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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] The Politics of Food is Politics
  • Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 11:52:43 -0600


Yes it is. I read the whole thing at that site. I would have had a hard time
just picking out the best excerpts to send on. ... The world is changing
fast. Best be ahead of the curve.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 4/25/2008 at 5:32 AM activism98201@verizon.net wrote:

>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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