ibid., p. 56.
[3] Edward Hyams, Soil and Cultivation (London: Thames & Hudson, 1952),
pp 274, 276.
[4] Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), p. 56.
[5] Ibid., p. 57.
[6] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, ed. and trans. David McLellan (New York;
Harper & Row, 1971), p. 94.
[7] See especially P. Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops
Tomorrow (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Mutual Aid (Boston: Sargent
Publishers, 1955), and also: Conquest of Bread (New York: New York
University Press, 1972).
[8] See Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley: Ramparts
Press, 1972).