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  • From: <activism98201@verizon.net>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Politics of Food is Politics
  • Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 05:32:54 -0500 (CDT)

Great article talking about the needed food revolution.


-Mark Nagel
Everett, WA


Full article: http://counterpunch.org/goff04242008.html


Past revolutions began not with ideas in isolation; they began with
facts-on-the-ground. By the time the French overthrew their aristocracy, that
aristocracy was already moribund except for its political power. In every
other realm, the businessmen who led the revolution were already dominant.
The revolution evolved through the Kairos of history -- through slowly
maturing metatrends -- which then interjected itself into the here-and-now
Chronos of politics. The Kairos of history, in our time, is the long arc of
fossil fuel depletion and the inevitable collapse of intricate profit-taking
systems and hyper-extraction strategies predicated on unlimited cheap energy.
"Just throw petroleum at it" is not going to work any more, This means that
deep contradictions and crises papered over by desperate energy-intensive
bandaids will become visible and painful (and they are, already).

The industrial food system is riddled with such crises and contradictions,
barely papered over by throwing ever-more petroleum at it. It has reached a
breaking point, and popular discourse is not unaware of this (as we may infer
from the groundswell of popular nonfiction books highly critical of the
system). The exposure of these fault lines -- and the intimate nature of
food, for us social primates -- can be highly politicizing for large numbers
of people; and whatever the ideological effects, the praxis of food autarky
and community-through-food can only enhance our chances of survival and
resistance during a period of (potentially) extreme dislocation.

The kitchen garden -- the "victory garden" -- represents not only the ability
to sustain resistance (or aggression) against a foreign enemy, but the
ability to resist domestic authority and to withdraw, at least partially,
from the money economy and the wage-slavery and debt on which it is based.

Capitalism began by kicking people off their land and forbidding them to grow
their own food; the end of capitalism may come when people who grow their own
food and share it with neighbors are able to say a resounding No to
capitalism's end-phase exterminism.

We need not start from scratch in order to "return to a perennial politics of
resistance: the defense of "peasant" (smallholder, local) agriculture against
imperial profit-takers."




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