KICK IT OVER fall 1994
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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 anti-ecological: 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...."@
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 Kropotkin7 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
humhumanity's psychic and social sell-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 begin ing to
recognize-and new eco-communities 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 distri
bution 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 labourextensive
forms on the one hand and decentralized, craftscale labour-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 eco-communities
of the future would thereby be sustained by rounded ecotechnologies8
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.
FOOTNOTES
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 Technol ogy 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 Publish ers, 1955), and also: Conquest of Bread (New York;
New York Univer sity Press, 1972) .
8. See Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley,
Ramparts Press, 1 972).
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