For a movement to defend the right to live off of the land (repost from DailyKos) | 30 comments (30 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (4.00 / 2)

In every country in which a capitalist system has been imposed, the beginnings of it all have been with enclosure. Enclosure, a movement beginning in the Middle Ages in England, meant the privatization of large tracts of land, wherein the peasants living off of said land were kicked off. Said peasants had to live in cities, where (eventually) truancy laws required them to work for subsistence wages in factories. Karl Marx discusses this enclosure in great detail here.

A historical pattern specific to Britain is just that, specific to Britain. Plenty of places transited to a capitalist agricultural framework without the peasants leaving the land (think France in the wake of the Revolution), and the single most brutal example of forced urbanization and industrialization was in the context of the elimination of capitalism - i.e. Stalinism.

Eventually this "right to live off of the land" will have to supercede capitalism. Capital today is out of control, and the people will have to rein it in (at some point). The reining-in of capital will create a struggle in which, for the majority to win, decentralized, community-based economics will have to become a way of life for most everyone.

So, we use the state to coercively enact a complete makeover in the economy and social geography. And if the 'majority' doesn't choose to vote for this plan? There is as far as I can tell no large scale movement among urban dwellers to turn themselves into peasants practising subsistence agriculture. What there is, is a clamour for better housing, better access to utilities, health care, more money with which to buy stuff. Plenty of people want to 'rein in capital', but not for your purpose.

Such a movement will start by guaranteeing all the right to grow food. This can be done through the proliferation of community gardens in unused spaces in parks and parking lots.

Quite common in Communist Europe. Mostly abandoned the moment you could get stuff in stores. It is also common among the poor urban dwellers of the Third World - i.e. those who cannot afford to buy food. You suggest it would be better for everybody to live like that? I doubt many people do.

by MarekNYC on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 03:31:23 PM EST

more questions, these ones for you (none / 1)

So, we use the state to coercively enact a complete makeover in the economy and social geography. And if the 'majority' doesn't choose to vote for this plan? There is as far as I can tell no large scale movement among urban dwellers to turn themselves into peasants practising subsistence agriculture.

This prompts me to ask some questions: 1) Do urban dwellers growing their own vegetables/ fruits become "peasants"? 2) Is there really anything better for many urban dwellers in the world to do? 3) Have you, yourself, ever tried to organize a mass movement of people who are struggling for their survival?

And as for the idea that it's better to "get stuff in stores" -- Couldn't the "local is better" thing make a comeback when Peak Oil drives the price of transporting food from countryside to city out of sight? What about the knowledge of pernicious factory-farming processes used in industrial food production? Won't that encourage food-growing? See Michael Pollin's The Omnivore's Dilemma for more on the latter...

"Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world" -- John Lennon

by Cassiodorus on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 03:54:51 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: more questions, these ones for you (none / 0)

Couldn't the "local is better" thing make a comeback when Peak Oil drives the price of transporting food from countryside to city out of sight?

Why should it? More expensive, sure, but that's not at all the same thing.

by MarekNYC on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 04:48:44 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 0)

Mostly abandoned the moment you could get stuff in stores.

Are you imagining a world where all humans have access to stuff from local stores--at prices they can afford?

I don't know the numbers. Does anyone know what percentage of the world's population currently has the money to buy stuff from stores--

And by stuff I suppose you mean more than just food, but I'd start at food: what percentage of the world's population buys its food in stores, and what percentage could in the future? Does it get anywhere close to 100%

And an added question: what work will people do to get the money for their food? I ask because in a conversation elsewhere on the internet there arose the key point that "making more stuff" cannot continue indefinitely (due to raw materials.)

I'd be interested if you could tease out your association "growing food" = "living like peasants from the past". I don't grow my own food and never have (well, I grew a potato into a plant once....but it didn't have any baby potatoes...), but from what I read, gardening doesn't have to be an all-day, every day arduous business. I like the idea of planting edible crops everywhere--at present we couldn't eat them, perhaps, because of ambient pollution in cities, but in principle, the difference between a non-edible plant and an edible plant...is that I can eat the latter.

Re: forcing people off the land, it seems there is a history of this, and that the people forced off their land fought against this...maybe not everywhere--northern europe may not be a good example of living it large on the land (cold, wet, fewer crop cycles per year etc...) But my reading (not extensive) has lead me to understand that the idea that people are going to the cities out of a Dick Wittington-esque desire for the good life doesn't match the facts. So I'd be interested in more facts either way. I suppose one easy way would be to look at the reasons for population migrations to the largest cities, and those expanding quickest.

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 04:08:49 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 1)

I don't believe that to be true. That is I think that certain materials will run out, meaning less of some stuff, replacement of other stuff, but I don't believe that there's any underlying 'ecological reality' that forces us to accept that your average westerner will have to live at the standard of living of the average person in Bolivia, and that there is little scope for improvement for the latter in the medium term. In the same way that I don't believe it when certain right wingers say the same thing, arguing from 'economic realities'. Again, there are such things as economic constraints, but socio-economic systems are primarily a product of politics, power, technology, and values, rather than the result of some 'natural' economic or ecological order.

As for the rest - no, the kind of urban gardening where people grow some vegetables that they couldn't otherwise get to supplement whatever starches that provide the bulk of their calories doesn't require anywhere near a full time commitment. Nor does it require all that much land, though still more than exists in many cities. Actually growing enough to provide yourself with enough for a good year round food supply is something else entirely, both in time and land requirements.

People move, and moved, to the cities for a wide variety of reasons. Those include the efforts of capitalist, or, in the case of England, feudal elites, to get more money that Cass and De talk about. But they also include the desire for a better and/or more interesting life, and population pressures leading to either environmental degradation or lack of land. The mass movement away from agriculture in postwar Europe was largely due to the second one - life as a factory worker in Milan or the Ruhr improved much faster than that of a small farmer or sharecropper. In much of the third world today it is all of the above.

by MarekNYC on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 04:46:48 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 0)

On the first point, is your idea that if the world population stays around the seven billion mark, there are enough resources out there to keep making various things, maybe with more efficient recycling of old things so that tomorrows chairs are todays tin cans, where the planet's resources cycle round and about us without running out? Sorta positing humans as essentially stuff making and stuff acquring animals--I don't mean that in any snide way...a sort of material emanation of our curiosity, so humans are happiest when making things, swapping things for other things (maybe via money exchanges etc.), and kicking back...letting technology do the hard pulling?

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 05:46:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 0)

Yes, and it's not just the stuff making and acquiring, it's also that a lot of that stuff makes life more pleasant. Washing machines, running water, medical technology, furniture, music in your home, books, light, ability to move around, communications, etc.

by MarekNYC on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 06:14:19 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 1)

>Washing machines, running water, medical technology, furniture, music in your home, books, light, ability to move around, communications

What percentage of the world's population has access to these things? If we just take medical technology, how many humans have access (either physical or financial) to medical technology?

I went off to google to see if I could find some numbers, and wandered into this from ...oh my word...dieoff.org

"Science Summit" on World Population:
A Joint Statement by 58 of the World's Scientific Academies

I have no quick way of finding out the truth-worthiness of those academies.

There's a preamble which states:

In a follow-up to several recent initiatives by assemblies of scientists and scientific academies, most notably one taken by the Royal Society of London and the US National Academy of Sciences that resulted in a joint statement, "Population Growth, Resource Consumption, and a Sustainable World, '' issued in February 1992 (see Documents, PDR, June 1992), representatives of national academies of science from throughout the world met in New Delhi, 24-27 October 1993, at a ''Science Summit'' on World Population. The participants issued a statement, signed by representatives of 58 academies. The statement offers a wide-ranging if ex cathedra-style discussion of population issues related to development, notably on the determinants of fertility and concerning the effect of demographic growth on the environment and the quality of life. It also sets forth policy propositions, with emphasis on contributions that ''scientists, engineers, and health professionals'' can make to the solution of population problems. The statement finds that ''continuing population growth poses a great risk to humanity, '' and proposes a demographic goal, albeit with a rather elusive specification of a time frame: "In our judgement, humanity's ability to deal successfully with its social, economic, and environmental problems will require the achievement of zero population growth within the lifetime of our children. '' The text of the academies ' statement is reproduced below.

The New Delhi meeting was convened by a group of 15 academies "to explore in greater detail the complex and interrelated issues of population growth, resource consumption, socioeconomic development, and environmental protection.'' One of the convening organizations, the Nairobi-based African Academy of Sciences, declined to sign the joint statement, issuing, instead, one of its own. The text of this statement is reproduced below as the second Documents item appearing in this issue. Other academies that did not participate in the New Delhi meeting, or did not choose to sign the joint statement (whether for substantive or procedural reasons), included academies of Ireland, Italy, Japan, Singapore, and Spain, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Notwithstanding the African Academy dissent, representatives of six African national academies, among them four from countries of sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda) were among the fifty-eight signatories.

The world is in the midst of an unprecedented expansion of human numbers. It took hundreds of thousands of years for our species to reach a population level of 10 million, only 10,000 years ago. This number grew to 100 million people about 2,000 years ago and to 2.5 billion by 1950. Within less than the span of a single lifetime, it has more than doubled to 5.5 billion in 1993.

This accelerated population growth resulted from rapidly lowered death rates (particularly infant and child mortality rates), combined with sustained high birth rates. Success in reducing death rates is attributable to several factors: increases in food production and distribution, improvements in public health (water and sanitation) and in medical technology (vaccines and antibiotics), along with gains in education and standards of living within many developing nations.

Over the last 30 years, many regions of the world have also dramatically reduced birth rates. Some have already achieved family sizes small enough, if maintained, to result eventually in a halt to population growth. These successes have led to a slowing of the world's rate of population increase. The shift from high to low death and birth rates has been called the "demographic transition."

The rate at which the demographic transition progresses worldwide will determine the ultimate level of the human population. The lag between downward shifts of death and birth rates may be many decades or even several generations, and during these periods population growth will continue inexorably. We face the prospect of a further doubling of the population within the next half century. Most of this growth will take place in developing countries.

So a question:

What is the best way of transitioning developing countries to the developed world's arriving standard of low death and birth rates? One way would be to make them more like us. But aye here's the rub...Is our position only maintained by their being a lot of people who are not like us...and never will be like us? We have the power, they don't. And "we" is spread across the globe, the nation state is dead, but the regional block is thriving, and some nation states are, in fact, regional blocks...

So, thinking in terms of schooling, medical services, a warm place to read a good book, all the non-tech heavy experiences we could all have...and maybe it would look very similar to some more enlightened democratic countries, but...people don't have time for all that, because they don't have access to food unless they do something for someone else. Does the capitalist expansion model help them out of that trap? You need money to live in a capitalist society, or else you're reduced to picking up the scraps. No free lunch! But once upon a time, people picked food from the trees, and from the ground...

...this is where I hear the gritting of teeth. Because they were also attacked by wolves (though apparently this is a myth...man's best friend is his dog...why did we have it in for wolves...the besrmiched species...bemerded...by humans...to keep them away...their howling....

I'm sure someone once said, "Before we have any more children, shall we sort out making the world a nice place to be?" The nicer the world, the less children will have, on average...an average of two. One for you and one for me. If every couple has two children, there is no net gain to the world's population...except it has increased by two for every adult couple...and then it stabilises at two...and we can get on and enjoy our funky new friendly world...ah shit, the techonic plates are shifting again. Shit!

Ah, Nomad! A planet is not a risk-free environment. Yes! Exactly!

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 08:29:08 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 1)

On the second point, a quick google got me this page, from theworld.org, the website of "PRI's The World".

It was one of those lateral wanders through the internet. I was wondering you know, really, how many of those city people are there because they want to be there?

Fink: Many governments demolish slums under the banner of eradicating urban blight and crime. But often it's just a pretense to quash centers of political opposition, or to clear land for developers. Almost always, the slumdwellers simply rebuild or relocate, and the slums often grow even larger than before.

Anna Tibaijuka directs UN-HABITAT. That's the United Nations agency charged with improving shelter for the world's poor. She says slums are booming for reasons that many countries share, like poverty and war, which push people from the countryside into cities.

That's the kind of quote I was looking for, a closer analysis of the situation, make humans human again, and anyway, I wondered, "Who is www.world.og?"

A few clicks later, I was at wikipedia.

Public radio, PRI, and NPR

Public radio is a generic term for radio stations or programming that is not funded by advertising -- specifically commercials. It is the opposite of commercial radio, the funding setup for most radio stations in the United States. PRI, NPR, and APM are the largest producers and distributors of public radio programming in the United States, and they compete with each other for slots on public radio stations and the attention of listeners. Any given public radio station may be an NPR member and an affiliate of PRI simultaneously.

PRI is a younger organization than NPR, which was founded 13 years earlier in 1970. Many PRI shows draw a younger overall audience than shows produced by NPR. Some listeners and critics believe that PRI programs feature a wider range of voices than NPR programs. Many programs that were formerly distributed by PRI, such as A Prairie Home Companion and Marketplace, are now distributed by American Public Media. In addition, PRI distributed World Cafe for many years, but in 2005, its distribution was switched to NPR.

...visions of...that guy...with the glasses...lives in Minessota...St. Paul's, he invented that small town...Lake Woebegon...

Has moved to NPR...perhaps...

Anyways, I'm not anti-tech in any way shape or form, I just get bored with new tech being shoved under my nose all the time...being conned at times, and the best way not to be conned is not to take part in the game, just walk away. But what if someone's put up a fence?

So I see renewable energy, locally distributed and with the possibility but not the necessity of connecting wider, except under good, healthy long term agreements beneficial to both sides....

Ya know I think a lot of human's have a grim lifestyle. The statistic tonight was, "One in eight adults in the U.K. is a carer for someone with a serious illness." And did he say "Eight million of us?", I can't remember--maybe I misremember. But then they flashed up the new projection: By [I can't remember when. Not tomorrow or next year, but five years? I can't remember], yes by this year in the not too distant future, the figure would have risen to 1 in 5.

Ya know, there's a bad attitude that let's that happen, something harsh and unforgiving, like a potato field in February, perhaps, when the wind is harsh once more, ach.... I don't think I've heard a single voice on ET that wants to move back to that. But I don't think that's a genuine reproduction of life under modern tech. farming techniques. And I don't think the huge food providers follow those modern tech. farming techniques, I think they're more like chemists mixing proportions, swishing liquids, and the product is...food. Was nature really that violent and dangerous? I'm sure for some it was, but I reckon for others...and how many are those others? Where are the statistics? I suppose they don't all live in one place as they are a product of the construction of social spaces....kcurie! A diary on magic, please.

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 06:12:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]

I have to disagree in every particular (none / 1)

In Britain and Europe, peasants were not eager to be thrown off their land and thrown into destitution: There were famous insurrections--which, however, were defeated.

Even in the US, those archtypal entrepreneurs--farmers--are not eager to be thrown off their land. But neo-liberalism finishes them off, and they go, to be replaced by huge industrial plantations of a sort the Stalinists never even dreamed.

There is something fundamentally insane about denying the physical reality of our existence. And the fact that we are using up unrenewable resources. Even topsoil--which given enough time, CAN be renewed--is being mined and destroyed like coal, oil, or copper.

Well, this can go on until it can't. Then we implode, not to the Stone Age, but to a far, far, more depleted existence.

The Easter Island scenerio looks more likely everyday. It seems to be what people want.

Can't understand why.

The Fates are kind.

by Gaianne on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 06:55:25 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: I have to disagree in every particular (none / 0)

Disagree all you want, it won't change the facts. There was no single template for urbanization in Europe. France was different from England, Germany different from France, Russia different from Germany, and so on. Even in England you are somehow ignoring the fact that the Enclosure Acts were an expression of the power relationships that were an inherent part of the pre-industrial agrarian society you so idealize. And while you are right that farmers aren't eager to be thrown off their land, at various times and places many have voluntarily left it because they believed that life in the cities would be better. Often they were right, sometimes they weren't. That wasn't necessarily because things had gotten worse for them in absolute terms, but because life had gotten better in the cities - i.e. their relative standard of living had declined. This was especially the case in post WWII Western Europe, not exactly the heyday of neo-liberalism. And in Eastern Europe which experienced even greater rates of urbanization during that period there was no capitalism at all. Nor was all the urbanization coerced, particularly in the post-Stalinist period when the Party authorities began to invest heavily into improving urban living standards.

by MarekNYC on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 07:31:54 PM EST
[ Parent ]

won't change facts (none / 1)

pre-industrial agrarian society you so idealize

Quite a misreading!

The Fates are kind.

by Gaianne on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 07:45:29 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: I have to disagree in every particular (none / 1)

Just wondering, are you even aware that urbanization in Europe happened in different times, at different paces, and under different social and economic conditions?

Just for a quick comparison, the percentage of the population living in cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants: 1800, 1850, 1890

England: 21.3, 39.5, 61.7
France 9.5 14.4 25.9
Prussia 7.3 10.6 30.0
Russia 3.7 5.3 9.6
Hungary 5.4 9.1 17.6
Switz. 4.3 7.3 16.5

In France if you're wondering much of the growth in the urban population came through external immigration (primarily Belgium and Italy in that period, soon to be joined by Poles), not internal migration from the countryside. In the Prussian lands one of the biggest factors in reducing the rural population in the twentieth century was the wholesale ethnic cleansing of its eastern provinces - nothing specifically to do with rural vs. urban, it was all about compensation and revenge, it just happens that those areas were more heavily agrarian than the rest of Prussia.

In some areas the introduction of capitalism led to the consolidation and growth of the great estates e.g. England and East Elbian Prussia (in both of these case, but particularly the latter, the shift in land control was directly linked to the reduction of the peasants' feudal obligations - instead of getting the use of land in return for unpaid labour for the landowner, they got turned into capitalist labourers), in others it was the the time of the peasant proprietor, e.g. France and West Elbian Germany. In some areas land ownership was fairly stable e.g. England and France, in others it wasn't, e.g. both sides of Germany. Some areas were characterized by a growth in landless agricultural labourers, others the reverse.

As far as living standards go, one indication of how the change began can be seen in rural vs. urban death rates in a given area. Up through the end of the first phase of industrialization they tended to be higher in the cities, then that flipped roughly around the turn of the century. But that varied from place to place Percentage of total income received by the top five percent in the half century preceding WWI grew in some places (e.g. Prussia) declined in other (e.g. Britain). Real wages of wage labourers grew declined in the initial phase of industrialization, then grew steadily, surpassing their pre industrial levels by around 1880, and continued rising - at the same time the as the hours in a workweek declined, housing quality improved, some modicum of hygiene began to be introduced into working class neighbourhoods, thus greatly improving health standards. But all of this happened in different ways, at different times, at different paces.

So if you want to understand what happened, look a little beyond England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And when you do study England, try to understand how what happened grew out of the existing social, political, and economic relationships.

by MarekNYC on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 08:37:37 PM EST
[ Parent ]

That people sometimes move (none / 1)

to cities voluntarily (and see it as an improvement, not merely a respite from assault and harrassment) is (completely) irrelevant to the subject of rural people being driven off the land.

The only thing I have been advocating (unlike you?) is that we avoid the Easter Island scenerio. Do you really think the scenerios I "love"--which I have yet to argue for, by the way--are worse than that?

The Fates are kind.

by Gaianne on Thu Jan 11th, 2007 at 01:52:39 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: That people sometimes move (none / 0)

I believe that what you are advocating would be in practice just as bad as the Easter Island scenario. I am also convinced that it is quite possible to maintain an urban based technological society without getting to that scenario. Take those two together and you can understand why I take such exception to your views, and the other people on this site with similar ones.

by MarekNYC on Thu Jan 11th, 2007 at 04:13:03 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: That people sometimes move (none / 0)

is (completely) irrelevant to the subject of rural people being driven off the land.

Please, please read some French history. Concentrate on the Third Republic up to WWI and then again on the Trente Glorieuses that followed WWII. It is the polar opposite of the English case which you seem to think was universal.

You'll find a state which actively sought to promote the political and economic interests of the small farmer at the expense of both the rural elites and the urban population. You'll see extensive measures, administrative, legal, and financial helping out small family farmers. You'll note the disproportionate power of rural areas, coinciding with the rapid demise in the political power of the already relatively weak rural elites. You'll find the rise of a modern industrial economy with little rural exodus to be observed. Then switch over to the post WWII period and you'll find your rural exodus - not because the conditions of the rural areas declined, but because suddenly the government embarked on a large scale effort to improve the lives of the urban working class and petty bourgeoisie - decent housing, running water, electricity, higher wages, shorter working hours. And a rural exodus occurred, but because of a relative decline in living standards, not an absolute one. The last quarter century has been different, but by that point the bulk of the urbanization had already taken place.

by MarekNYC on Thu Jan 11th, 2007 at 04:41:06 PM EST
[ Parent ]

For a movement to defend the right to live off of the land (repost from DailyKos) | 30 comments (30 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Top Diaries

A blog policeman's lot is not a happy one

The Amazing thing that's happening in the US Presidential...

Hoover's FBI: Patriotism, Nationalism, MAGA, Fascism

Net Zero Energy - August 24, 2024

Not one of us!

Kamala Harris Surge?

Google Censors Jill Stein Acceptance Speech

The Tipping Point: Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump

Recent Diaries

Russia Kills Traitors .. Israel Murders Peace Activists

GS: MAGA Policy Hits EU Economy Hard

Hoover's FBI: Patriotism, Nationalism, MAGA, Fascism

Trump Victory, Communism, Divine Intervention

City Agriculture - September 4, 2024

President Sees US NATO Policy Succeed in UA

Turkey Turns 'East' Towards BRICS

The Amazing thing that's happening in the US Presidential...

How War in Europe Boosts the U.S. Economy

A blog policeman's lot is not a happy one

Remember the Fallen

September 2024

The Politics of Masculinity - New York Times

Energy (and Other) Events Monthly - September 2024

Israel Blocks UNRWA Humanitarian Aid In Gaza

Human Rights: Macklemore Cancels Dubai Show

Netanyahu Sets New Conditions as Cairo Talks Fail

Creation from Anbar to Raqqa to Solingen

China and America's Pacific Supremacy

Israel Launches Preemptive Strikes In Lebanon

Occasional Series