Category Archives: Politics and neoliberalism

Magic economics

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When your car is malfunctioning and you take it to a mechanic, you hope that they’ll diagnose the problem and give you some repair suggestions and costings. You don’t expect them to discourse lengthily on the wider transport system or on government priorities vis-à-vis roads and other infrastructure. It’s not their job.

I’d like to suggest that economists should likewise be seen as the mechanics of the political economy. I’m interested in their opinions on the pros and cons of different policy instruments for achieving desired political and social goals, using the technical skills developed in their discipline. I’m not interested in their opinions about what political and social goals are desirable – matters on which I don’t consider them to have more legitimate authority than anyone else.

I mention this in the context of a tweet from Branko Milanovic, an expert on the economics of global inequality (whose work was previously discussed on Small Farm Future here), in which he attempted to ridicule the ‘doughnut economics’ thinking of heterodox economist Kate Raworth, and by implication the wider tradition of alternative, degrowth-oriented economics.

Milanovic tweeted “Here is a list of some things that Doughnut economists could advocate if they seriously believed that the planet is in danger and that world GDP must not increase and yet abject global poverty must be reduced

Reduce work week to 2 days

Increase highest marginal tax rates to 80%

Double indirect taxes on all polluting goods

Triple the price of oil

Double subsidies to all renewable sources of energy

Sell (very expensive) meat only two days a week

Ban cheap airplane companies and double the price of air flights

Introduce a £1000 tax for all travel by car & airplanes outside the UK

Introduce UBI of say £200 per person per week

Define the goal of halving GDP and real incomes by 50% in 10 years

He added: “Then they should create a movement that would try, through political action, to implement these measures and find out how much support they get from rich countries’ populations.”

Well now, I’ve already documented my own issues with Raworth’s economics, but writing as someone who does seriously believe that human wellbeing (if not ‘the planet’) is in danger, that it’s probably not a great idea for world GDP to increase, and that abject poverty must be reduced, those suggestions all make a lot of sense to me. However, I’m not a fully paid up member of the economics tribe, so I’d be interested to hear the analyses of Milanovic and other economists concerning the detailed implications of these policy measures, which I’m sure could help sharpen the debate over how to improve equity, wellbeing and sustainability. I’m not, however, much interested in the fact that Professor Milanovic considers these measures absurd.

I’d like to reformulate Milanovic’s approach along the lines suggested by Raworth of being ‘agnostic’ about economic growth. So let’s take the last of his suggestions. Instead of defining the goal of halving GDP and real incomes by 50% in 10 years, I’d like to define the goal of halving (or, better, quartering) greenhouse gas emissions in 10 years, while reducing economic inequality to a global Gini value of, say, 30 over the same period. I’m happy for this to be done with any high-tech whizz-bangery Professor Milanovic cares to choose, so long as we hit our 10-year targets – though to my mind this implies it would have to be technologies that are available to roll out at scale right now, so vague talk about the future possibilities of thorium or fusion reactors, or emerging CCS technologies and suchlike won’t cut it. If it can be done while increasing GDP, then great. I struggle to see how that would be possible, but I’m open to suggestions from economists toiling down in the garage of the global political economy as to how they might pull it off. I’m not, however, open to suggestions from economists that the goals I’m proposing are inappropriate, since the grounds of these goals are not economic and therefore fall outside their disciplinary ambit.

Economists do like to weigh in on normative issues of this kind nonetheless – and here is where, for me, they cease being potentially useful mechanics and start to become priests, magicians or quacks. Still, the nature of the dogma, the magic or the quackery is interesting for what it reveals about contemporary ideology, so let us probe it a little further.

The first level of magical thinking is the one purveyed in Milanovic’s afterthought: people won’t vote for ‘degrowth’ policies, or at least people in rich countries whose votes count most for the way the world works won’t vote for them – so the idea is dismissed as absurd. However, if we make the uncontroversial assumption that human wellbeing really is seriously threatened by the existing structure of the global economy, then where is the absurdity? Not with the degrowth, but with the politics. Much as I acknowledge that the unenlightened short-term self-interest of a rich minority of the world’s population does create genuine obstacles for implementing a more sustainable political economy, the real force of Milanovic’s point here is surely a push to rethink the politics. I plan to write some more on this soon, but I’m unimpressed by the notion that current voter support is some kind of litmus test for policy plausibility. The fact that contemporary politicians are still playing petty power games and trying to buy off voters with absurd, undeliverable promises is an indictment of our current political maturity and an index of the difficult path ahead. It’s not an argument against degrowth.

Various other levels of magical thinking were amply demonstrated by respondents to Milanovic’s tweet on the thread linked above. One is the basically ecomodernist notion that economic growth and prosperity are necessary in order to create the surplus needed to invest in environment-saving technologies – in the words of the Tweeter ‘Econartist’, “Invest in renewable and nuclear tech big time, decommission coal, electrify the transport system, explore the myriad of proposed geoengineering solutions – anyone who tells you this can’t be done or that it’s too expensive is a charlatan”. Well, call me a charlatan but the problem here is that there’s no compelling evidence that ongoing global economic growth funds reduced emissions or other environmental positives…though doubtless we’ll soon be seeing projections on the imminent downturn of the environmental Kuznets ‘wave’. You get the sense that there may just be a stray vowel somewhere near the start of ‘Econartist’s’ Twitter handle.

Another strand of magic invoked by Econartist is the notion that exogenous environmental constraint on human action is some kind of Malthusian fallacy. Malthus-as-bogeyman is widely invoked nowadays – usually to purvey the tautological argument that since Malthus posited exogenous (or even just actual) environmental constraint on human action, and since as-we-all-know Malthus was wrong (and had nasty politics to boot), then clearly any argument that invokes environmental constraint on human action is Malthusian, and therefore wrong.

Luckily I find that in my day job as a grower it’s possible for me to say things like “The weather’s been poor this year – I expect we’ll get a lower crop yield” without being dismissed by my fellow growers for my Malthusianism. But when you’re far away from directly experienced environmental constraint – like on Twitter, for example, or in the average university – it’s easy to invoke Malthus-as-bogeyman and/or the magic of human ingenuity to banish the danger of the natural world intruding on one’s anthropocentric reveries. This debate from a while back here on Small Farm Future convinced me that if we want to insist on invoking Malthus-as-bogeyman then we need a carefully circumscribed definition of Malthusianism. Following Andrew in that debate, I’d suggest that it should be the notion that the uncontrollable passions of the lower orders result in an excess of population over available resources. To extend an anti-Malthusianism further than that strays into the kind of magical thinking that assumes a priori that human ingenuity inevitably banishes all non-human constraint. It clearly doesn’t…and furthermore it fortunately doesn’t need to (which is why I find Tom X Hart’s recent tweet to me that “the left is anti-nature” a depressing sign of the needless techno-mythologism into which too much of the left has sunk).

Finally, the issue that the growth folks never seem to confront is where it ends – and this is where the numbers themselves start to get magical. In 1967 global GDP was 16.1 trillion at constant 2010 US$, and in 2017 it was 80.08 trillion. Current average global economic growth averages about 2.3% per annum, which is pretty much the minimum necessary to avoid recession in the existing capitalist world economy. Projecting that forward over the next 50 years suggests a global GDP in 2067 of about 255 trillion, a global economy about 16 times the size of the 1967 one (the data are here). Where’s all that economic activity going to come from? In view of the lack of absolute decoupling between economic growth and environmental degradation, what environmental effects would that kind of economy have? No wonder the growth thinkers are getting so enthralled by space travel – more magic.

I suspect the main reason we’ve become so enamoured of economic growth is that it’s the only way of addressing the growing scandal of global inequality without fundamental political change. It doesn’t address global inequality very well, since most of the additional income created by economic growth goes to the already well off (for example, as Milanovic documents in his book Global Inequality, 44% of the increase in income between 1988 and 2008 went to the richest 5% of people). This inequality is systemic, as recognised long ago by ecological economics pioneer Herman Daly in his Steady-State Economics:

“We are addicted to growth because we are addicted to large inequalities in income and wealth. What about the poor? Let them eat growth! Better yet, let them feed on the hope of eating growth in the future! We have been growing for some time, and we still have poverty. It should be obvious that what grows is the reinvested surplus, and the benefits of growth go to the owners of the surplus who are not poor” (pp.103-4)

But the neat thing about the ideology of growth is that it’s easily deployed to dismiss the ‘elitism’ of its alternatives, along the lines that while most growth-induced income increases indeed go to the already well-off, nobody can conscionably oppose the small gains that go to the poor. So, for example, there were about 118 million fewer people earning less than $1.90 per day in 2013 than in 2012 – who can oppose that trend, even if the very rich were rewarded disproportionately more?

Certainly, this is a line that Milanovic spins, as here:

“One can hardly overestimate [the importance of economic growth] in poorer countries as a means of making the lives of ordinary people better. The disparagement of growth that surfaces from time to time comes mostly from rich people in rich countries who believe they can dispense with more economic growth. But these people are either deluding themselves or are hypocritical.” (Global Inequality, p.232)

…a point Milanovic proceeds to substantiate with several fairly specious arguments, including references to the secessionist and isolationist waves convulsing the politics of the west. Here, his arguments have already been overtaken by events, since – if we assume that people voted on the basis of rational calculation – support for the likes of Trump and Brexit must have involved a preference for political autonomy over economic increase.

But, more importantly, with such arguments Milanovic and the cadres of growth-promoters stray from the domain of their economic expertise into wider realms of political opinion where they have no firmer technical grounding for their views than anyone else. So I return to my original challenge. I’d like to see a world with a minimal drawdown of fossil fuels and other polluting and unsustainable resources, and much reduced inequalities in wealth and income. How to achieve that politically poses tricky questions that economists have no particular expertise to answer. How to achieve it economically is an arena where they can doubtless contribute. Milanovic’s list above strikes me, speaking as a non-expert, as a pretty good suite of economic policies for starting down the road to sustainability and equity. What I’d really like to see from him and other economists is in-depth analysis of the various pros and cons of each policy for delivering the world I and many other critics of economic-growth-at-all-costs would like to see. His thorough derision of all those policies holds no particular interest for me over that of any other online opinion-monger, with which the market is currently quite saturated, and the price therefore low.

Comparative disadvantage

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When I make the case for greater local self-reliance in agriculture I quite often come across the counter-argument that Britain hasn’t been self-sufficient in food since the early 19th century. This is true, but what’s not so often noted is that we’re now not self-sufficient in different kinds of foods to those we weren’t self-sufficient in 200-odd years ago. Back then we were self-sufficient in most things except for staple grains, whereas now we’re mostly self-sufficient in staple grains while we’re not self-sufficient in most other things, our greatest food-trade deficit being fresh fruit and vegetables.

The reasons for this switch aren’t hard to find. As a result of crop-breeding, mechanisation, the development of artificial fertilisers and other agro-chemicals, along with the EU’s productivist aims and subsidy regimens, cereal productivity nationally, and per hectare or per hour of human labour, is now much greater than it was in the early 1800s. So despite a six-fold population increase since then, we’ve become pretty much self-reliant in cereal grains – though it’s a fragile self-reliance, based to a considerable degree on imported fossil fuels. But the cost of labour and the opportunity-cost of agricultural land is now also much greater, while the relative cost of energy is much lower – all of which mean it’s cheaper to import bulky, labour-intensive products like fruit and vegetables than to produce them domestically as we did a couple of centuries ago.

Wait, scroll back. Did somebody mention the EU? Britain voted to leave that creaking old juggernaut years ago and then struck out boldly on its own, right? The answer to that is yes and no, my friend, yes and no. Yes, we did narrowly vote to leave the EU more than two years ago, but no we haven’t left yet. Instead, we’ve had two years of epic fudging, as the government has tried and largely failed to work out how to leave the EU without tanking the economy, while simultaneously dealing with vast amounts of other fallout, such as the Irish border question. Perhaps I’ll write another post soon that runs the rule over this monumental waste of political energy, but here I’d like to focus on just one aspect of the aforementioned fallout, namely post-Brexit agricultural policy.

The government’s consultation paper Health and Harmony: the Future for Food, Farming and the Environment in a Green Brexit set out its post CAP policy thinking, receiving a response from me and, apparently, about 43,999 other people and organisations. I don’t think I was the only one to notice that there was precious little about food or farming in the paper. The government seems to be planning some kind of environmental payments scheme to farmers on a ‘public money for public goods’ basis, but the notorious single farm payment subsidy regimen is soon to be history, with nothing to replace it. This was predicted long ago on this website – not that it was a hard prediction to make.

Well, the SFP was a bad scheme, and it won’t be mourned by many. Though much as folks like to bang on about the way it enriched people who didn’t need enriching and turned farmers into subsidy-junkies, the truth is the real junkies were retailers and consumers grown reliant on rock-bottom farm-gate prices. I won’t further plumb that particular line here, but it’s worth noting the implications of the SFP’s demise. There’s to be no emphasis on national food production or security, instead just a thoroughly neoliberal commitment to making British agriculture globally competitive. Which it probably won’t be across almost all dimensions of food production, with the possible exceptions of things like whisky and smoked salmon. My guess is that in the short-term we’ll see farmers getting out of farming and becoming landscape managers, while retailers and consumers continue getting their cheap food fix by importing more from abroad, regardless of the longer-term consequences – something like the ‘bad rewilding’ scenario I outlined some time ago. Farms will prioritise chasing money for wildlife management and visitor attractions, while we export the responsibility for producing our food to other countries willing to sell on global markets (and possibly less anxious to protect what remains of their own wildlife).

Nothing wrong with all that, according to mainstream economic theory. If each country focuses on what it’s best at producing and imports what other countries are best at producing, then everyone gains – this was all explained long ago by David Ricardo in the theory of ‘comparative advantage’ set out in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817).

Comparative advantage is still routinely invoked as a justification for free trade today, so it remains sadly necessary to explain why it’s a poor foundation for contemporary economies. If investors who are unable to freely put up their capital outside their own country – which was generally the case when Ricardo was writing – wanted to obtain the best possible financial returns, then it made sense for them to invest in their local or national industries with the greatest comparative advantage. But since Ricardo’s day, the entire drift of global financial policy has been to remove the trade barriers that pushed investors to seek comparative advantage, and also to virtualise the economy away from the production of physical things and towards the increase of money itself. So while an English capital-holder today may be better advised to invest in cloth than wine (Ricardo’s original examples) if they want a high return on investment they’re almost certainly even better advised to invest in derivatives on Wall Street. This replacement of comparative advantage by absolute advantage fundamentally changes the economic game in ways that quaint Ricardian theories of international trade are powerless to model.

Meanwhile, national and local governments have numerous responsibilities. Trying to maximise fiscal flows and foreign exchange earnings are certainly among them, but there are many others – the health and wellbeing of the populace, the resilience of infrastructures (including soil health and food security) and so on. Global policymakers nowadays seem to be gripped by a huge Hayekian delusion that all of these things are best secured by hawking them on global commodity markets. Even so, most wealthy countries take steps to protect their agricultures and ensure that their farmland remains productively farmed. You can certainly criticise the way they go about it – as in the EU’s common agricultural policy – on numerous grounds, but the basic motivation behind it seems sound. It’s unusual, and I think ill-advised, for a country to cast out its agriculture as Health and Harmony does in favour of the religious mantra that ‘the market will provide’.

Eighteen months ago I was pilloried on here by a couple of commenters for supporting continued British membership of the EU on the grounds that the latter is committed to neoliberalism. But it seemed obvious then, and it seems even more obvious now, that aside from a few misty-eyed nationalists the main impetus for Brexit within the Conservative Party came from people dissatisfied with the EU because it wasn’t neoliberal enough. The Health and Harmony paper seems confirmatory of this point. A case could have been made for a ‘progressive’ Brexit, but it would be stretching a point to say that that case has even been a marginal part of Brexit politics. In this sense, though I don’t like to use the term, people who supported Brexit for its progressive possibilities strike me as essentially useful idiots for neoliberalism. Though it’s possible, if fortune smiles on them, that they may yet have the last laugh.

In the short term, though, Britain is putting itself at a comparative disadvantage in pursuit of ‘competitiveness’ in the global agrarian economy. It’s worth bearing in mind that agriculture currently contributes less than 1% of Britain’s gross value added economic output, and under any realistic medium-term economic scenario it’s hard to see that increasing in any major way. But Britain could more or less feed itself from its existing agriculture if the government chose to make that a priority. To me, that seems a much wiser option than trying to wring another few million quid from a more ‘competitive’ agriculture.

Meanwhile, another aspect of Ricardo’s economics is looming ever larger. Ricardo supported international free trade because he perceived that in a protected capitalist market landowners would be able to extract economic rent – an excess return over production costs – as a result of increasing food demand. Essentially, he construed a scenario in which labourers did honest work to earn their wage and capitalists did honest work to earn their profit, while landlords pocketed an increasing share of the economic surplus thus generated without lifting a finger.

This dynamic of Ricardian rent has largely been in abeyance for many years in the rich countries. Food prices have been low and rural landownership has rarely been a royal road to wealth. But as industry and economic growth stalls and inequalities widen, the prospect of the economy falling into the grip of landlordism grows. If we extend the logic beyond agricultural land per se, it’s already happened. It’s already happened from a poor country perspective in terms of the extraction of Ricardian rent by rich countries in controlling access to the global economy (this is one reason to welcome exit from the protectionism of EU agricultural policy – but Britain unilaterally falling on its sword in this way probably won’t benefit poor people globally a great deal). And it’s already happened from a rich country perspective in the substantial exit of businesses from matters of production in favour of battling to control the means of circulation – intellectual property rights, branding and so forth. The emergence of a rentier capitalism which has no interest in putting capital to work in service of material improvement (always a minor theme at best in earlier capitalist iterations in any case) has a thoroughly Ricardian resonance.

The way I see this panning out is a period of tricky trade wheeler-dealing that won’t be more economically beneficial to Britain than EU membership was, but may inaugurate a brief honeymoon of cheap, low-quality imported food and possibly improved wildlife habitats at home (we’ll conveniently ignore the consequences for ghost acres abroad). Then as climate change begins to bite in the global breadbasket countries and calculated self-interest looms larger in the global political economy, I think we’ll be in for a major food crisis where it’ll suddenly seem like a good idea for the government to be supporting the local production of food, and where large landowners in possession of lightly-farmed estates may start to feel some class-aligned political heat.

At that point, the government will start casting desperately around for solutions to the self-inflicted problem of its Ricardian nightmare. Luckily, Small Farm Future will be here for it, shining a guiding light that will help it overcome the Ricardian perils of our age with this simple two point plan:

  1. A new protectionist economics, focused around local production for local use. This protectionism won’t be of the tit-for-tat, ‘my country first’ kind being reinvigorated by idiotic politicians like Donald Trump. It will take the form of an internationally agreed, convivial kind of protectionism in which collective strength is gained from individual difference.
  2. A new anti-landlordism economics. But not in the traditional socialist or capitalist manner of alienating people from the fruits of their own work on the land, because the benefits of this ‘globalising’ move will no longer be paying out. In this situation, the most obvious form of anti-landlordism is of the if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em variety, in which more or less everyone becomes their own landlord.

The result of this protectionist, anti-landlord economics would look a lot like the small farm future I’ve long promulgated on this blog. What a funny coincidence. Undoubtedly, figuring out how to deliver this future from the unpromising present is a major conundrum. Happily, here at Small Farm Future we have all the answers – and we’ll start revealing them soon. But not just yet. First I have to go and pinch out my tomatoes.

Population: what’s the problem?

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Apologies for the clickbait-y title. My question isn’t a rhetorical one intended to suggest that human population levels aren’t a problem. I don’t doubt they are. But it seems to me much less clear than a lot of people seem to think exactly what kind of problem they are, and what – if anything – could or should be done about it, which is what I want to aim at in this post. I raised these issues in my last post of 2017, which prompted some lively debate. But neither the post itself nor the comments under it quite nailed the issue for me, so here goes with another attempt.

1. Of proximal and underlying causation

In a recent article by the evergreen George Monbiot bemoaning plastic pollution in the oceans, the first comment under the line had this to say: “Two answers – population control and capitalism control – but no takers…not even George!”

It strikes me that this response is spot on…and also entirely misses the point. It’s spot on because although plastic pollution in the oceans is an immediate problem, it has deeper underlying causes which are summarily encapsulated by the words ‘population’ and ‘capitalism’ about as well as by any others. I think it’s a bit unfair to accuse George of not being a ‘taker’, since part of the point of his article was to suggest that self-fuelling economic growth – ‘capitalism’ by another name – is intrinsically destructive of the environment. Still, it’s surely true that without large global populations subject to the forces of capitalist commodification, the problem of plastic in the ocean would be very much less severe than it presently is.

But what is the ‘answer’ to the problem of plastic pollution, now that it’s there? Is it really population control and capitalism control? Suppose when the governments of the world met to negotiate the Montreal Protocol they’d said “the immediate problem of the ozone hole is caused by CFCs in aerosol propellants, but the underlying problem is population and capitalism. Therefore, rather than banning CFCs we propose to adopt a more holistic approach and exhort each member country to foster population control and work towards economic alternatives to capitalism”? Luckily, they didn’t, and the ozone hole is now a lot smaller than it otherwise would have been as a result.

Doubtless population and capitalism remain underlying problems, investing other issues – such as plastics in the ocean. Again, though, are population control or capitalism control the best means we have of addressing these other issues right now? Apparently, about 90% of ocean plastic pollution arises from just ten river systems in Asia and Africa, basically as a result of inadequate waste management systems and a lack of public consciousness about waste disposal in these rapidly industrialising places1. The most efficient remedy would seem to be targeting investment in waste management systems in the relevant places. It’s not a radical strategy aimed at the underlying generative factors, but it’s probably the most effective strategy aimed at the actual problem. Generally, I’m in favour of approaches that tackle the underlying nature of a problem, but sometimes it’s possible to overcomplicate things. The main problem with plastics in the ocean is plastics in the ocean.

It’s not an either/or thing, of course. Alongside strategies to reduce plastic pollution, strategies to reduce population and transcend capitalism also have their place. However, when someone like George writes an article identifying a particular issue such as this and gets the population/capitalism brush-off in response, I can’t help feeling that this is a way of relegating the problem from serious policy attention in the here and now. It would be a good thing if human population was lower than it is. But it isn’t, and it strikes me that very few of our contemporary problems are best tackled by prioritising population control as the main policy response. Certainly not plastics in the ocean.

2. Theories and causes

Nevertheless, it seems clear that high levels of human population lurk somewhere behind the numerous environmental crises of our age. But exactly how to elucidate the relationship between population and environmental impact is less obvious. In my previous post I critiqued ecological economist Herman Daly for a simplistic take on this (Daly is a fine thinker, but his subtlety seems to desert him on population matters). In a recent article, Daly said,

“Environmental impact is the product of the number of people times per capita resource use. In other words, you have two numbers multiplied by each other – which one is more important? If you hold one constant and let the other vary, you are still multiplying. It makes no sense to me to say that only one number matters”2

But, as I mentioned in my previous post, I just can’t see how Daly’s logic escapes a tautology that becomes obvious when you write his words down as an equation:

(1) Impact = Per Capita Impact x Population

=>

(2) Impact = (Impact ÷ Population) x Population

The fact that total impact varies in direct proportion with population when it’s written as a function of impact per population is a mathematical truism, but it doesn’t tell us whether population actually does affect impact in the real world. The same is true of the I = PAT formula that’s also often invoked to characterise the relationship between impact and population. These mathematical formulae are merely a priori assertions, not empirical findings of real-world relations.

Let me take this example. In the 1960s the global whaling fleet was catching about 25,000 fin whales annually. We could take the fin whale catch as one indicator of environmental impact. Global human population was about 3.5 billion at the time, so the per capita impact of fin whale hunting was about one whale per 140,000 people. Population back then was increasing globally by about 2% per annum. So was the fin whale catch increasing by about 2% as well? No. Only a handful of nations were involved in whaling, and catch levels were determined by various factors that had little to do with global population. You just can’t write a meaningful, predictive per capita impact x population equation in this instance.You need to fit a theory to the data, not data to a theory.

Doubtless there are other issues where population level does have a more direct and independent effect – greenhouse gas emissions, for example. But we know that individual-level emissions vary between people by a factor of at least 2,000 according to life choices and circumstances, so if we’re going to insist on writing an environmental impact equation with population level as an independent variable in it, it’s going to have to be something of the form:

(3) I = p∑iv

Where I = total impact, p = total population, i = per capita impact and v is a variable factor representing these individual differences in emission levels.

The fact is, you just can’t infer from such a formula that I is going to vary directly with p.

Perhaps this is all an over-elaborate way of making the familiar point that what matters most isn’t population level itself, it’s what populations do – burning fossil fuels, clearing forests, dropping plastic in rivers and so on. Some populations do a lot more of those things than others. So generally speaking, v seems to me a more important variable to focus policy attention around than p.

3. Fertility decline

And this is particularly true because while the population debate rages on, meanwhile – unnoticed by many – global fertility is crashing at a historically unprecedented rate, as indicated in the graph below, which shows fertility rates worldwide and for the world’s five most populous countries over the last 55 years.

Source: World Development Indicators –  http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=world-development-indicatorshose

Those who say there’s inadequate attention to population control might do well to ponder the implications of this graph. In just fifty years, global fertility has more than halved, from an average 5.07 live births per woman in 1964 to 2.45 in 2015. In three of the five most populous countries of the world, fertility rates are considerably below replacement rate – and in fact this is true in about half the countries of the entire world. I would have thought that the trend shown in this graph would be widely celebrated by the anti-population lobby, but it scarcely seems to get a mention. True, population itself rather than population growth rate or fertility rate is continuing to rise for the time being as a result of the time lag between present fertility and its manifestation in future birth rates – there’s not much that can be done about that, short of mass murder or enforced childlessness. Fertility rates have to drop first before population level does, just as a car has to stop accelerating before it can start slowing. But for those who say that not enough is being done to reduce population, I wonder what realistic policy measures they believe could have been implemented over the last fifty years that could have improved on this 50% fertility decline.

It’s worth noting that not many countries apart from China have implemented explicit population control policies, and if you look at the graph you’ll see that the point at which China introduced its one child policy (1979) came after its steepest fertility decline. So it seems that on this one, the people of the world have voted with their feet…or maybe with other parts of their anatomy…and done the policymakers’ work for them. Certainly, it would have been hard to implement official population control policies globally as effective as this gigantic act of self-implementation, and perhaps unwise too – many countries are going to face significant social problems in the coming century as a result of this demographic collapse, however welcome it may be for other reasons3.

Of course, the demographic collapse doesn’t mean that our environmental and resource problems are going to magically sort themselves out. Which is another reason why the ‘problem’ isn’t really ‘population’…‘capitalism’ gets a bit closer to the mark, perhaps. The billions of people who live on just a few dollars a day certainly do have an environmental impact, but it’s really not them who are driving the drastically negative impacts in the contemporary world. However, I’d guess that the majority of them would love to live as impactful a life as the average European or North American if only they could. In that sense, globally reducing fertility rates aren’t necessarily much to celebrate.

But maybe with global population set to decline in the future, there’s less need to panic about increasing crop yields, ‘sparing’ land, intensifying agriculture and all the other components of high tech solutionism that are routinely trotted out in relation to rising human numbers and pressure on earth systems. Maybe the idea of settling in to our existing local places for the long haul at historically very high, but soon to be declining, numbers might prompt some more sober thinking about the possibilities of a more sustainable, steady-state kind of agriculture.

The reasons for the astonishing fertility decline don’t seem completely clear, but are largely to do with the demographic transition (declining birth rates following declining death rates) and ‘modernization’, generally speaking. So inasmuch as the line I take on this website is generally opposed to ‘modernization’, perhaps it’s worth musing on the implications of a small farm future for fertility rates or future population levels.

Against the notion that peasant farmers always have high fertility, the evidence suggests that in situations where population pressure on land is a limiting factor (which could well be the case for a lower energy, small farm future in a country like Britain), people attempt to keep their fertility levels low4. But high fertility can look like a good idea if you have no means of supporting yourself in old age and/or you or your children are unlikely to be able to attain a secure livelihood. So if I were responsible for social policy in a resource-constrained country of small farmers in the future, I think I’d prioritise primary health care for mothers and infants, social care for the elderly, and educational/job creating opportunities for young people. Doubtless this would pose many challenges, but on the upside they’re all people-intensive rather than energy or capital intensive projects, and that’s where the true wealth of human societies lies.

I’m in no position myself to lecture anyone about the evils of human fertility but here’s a final thought: there’s something quite odd historically about societies that deem having children to be a bad or irresponsible choice on the grounds of environmental impact, without attending more directly to the nature of the impacts themselves. I have no idea how that’ll pan out, since there are so few historical precedents. My guess is that while other countries will try to ape the high-consumption low-fertility western style, not many will succeed and in the longer term that high consumption low fertility style will go the same way as other weird religious cults of the kind that emphasise celibacy and service to some jealous and demanding god. People will get old, the freezers containing the corpses of the transhumanists will run out of juice, the trinkets will lose their lustre, and ultimately our societies will be replaced by ones that are better able to farm and function at sustainable levels of energy use by attending more to v and not so much to p in equation (3) above.

Notes

  1. Schmidt, Christian et al. 2017. Export of plastic debris by rivers into the sea. Environmental Science & Technology. 51, 21: 12246-53.
  2. Daly, Herman. 2018. Ecologies of scale. New Left Review. 109: 81-104. p.93
  3. Morgan, Philip. 2003. Is low fertility a 21st century crisis? Demography. 40, 4: 589-603. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2849155/
  4. Netting, Robert. 1993. Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture. Stanford UP.

To find my resting place

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So many lines of enquiry left open from recent posts, and so many other things calling me away from my true vocation, which (obviously) is churning out these blog posts… Ah well, patience, patience – we’ll come to them all in the end, I hope. It’s like good old-fashioned British public services – it’s free, so you’ll just have to wait in line and accept what you’re given…

…which on this occasion is a somewhat unfinished post that’s been sitting in the pending tray for quite some time. But I’m going to publish it now in its naked state so I can polish off some other jobs – and if you read it, at least you’ll get a glimpse of what it’s like down in the Small Farm Future engine room. The post follows on quite naturally from the last – indeed, perhaps I risk the accusation that I’m over-labouring the same point, even down to picking over the same article by Paul Kingsnorth. If so, apologies in advance – we’ll move on to something different next time.

My broad theme is nationalism, identity, immigration and the places we call home (the title, incidentally, is from a Burning Spear song that I used to listen to a lot. It seems vaguely relevant).

I thought I’d start with a brief bit of my own (migrant) family history by telling the tales of my four grandparents, which I hope will help me illustrate a few points.

My mother’s father was a Yorkshire coalminer who fought in the trenches in World War I, and despite these two risky enterprises lived to a ripe old age. His grandfather had migrated to the South Yorkshire coalfields from Aberdeenshire. His grandfather’s grandfather, born in 1799, ran a smallholding in that part of Scotland and so far as I know was my last direct ancestor whose work life was devoted to farming.

My mother’s mother was the daughter of a Yorkshire miner, some of whose family had migrated there from the coalfields of South Wales. He was killed in a pit explosion along with most of the other men on his shift not long after she was born, and in those pre-welfare state days her mother struggled mightily to raise her four children alone, along with many of the other women of the village widowed by the mine. My grandmother said that if it hadn’t been for the help of the Salvation Army she fears her family would have been destitute.

My father’s father moved from factory work in northwest England to London, where he eventually became a teacher and lay Baptist preacher. Some of his ancestors were East European Jews who had moved to the Netherlands, taken citizenship there (the Netherlands being the first European country to grant citizenship to Jews in 1819) and then migrated to Britain, changing their surname from Smaaje-Halevi to Smaje in the charmingly naïve belief that English speakers would find ‘Smaje’ any easier to pronounce. I think the Judaism pretty much disappeared with the migration and the name change. One of the Smajes married a woman from Somerset, where I now live.

My father’s mother was born to Protestants in Northern Ireland (whose ancestors were no doubt of Scottish or English origin), moving to London after marrying my grandfather. My father grew up in London and my mother met him there after moving from Yorkshire to work in London. When my brother and I were born my parents moved out of London to somewhere they could afford a house, and I grew up in a semi-rural village about thirty miles outside London. After some years of living in London myself, I now live in northeast Somerset, about a hundred miles from where I grew up.

There are five points I’d like to make by way of – I hope not unreasonable – generalisation from that potted family history.

First, I reckon my pedigree as a true blue southern Englishman is probably about as good as most other people of my tribe – which is to say, not very good at all.

Second, in England (and Scotland) probably more than most countries it’s a pretty long time since many people have been working rural land. For those of us who seek a small farm future here, we will not find its workforce by looking among the current stock of farming folk.

Third, as my grandmother’s mother found out, living in a small village among known neighbours doesn’t necessarily make the vicissitudes of life easy to negotiate. The kindness of strangers – in this case, the Salvation Army – can be a boon.

Fourth, people tend to move to where there are opportunities for work. The potential paths are many, but the ones my forebears took are scarcely surprising – from East Europe to the Netherlands, and Britain. From Scotland and Wales to England. From Yorkshire to London. From periphery to core, as historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein likes to put it.

And finally, even though I’ve spent almost all my life living in southern England there isn’t a single patch of earth in this whole wide world where somebody doesn’t have a better claim than me to truly be a local. Maybe that applies to my daughter too, who was born here in Frome. My guess is that it probably applies to the majority of the world’s people.

Seeking what he calls a benevolent green nationalism, in a recent article Paul Kingsnorth had this to say:

“It must be 20 years since I read the autobiography of the late travel writer Norman Lewis, The World, The World, but the last sentence stays with me. Wandering the hills of India, Lewis is asked by a puzzled local why he spends his life travelling instead of staying at home. What is he looking for? “I am looking for the people who have always been there,” replies Lewis, “and belong to the places where they live. The others I do not wish to see.”

That sentence has stayed with me too, because it makes Lewis sound like a total arse – partly because if you spend all your time travelling in search of the authentically rooted it seems to me that you’re kind of missing the point, and partly because of the alt-modern sensibility underlying Lewis’s contempt for the unrooted people – the global majority, wandering mongrels like me and my ancestors, the herd, the untermensch, the plastic people, the unreal people, rootless cosmopolitans. These are some of the names I’ve heard.

We sorely need in the world today some stronger ways of relating people more authentically to place, but for me any doctrine that “does not wish to see” the unemplaced multitudes is a non-starter, and a potentially dangerous one at that. One of the dangers is that after a couple of centuries of state-nationalist propaganda, we’ve become far too ready to connect a love of place or the comforting rhythms of the local to the designs of our emphatically non-local polities.

For example, when asked why he’d volunteered to fight in World War I, the writer Edward Thomas famously scooped up a handful of English soil and said “Literally, for this”. I’d be more sympathetic if he’d said “Figuratively, for this” and then provided some kind of rationale that linked his affinity for the decayed humic residues of the various organisms he was holding in his hand – whose distribution in few cases is limited to England alone – with the machinations of the British imperial government in its contest with Austria-Hungary and other jostling political powers of the world system. But no, the trick of nationalism is to leave such things unsaid, inciting our minds to make strange connections between the local things and people we love and abstract entities like England, empire or state.

Unlike Thomas, my grandfather wasn’t a poet or an author. He was a soldier, a miner and a gardener who rented his allotment and his house. Apparently, he never spoke about the war. I wonder if he would have endorsed Thomas’s sentiments – I believe that many enlisted men did. Or would he have endorsed this alternatively earthy metaphor from the Ed Pickford/Dick Gaughan Worker’s Song:

But when the sky darkens and the prospect is war/ Who’s given a gun and then pushed to the fore / And expected to die for the land of our birth / When we’ve never owned one handful of earth?

oOo

Humans are an inherently migratory, patch-disturbing, neophilic species. It’s a fair bet that even among the people “who have always been there”, most of them haven’t been there for all that long, and have lived as they do now for less time still. As discussed on this site recently, even the individuals who are most genetically remote from each other on earth share a common ancestor who lived no more than a few thousand years ago. We’re also an inherently self-conscious species. One of the best reasons I can think of for the need for us to relate more authentically to our local places is that if we don’t there’s a fair chance we’ll soon be screwed, so it makes sense for us to reckon with that fact and act accordingly…

…And one of the best ways to relate more authentically to our local places is to produce our livelihoods from them with a minimum of exotic energy imports. My feeling is that people who are able, self-consciously, to do this are more likely to have a rich sense of emplacement and inherent self-worth that’s uncomplicated by local pride, still less by any kind of “my country, right or wrong” abstract nationalism. Where they live is special and is also nothing special. Exotic people, the foreign-born, are welcome to find a place alongside the local-born if they’re playing the same livelihood game. Perhaps more than welcome – they may bring some new knowledges. As Joe Clarkson observed on this site a while back, trustworthiness in such a society is something that can be earned on the basis of being a provider of food or other materials. Little else really matters.

The state, the political centre, has both nothing and everything to do with this. It has nothing to do with it inasmuch as it has no call on people’s emotional attachments to the places that they live, and to the people that live there. If you wouldn’t lay down your life for an abstraction like the EU, why would you lay it down for an abstraction like England? For your family, for your farm, for your ‘community’…well…

It has everything to do with the state inasmuch as, absenting total civilizational breakdown, the kind of locality society I’m describing can only be delivered by a state that’s centralised at some level and is constituted as the servant of such a society, rather than one that constitutes itself as its master, drawing local legitimacy upwards to its own purposes. Fat chance of that, you might say, and I’d have to concede the scale of the task. But at least it specifies where the work has to be done and the nature of what’s involved. In the wake of Trump and Brexit, I’ve seen too many liberals and leftists rapidly backtracking on their former commitments to multiculturalism, multinationalism, multilateralism, cosmopolitanism and other such standard fare of the left in the hope they can keep the wolves at bay by throwing them some tasty sacrificial morsels from their new-found communitarianism. I think it’s the wrong strategy. The shifting norms won’t keep the wolves at bay, but merely encourage them.

Many nomadic foraging cultures have learned from bitter experience that individual egos need to be kept in check for the greater good of the band as a whole. So a hunter returning to camp never brags about his kill for fear of social reprisal. “Terrible hunting today,” he might say, “Just couldn’t seem to aim straight. All I got was a couple of stringy morsels I’ve left by the fire.” Whereupon the rest of the group rushes to the fire, knowing they’re in for a huge feast. For the hunter’s meat, I’d submit our modern nations. Don’t heft your soil in your hand and use it as a metonym for England. Heft it and say instead well this soil is poor stuff – worse, I’m sure, than the fine soils of your country – but it’s the soil I know best. Maybe there’ll come a time when you’ll feel you have to fight for that poor soil of home. But if that happens, I think you’ll be able to narrate a better logic for your fight than Edward Thomas could for his. Soil is no excuse to go looking for a fight.

I suspect that the imaginary attachment between soil and nation-state affected by the likes of Thomas comes more readily to us modern arrivistes, the people that Norman Lewis does not wish to see. People generally seek emotional attachment to something bigger than their own horizons, and over the last couple of centuries a lot of work has been put into making the nation-state seem the obvious choice to people living sub/urban lives where the groundedness of a productive soil or a known community is missing. It’s possible to overstate this case. Local farming isn’t the only way to have an authentic relationship with the universe, local farmers aren’t necessarily immune from the siren song of nationalism, and not everyone who lives in the city mourns its implicit alienation.

Still, I think there’s a stronger truth to it than will be found rummaging around in the wardrobe of the nation-state to find some benevolent green nationalist clothing. Nationalism is too self-consciously constructed and too wrapped up in the legitimation of centralised political power to proffer benevolence. It’s better to serve the soil and its organisms than it is to serve “this sceptred isle…this England” (interesting that Shakespeare should have put those words into John of Gaunt’s mouth in a play about a changing world where medieval honour is usurped by scheming and statecraft). There are numerous ways to serve the soil that have no connection with political power, and that are available to everyone, whether they’ve “always been there” or not. In fact, if you haven’t “always been there” probably the major way you can start belonging to the place where you live is to start serving its soil. Most likely, that’s how the people who’ve always been there pulled it off when they first arrived.

“How long have you been here?” is a question freighted with well-known political dangers that we seem to be courting once again in the contemporary world. In a local farm society “Would you like to join us for lunch?” is a safer (if not entirely innocent) way of playing status games. But what I’ve said here operates mostly at the level of individuals and communities. I see no role for nationalism, benevolent green or otherwise among them. But I haven’t said anything about immigration and the larger interactions of states and civilisations. Ah well, there’s always the next post. Or more likely one of the ones after that.

Florence, Texas

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First, a quick bit of housekeeping. I think my RSS feed has stopped working, but I want to check with anyone who might subscribe to this blog by that route. If you’d be so good as to send me a message via the Contact Form to that effect I’d be grateful – you could just put a message in the subject line saying ‘Feed working’ or ‘Feed not working’. Many thanks. Alternative ways of keeping updated about the blog are via Facebook or by following me on Twitter. What a virtual world I live in. It’ll all end in tears – you read it here first. But in the meantime, I’m about to establish yet another way of keeping up with Small Farm Future in the form of a monthly digest of blogs and other publications from the Smajian stable. If you want to be sure of keeping abreast of the Small Farm Future world, drop me a line via the Contact Form and I’ll put you on the list.

Right, now down to business. I’d like to raise a standard in this post for two doctrines that I think speak to our troubled times. I’ve discussed them both before, but it occurs to me that perhaps I haven’t brought them together systematically enough or thought about them conjointly with enough clarity. This is a preliminary effort to do so, which as it happens also bears on some of the debates emerging out of a few of my recent posts. The doctrines I have in mind are civic republicanism (that’s the Florence part of my title) and agrarian populism (the Texas part). Let me explain…

It’s a commonplace of anti-establishment politics nowadays to oppose globalisation and neoliberalism – and even to oppose ‘liberalism’ without the ‘neo’, as in critiques of the machinations of the much-derided ‘liberal elites’. I’m pretty much signed up to this agenda, but I’m not signed up to invoking in place of global neoliberalism some kind of communitarian localist alternative that’s assumed to be a superior pre-political ‘natural’ community – clan, tribe, nation, ethnic group, ‘the local community’ and so on. This is for three reasons.

First, such identities usually turn out to be much less ‘natural’ than their proponents like to claim. They rarely reach back to some pre-political, essential or unproblematic claim on people’s emotions and loyalties. Instead they emerge from other – usually quite recent – processes of political claim-making. As Immanuel Wallerstein put it “first the boundaries, then the passions”.

Second, these identity claims can be dangerously exclusive, not only towards the claims made by other peoples outside the group, but also towards alternative claims made by people within it – I get an inkling of this when I see people who argue for greater parliamentary oversight of Britain’s farcical Brexit negotiations denounced as “enemies of the people”. While the existing global neoliberal order is dangerously exclusive too, I don’t see the virtue in exchanging one kind of dangerous exclusivity for another.

Third, while the manufactured contemporary neo/liberal political community is certainly problematic, that doesn’t mean it’s necessary to give up on the notion of any kind of manufactured political community. Indeed, I’d argue that all political communities have to be manufactured, and the sooner we give up the notion of ‘natural’, pre-political communities and their virtues the better. The ‘recovering environmentalist’ Paul Kingsnorth pushes a bald dichotomy between ‘globalism’ on the one hand and what he calls “people’s deep, old attachment to tribe, place and identity” on the other. Not so fast, sir. Can there not be a constructed, political, deliberative kind of particularistic moral community that we don’t just assume into existence on the basis of its ‘depth’ or ‘antiquity’?

Enter civic republicanism. It’s a political tradition with roots in the classical world that was given its modern shape by the much-maligned Niccolò Machiavelli of Florence (hence the ‘Florence’ of my title) and arguably last had real political traction during the early years of the US republic in the thought of people like Thomas Jefferson. It lost politically to the ‘modern’ doctrines of liberalism and socialism, but now that those doctrines seem to have run their course, bequeathing the world numerous problems in their wake, civic republicanism has enjoyed a mini-revival, albeit so far mostly just in the writing of political philosophers rather than in much real-world politics.

A thumbnail definition of civic republicanism would be that it’s a form of politics founded on interdependent, individual citizens, who form a political community by deliberating and forging common goods or ‘values’ as the basis of living politically together. In this respect, it’s different from,

(a) libertarianism, which is focused on individual rights, not common goods

(b) liberalism, which is focused on defining political practice not political outcomes

(c) socialism, which focuses on class-based restitution of inequality (and ideology)

(d) communitarianism, which (like Kingsnorth) focuses on a ‘natural’, pre-political basis for the polity

I think all of these traditions have something to commend them (communitarianism is the one that impresses me the least), but a version of civic republicanism seems to me best fitted to creating viable post-global, post-capitalist, ecologically-sustainable societies.

I’ll try to lay out in more detail what such a version might look like in a future post. I guess for now I’d just say that I share the high value placed by liberalism and libertarianism on individual rights and freedom (contrast it with arbitrary legal process and a coercive political economy), but I don’t think those principles always supervene over common goods (eg. the freedom to erode away your farm soil in pursuit of short-term profit). And I share with socialism an understanding of the corrosive nature of unchecked private wealth which often has a class structuring, but without the confidence of socialism that class rather than citizenship can act as the motor of restitution, or that equality rather than justice represents a preferred end-state. I also share with parts of the socialist tradition the idea that values are shaped collectively and systematically – that is to say that we’re shaped by ideology. But I’m not sure that there’s such a thing as ‘scientific socialism’ which escapes ideological blinkers.

In a recent post I invoked libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick’s ‘framework for utopias’ as a way of thinking about a sustainable post-capitalist future, to a mixed reception. I suppose I was unconsciously motivated by a civic republican impulse to suggest that if you take individual rights seriously, you can’t have untrammelled freedom unless you make the implausible assumption that individual freedom inevitably promotes collective freedom, ie. common goods or agreed common values (much of the ‘New Optimist’ school of thought – Steven Pinker, the ecomodernists etc. – seems to me like so many attempts to shore up this assumption…implausibly.) Since we can’t all choose our ideal utopia and go to live there, I think Nozick’s framework pushes us towards a civic republican need to determine common goods deliberatively. With hindsight, I think some of the ensuing discussion (including my own) about individualism, independence and collectivism under that post would have benefitted from a civic republican lens, and a sharper focus on ideology.

One of the problems with civic republicanism is that it’s hard to create and maintain a community of citizens in the face of other political forms. The present global capitalist order, undergirded by libertarianism/liberalism, generates vast wealth for the few which is partly coopted (increasingly badly) by states and used to buy off enough of the many to keep the lid on the system. Socialist alternatives have typically involved claims originating among the many for a bigger piece of the pie, usually based on well-founded class ressentiment and often accompanied by a utopian belief that this class project will somehow result in universal benefit for all. As the class basis for the socialisms of the 19th and 20th centuries has frayed, many contemporary socialisms seem to have narrowed into a kind of cargo cult version of capitalism, of relations over essences, until we reach the final materialist essence of the ‘fully automated luxury communism’ variety, in its more sophisticated (Kate Raworth, Paul Mason, Nick Srnicek) or less sophisticated (Leigh Phillips) forms. Historically, civic republicanism has often been the preserve of small-scale, tightly-organised and quite militaristic societies, defending their common goods from the barbarians at the gate. I fear that it may operate like that in the future too, against any number of capitalist, socialist or nativist ‘barbarians’, but one can always hope.

I’ve recently come across an excellent essay by Eric Freyfogle, a sympathetic critique of Wendell Berry’s thought which, among other things, emphasises his debt to and his divergences from civic republicanism. One of Freyfogle’s points, which bears on my recent post about personal behaviour and ecological damage, is that Berry strongly emphasises individual morality and individual culpability in the aggregate for our contemporary ecological bads. For Freyfogle, Berry’s approach “largely blames the individual for problems that are far bigger than the individual. It increases the level of guilt in a way that can detract attention from the larger failures of collective responsibility”.

Freyfogle goes on to make the argument that as a citizen I might support government action that penalises or disincentivises profligate fossil-fuel use, while as an individual I might continue to avail myself of the opportunities afforded by cheap fossil fuels – a situation in which I think many of us, most certainly me, find ourselves today. A typical response is to think that our individual behaviour reveals our ‘true’ character, revealing our citizenship activism as mere hypocrisy. Certainly this seems to be Berry’s view. Freyfogle demurs from it, on the grounds that it overemphasises the importance of individual choices made in isolation as both the true mirror of our character and the most significant domain for political change. As I suggested in my ‘Be the change’ post, and others suggested in the discussion, it may be a good idea to de-emphasise this religious dimension of ecological action as personal morality and to place more emphasis on our actions as interdependent political citizens in defining common goods. Civic republicanism offers one means of doing so.

Shifting focus somewhat now, I’ve long argued for a version of agrarian populism or left agrarian populism as a key to future sustainable societies. An important intellectual ancestor in this respect is Alexander Chayanov, a Russian economist of peasant farming who was murdered in Stalin’s gulag and whose ideas keep getting murdered by later generations of Marxists. Jan Douwe van der Ploeg’s Peasants and the Art of Farming: A Chayanovian Manifesto is a brilliant (if unfortunately rather turgidly written) reconstruction of Chayanov’s thought for the present age – other writers like James Scott, Paul Richards and Eric Wolf have also freshened up Chayanovian perspectives in more recent times. There have also been numerous agrarian populist political movements around the world, probably the best known in ‘western’/Anglo-US consciousness being the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party that briefly rose to prominence in the late 19th century USA out of its Texan heartlands (hence the ‘Texas’ of my title).

I’ve spent time pondering whether these older agrarian populist movements have much to teach us today about a politics for modern times. The answer proffered by US historians has varied according to intellectual fashion and the prevailing political winds – from Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘No’ (1890s) to John D. Hicks ‘Yes’ (1930s) to Richard Hofstadter’s ‘No’ (1950s) to Lawrence Goodwyn’s ‘Yes’ (1970s) to Charles Postel’s ‘Not much’ (2000s). I feel inclined to side with Postel…but also with Ploeg. I think we need to recuperate the economics of the family or peasant farm, and the Chayanovian tradition can help us with that. But to achieve it politically, I think past agrarian populist movements are of limited use. For Postel, US agrarian populism was less far removed than is often supposed from the liberal politics that supplanted it, whereas for Freyfogle “the Populists rose and fell because their moral dreams lacked any means of accomplishment”. Civic republicanism offers a stronger political frame to hang an agrarian populist economics from, but I think is also caught on the horns of that dilemma.

Meanwhile, populism has now taken on a very different cast in western politics with the election of Donald Trump, the UK’s Brexit vote and the rise of far-right populist parties across Europe. These events have prompted many anguished liberal disavowals of the ‘populist threat’ recently, such as in books by Yascha Mount and William Galston that are skewered by Thomas Frank in an interesting recent review. For Frank – as for many other commentators, like John Michael Greer – the rise of US populism stems from the abandonment of ordinary working people by the political class, and particularly by ‘the left’ and the Democratic Party. “Reduced to its essentials” says Frank “populism is America’s way of expressing class antagonism….Anyone can be the voice of those who work, and when one party renounces its claim the other can easily pick it up”. A problem he diagnoses in much current liberal antipathy to contemporary populism is complete ignorance of past populist traditions and why they arose.

A great advantage of Frank over someone like Greer is that he isn’t taken in by Trump’s populist posturing:

“The right name for Trump’s politics is “demagoguery” or “pseudo-populism”. By lumping him together with the genuine reform tradition of populism, we do that tradition a violent disservice.”

I’d go so far as to say that we do that tradition a disservice even by calling Trump a pseudo-populist. Sure, he borrows a few scraps of rhetoric from the populist rulebook like economic protectionism, but with none of the accompanying vision and intent. I suppose there is an identifiable right-wing populism which he recycles in his rhetoric – anti-immigrant, anti-liberal, anti-intellectual, nationalist/nativist, and rhetorically supportive of working people, or at least working men. It’s a shame that it goes by the same name as the reformist tradition Frank identifies, because the two have little in common.

In the UK, the Brexit campaign lacked even Trump’s thin veneer of populist reformism. It was sustained largely by elixirs of neoliberalism and haughty isolationism. I’ll confess that my reaction here at Small Farm Future to the Brexit and Trump results perhaps borrowed a little from the horrified liberal zeitgeist. It invited accusations that I wasn’t a proper populist, which suits me fine because I doubt I’m a ‘proper’ anything. But Frank’s intervention encourages me to think that in part it was the reaction of a horrified populist seeing the tradition hijacked – and watching commentators like Greer turn into apologists for the hijacking.

There’s also perhaps some transatlantic confusion here. As far as I’m able to discern from my distant vantage point, it does seem that in the US many conservatives have finally decided that they don’t much like capitalism and globalisation. Good for them. What I think they can’t then do is pull a Greer and pin all the evils of capitalism, the market and globalisation on the left/Democrats as if the right/Republicans are unsullied by the same associations. But this whole political iteration doesn’t work in the UK where the right/Conservatives remain wedded to neoliberalism, albeit with a few nationalistic twists, while the left/Labour attempts to extricate itself from Blairite neoliberal globalism and articulate a social democratic vision grounded in national sovereignty. Both parties are mired in what strike me as irresolvable contradictions, though it seems to me that Labour has more potential to emerge out of them with something akin to US-style reformist-populism.

If and when it does, I think it’ll be plunged immediately into the kind of contradictions faced by civic republicanism – how to create an engaged citizenry, how to defend the republic from disintegrative alternative forces, how to define agreement around common goods. But at least these are problems worth wrestling with. By contrast, how to make America great again is not a problem worth wrestling with.

For my part, I think I need to wrestle some more with the overlaps and contradictions between the various traditions I’ve identified here as a possible base for sustainable future societies: civic republicanism, agrarian populism, the individual rights focus of libertarianism and probably the justice and ideology focus of leftism, broadly conceived. I’d also like to acknowledge the importance, noted by Kingsnorth, of attachment to place, but without making it the basis of competitive or exclusionary political identity. So for me the siren songs of nationalism, nativism, communitarianism and Trumpian demagoguery, as well as neoliberalism, are all part of the problems that must be overcome.

To be or not to be the change

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Coming up on Small Farm Future – some posts on the hows and whys of social transformation towards more sustainable societies, which have been prefigured in recent posts like this one on ‘self-systemic’ agriculture and my previous one on utopias – perhaps particularly in relation to the ensuing discussion about individualism and collectivism. Here, I’ll look at the question of transformation via personal consumption choices in societies of mass consumption, which I touched on a while back. That discussion prompted Peter Kalmas, climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution to get in touch and kindly send me his book.

Maybe first I should set out a brief position statement. As I see it, the world is beset with enormous inequities, creating a lot of human misery, and looming environmental crises, creating yet more human (and non-human) misery. The dominant paradigm for tackling these problems involves lifting people out of poverty through growing the capitalist global economy, and mitigating the environmental problems caused by this economic growth through technical innovation. I don’t think this will work on either count – it won’t lift many people out of poverty and it won’t succeed in mitigating environmental problems. If we continue down this path, it seems to me likely that there will be major breakdowns in human social systems and in the Earth’s biophysical systems. In fact, there already are. These may proliferate in all sorts of surprising and dystopian ways, but I don’t see much point in speculating about how such ‘collapse’ scenarios may unfold. I do see a point in speculating about alternative scenarios that may create better outcomes, and in particular about how such scenarios may emerge from present social processes, because that may give some kind of a handle on how to increase the probability of those better outcomes occurring. So that, generally speaking, is what I want to focus my writing around.

One possible way of achieving these better outcomes is if the wealthy consumers of the world change their consumption behaviour: stop flying, stop driving, stop buying products that use conflict minerals, stop eating resource-intensive meat, stop shopping in value-scouring supermarkets, stop using polluting plastic and so on. Peter’s book (I can’t claim to have read it word-by-word and cover-to-cover…I’m afraid the in-box is too full…but I’ve spent some time looking over it) first sets out the evidence for climate change, the seriousness of its consequences and the pressing need to do something about it. Then it looks at the numerous things us carbon-spewing rich western consumers can do to lessen our impact on the climate system. And it emphasises that many of these things don’t involve loss and self-sacrifice, but can be part of a more fulfilling and interesting way of life.

I don’t have any quarrel with that. The science, as far as I can tell, is compelling – it’s a really good idea if we reduce global carbon emissions, fast. And somehow that’s going to have to involve people in high-emission regions like Western Europe and North America cutting their emissions drastically. Well then…Peter’s book shows us how to get started.

I guess the problem I have is that I don’t think it’ll work – for three reasons, of increasing gravity.

The first is a twist on the familiar criticism of environmentalists – they talk about the dangers of climate change while flying off to environmental conferences in exotic locations etc etc. They’re hypocrites who don’t practice what they preach…what we might call the John Michael Greer critique. The risk that I think Peter’s proposals run is the opposite: the dread prospect of environmentalists who don’t fly off to exotic conferences, who instead preach what they practice.

People don’t like hypocrites for sure, but nor do they like preachy environmentalists telling them that they shouldn’t do stuff. Now, I’m sure Peter isn’t at all preachy, but I think it’s hard to avoid people reading those bad, virtue-signalling motives into any public avowal of carbon restraint. If you consider yourself a role model helping other people lessen their planetary impact by following your example, I’d be willing to bet that a fair proportion of those other people will dismiss you as insufferably smug unless you have social skills that greatly exceed my own (which to be fair wouldn’t be difficult – that’s why they only let me communicate with the world through this computer). I’ve been down this road myself – I’ve been the Puritan at the party, shocked at the wanton ways of lesser folk. I ended up not liking that guy much and now try to cultivate a different persona. Let he who is free of sin and all that…

Some of the commenters under my last post emphasised the need for greater collaboration and less private individualism in a sustainable post-capitalist society of the future. So how about this? Suppose you’ve given up eating meat because of its environmental impact – good for you — and an acquaintance invites you over to a special meal, which in their worldview is a beef-fest. I suggest you keep your meat abstinence private and tuck in. One or two meaty meals are neither here nor there in terms of global environmental protection. More important that you build community by publicly accepting your acquaintance’s generosity. But if it’s important to you to be seen not to be eating meat, I’d want to ask why. Is publicly-dramatised individual abstinence the best route to sustainability? Maybe…but maybe not?

The second problem is essentially the free rider problem – if everybody refrained from behaviour X it would have a significant impact on global emissions, whereas if it’s just me and a handful of other freaks while everyone else carries on regardless it has no significant impact on global emissions. Might as well carry on Xing, then? Well, Peter makes the point that lower impact choices can often be the fun choice – who wants to sit in a traffic jam when you can be biking through the woods? It’s a good point, but I don’t think you can sustain it across the board – particularly in the context of a society that’s systemically organised on the basis that many or most (rich) people will have to drive to work, fly for business or pleasure, be instantly reachable via mobile phone, shop at the supermarket etc. It’s not that these possibilities are intrinsically great in themselves, but in a society that’s organised around them you have to go out of your way to avoid them, which may sometimes be possible and indeed attractive at the individual level, but not really possible for the population en masse.

Actually, that’s the thing that draws me most to people making ethical lifestyle choices – that little spark of individuality driving them to swim against the current, resist the machine etc. But then here we are, back to individualism…

Perhaps a wrinkle within this second problem is the complexity of the issues concerning the shape of a future sustainable society. There’s no end of ‘expert’ opinion telling us, for example, that feedlot beef involves lower emissions than pasture-fed beef, which is probably true depending on how you choose to draw the parameters around your analysis. But it’s also probably true that in a sustainable, low-energy society there’d be some pasture-fed cattle, but no feedlot cattle. So should you eat only feedlot beef to lower your emissions, eat only pasture-fed beef to help stimulate sustainable farming, or eat no beef at all in the hope that somehow by so doing you can wash your hands of these agrarian dilemmas? Beats me.

But suppose you take a different view to my first two points. If you model environmentally responsible behaviour, you’ll inspire others to do likewise. And if everyone did likewise, then the problem is solved.

Except that – point three – it’s not going to happen without profound systemic change. The present political economy is deeply invested in a massively energy-intense model of modernist-urbanist creation, destruction and re-creation involving vast flows of people and goods. Individually it’s possible to lower your footprint via numerous consumption decisions such as cycling rather than driving to work. Collectively, if it does prove possible to aggregate those decisions then it’ll tank the system and there’ll be no work to cycle to. OK, so maybe that’s precisely the aim – but then you need a different systemic vision, which is not implicit in the consumption decisions and can’t be assumed just to happen as a dependent outcome of them. In other words, the system has emergent properties – it needs ‘systemic’ restructuring at the level of the system.

I’m doubtful of the possibilities for aggregating those consumption decisions by example or exhortation in a society organised fiscally to incentivise the exact opposite. I see a parallel here with the ‘make the healthy choice the easy one’ paradigm in health promotion. Historical examples: don’t subsidise sugar production and then exhort people not to eat sugar; don’t manufacture dangerous cars and then tell people to drive carefully; don’t make flying the easiest and cheapest choice and then expect people not to do it.

I also see a parallel with 18th century anti-slavery activism in Britain. Middle-class people (middle-class women in particular) started talking about the link between the sugar they were drinking in their tea and the blood-soaked horrors of the colonial economy that was delivering it to them. But for all that in Britain today we like to think that it was William Wilberforce and his cohorts who personally put a stop to the slave trade, the ending of the trade and of slavery itself was a long drawn-out affair that responded mostly to changes in the global political economy and the superpower politics of the day – system emergence again.

Nevertheless, I’d concede that the behaviour of the parts is important. Anti-slavery activism more-or-less created the modern public sphere of respectable opinion and concern for unknown others that I think could be critical for a tolerable post-capitalist future. So whether you incline more towards Peter’s stance or mine, maybe the important thing is hanging onto the possibility that we can politely put out our alternative views in public.

None of the arguments I’ve proffered make a case for not trying to lower one’s personal environmental impact as such. I agree with Wendell Berry when he writes,

“to be fearful of the disease and yet unwilling to pay for the cure is not just to be hypocritical; it is to be doomed. If you talk a good line without being changed by what you say, then you are not just hypocritical and doomed; you have become an agent of the disease”1

I’d only add that even if you are changed by what you say and try to take some practical steps towards a cure within the current iteration of the global political economy, you’re almost certainly still an agent of the disease. That’s not an argument against taking the practical steps. It is an argument against their efficacy in the absence of finding routes towards structural transformation.

So I’m sympathetic to the ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’ message. I don’t think it’s morally innocent to take a plane flight just because personal choice in that respect makes little difference to global outcomes. But what makes a bigger difference is collective, organised, political action geared to systemic change. The ‘be the change’ message is attributed to Mohandas Gandhi, but this is what Gandhi actually said (which Peter accurately quotes in his book):

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change toward him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”

I find Brian Morton’s interpretation of this passage quite persuasive: “Gandhi is telling us that personal and social transformation go hand in hand, but there is no suggestion in his words that personal transformation is enough. In fact, for Gandhi, the struggle to bring about a better world involved not only stringent self-denial and rigorous adherence to the philosophy of nonviolence; it also involved a steady awareness that one person, alone, can’t change anything, an awareness that unjust authority can be overturned only by great numbers of people working together with discipline and persistence.”

Looking back from the present at the key causes for which Gandhi stood– Indian independence from colonial rule, non-violence and rural self-reliance – it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that his activism was only conspicuously successful in relation to the first of these. And ultimately this was the easiest one, because it fitted a pre-existing collective narrative of national self-assertion which is all too evident today under the aggressive Hindu nationalism of Modi (there’s a larger story here about the intersections and dissonances between Gandhism and Hindu nationalism, but let’s not go there now).

So in summary, while there’s much to be said for changing personal consumption habits in response to the climate crisis, I doubt that the necessary social transformation can be generated purely from aggregating such changes. In which case, I guess it behoves me to offer some alternative suggestions as to where the impetus for social transformation might come from. Ay, there’s the rub – I wish I had the answers. Conventional political positions just keep rollin’ on as if they do, but to me they seem exhausted. The right thinks history is on its side: human nature, markets, cultural identities will generate the correct solutions (never mind that these things are numerously and numinously contradictory). The left thinks history is on its side: social conflict powering historical change will propel righteous collective solutions. Both left and right are invested deeply in technological solutionism – which is why the books written by their avant-garde futurists all seem uncannily similar. Stewart Brand, Leigh Phillips, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, Nick Srnicek, Mark Lynas: they sound like the modulated voice of a single character from some nightmarish modernist novel. Lord deliver me from fully automated luxury communism. Or capitalism.

Partly I think solutionism itself is the problem. There are no ‘solutions’ and no right answers. But I’d like to think there may be better answers to the numerous crises we currently face – not just the climate crisis but other biophysical crises, as well as social ones (economic justice, cultural meaning). One possibility is to bring more marginalised political traditions onto the stage – anarchism, environmentalism, libertarianism (any contradictions there? …you betcha). Or else to seek some radical rupture with the politics of the past that seems better fitted to our contemporary predicaments.

So…what path to take? The old familiar mainstream, the marginal, or the radically new? Hell, I’m opting for all of the above. I think we need to revitalise the best of the old traditions of right and left, while bringing in the contributions of more marginal political positions from the past – and articulating them all afresh in the completely novel historical circumstances we face.

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it, and I already started out last time in my post on libertarianism and utopia (and in other previous posts too, like this one). So watch this space…though please forgive my lessened current output, resulting from various other pressing projects.

Meanwhile, I’d thoroughly recommend a read of Peter’s book, and I’d urge you (non-smugly) to try lowering your carbon footprint. Just don’t tell me that you’re doing it.

Notes

  1. Berry, W. 2017. The World-Ending Fire. Penguin. P.55.

From info-tech to post-capitalism?

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Times have been hard of late for us leftists. Despite the fact that a good deal of our tradition’s criticisms of capitalism and modernity have proved accurate, the expected solutions haven’t really come – and when leftist governments have assumed power, they’ve often compounded the problems. New issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss and resource squeezes, not to mention feminism, decolonisation and identity politics, have arisen and challenged old leftist certainties. Small wonder that there’s a cottage industry in the publishing world for new leftist books trying to make sense of all these emerging trends.

I’ve tried to keep up as best I can with a selection of these volumes. They vary from the gob-smackingly bad – like Leigh Phillips’ neo-Bolshevik Austerity Ecology and the Collapse Porn Addicts – to the serious and thought-provoking. To my mind, almost all of them suffer from an insufficiently analysed commitment to ‘progress’ and technological solutionism. It’s not that I’m arguing instead for regress and anti-technological, reactionary backwardness…here, you can already sense the narrow straitjacket that leftism (and not only leftism, but most mainstream political thought) throws around the debate over ‘progress’ and technology. We need to do a better job when we talk about these ideas and acknowledge their complexities. Not much chance of that with public intellectuals like Steven Pinker strutting their stuff – what’s this weird modernist obsession with proving how much better life is now than in the past all about?

Anyway, Paul Mason’s book Postcapitalism: A Guide To Our Future (Penguin, 2015) is one of the better efforts I’ve read among this bad bunch. I still think it suffers from some of the characteristic weaknesses of mainstream leftist thought – and I think it would probably have been better titled Capitalism: A Guide To Our Past – but I’ve come away from it feeling enriched and informed. I’m not going to try to summarise it here, but I do want to review a few of Mason’s points that bear most directly on some of the concerns of this blog.

1. Capitalist crisis: Leftists, and Marxists in particular, have long argued that there are inherent tendencies to crisis within the capitalist economy, basically associated with the contradiction between finding consumers to buy its products and immiserating labour to cut its costs, and with replacing human labour with machinery. These tendencies are genuine, but the capitalist economy has proved much more resilient than the early Marxists supposed in overcoming its crises, essentially by finding ever new arenas (places, people, products) to commodify. It’s possible that the present impasse of the global capitalist economy will prove to be no more than another one of these temporary crises, but there are various signs that it’s more serious than that. In briefest outline, these include the unprecedented reliance on debt-fuelled growth by most of the major ‘developed’ countries, the scouring of value from these countries’ own increasingly immiserated populations, placing more wealth into the hands of an increasingly small global economic elite, the pressures of resource crisis and climate change, and the emergence within many of the major western economies of an impetus towards beggar-my-neighbour trade protectionism of the kind associated with the rhetoric, if not the deeds, of a figure like Donald Trump, with all the attendant 1930s-style dangers of global trade wars turning into global military conflict.

2. Working-class response: Marx himself had a rather naïve, intellectually-driven faith in the industrial working class as the universal historical class that would by itself right the wrongs of capitalism and of previous economic systems. But the more influential Marxist position, associated with someone who achieved actual political power, is Lenin’s critique of the ‘trade union consciousness’ of the industrial proletariat: without party cadres to push them into proper communism, according to Lenin all you get with industrial workers is demands for better pay and conditions. That’s pretty much the same viewpoint as legions of conservative thinkers, except what’s a negative for Lenin is a positive for them – witness, for example, John Michael Greer’s voluminous writings on the ‘wage class’ in the USA and its lack of interest in socialism. Mason, much more convincingly, shows how working class movements across the ‘developed’ world in the 19th and early 20th centuries actually did involve a strong leftist (though rarely Marxist) critique of capitalism, which emphasised education, self-improvement, the dignity of skilled manual work and the rich associational life of an engaged, disciplined, politicised workforce. As the contradictions of early 20th century capitalism began to mount, these movements faltered – destroyed by authoritarian populism and/or fascism, or bought off by social democracy, and ultimately snuffed out by neoliberalism with its destruction of organised labour in the west and its individualisation of economic action.

3. The rise of info-tech. The old leftist project is in ruins, then, but Mason sees new possibilities in the rise of networked information as the currency of 21st century human interaction. In his view, information goods are corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly, because markets are based on scarcity, whereas information is abundant. Meanwhile, info tech is lowering the marginal costs of production of numerous commodities – including basic physical commodities. The peer production of free stuff enabled by the info tech revolution is growing, enabling people to interact with each other as social beings outside the marketplace. Just as the old idea of the working class as the universal political class dies, a new idea of the well-educated and networked as the universal political class is born. At the same time, traditional forces of capitalist control are attempting to reassert themselves: vast tech monopolies like Google, repressive-authoritarian states and the constant reinvention of indebtedness to entrench exploitation. Hence are the contemporary battle lines between capitalism and post-capitalism drawn.

oOo

I think Mason has some brilliant insights into the story of capitalism and of the left’s somewhat-but-not-entirely futile attempts to understand and challenge it. I’m less convinced by the way he construes the coming conflict between monopoly capitalism and post-capitalist info-tech. I just don’t think he provides anything like a ‘thick’ enough description of future energy and resource prospects, the present structure of commodity manufacture and the nature of the open source or peer production movement to give his claims real weight. So it would be easy to dismiss his analysis as another example of starry-eyed, high tech, 3D-printer-fantasising flummery of the kind that disfigures so much ‘postcapitalist’ writing on the left these days. And indeed, in many ways his approach to the ‘zero marginal cost revolution’ isn’t that different to Kate Raworth’s, which I treated to a fairly peremptory dismissal on this site not so long ago.

But I don’t want to jettison his arguments quite so hastily. This is partly because he has a more nuanced view of info-tech as a contradiction within capitalist production, rather than simply as something that’s going to ride to the rescue of a grateful humanity. And it’s partly because I think his analysis can be reformulated in a more interesting way. So I’m going to conclude by trying to reformulate it.

I’ve long been sceptical of the idea of commons as a fundamentally superior form of economic organisation for the production of food and other key basic commodities (perhaps I’ll try to lay this argument out more systematically in another post). Given the opportunity, I think most people historically have preferred to provide for their household needs themselves as far as possible (which is not to say that commoning arrangements haven’t nevertheless been important in numerous ways). But it does seem to be the case that there’s a thriving ‘digital commons’ of peer-produced, open source free stuff out there in the world of information. I think Mason possibly overstates the significance of Wikipedia, Linux and Android compared to, say, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, but he undoubtedly has a point. So I wonder if there’s some key difference between the world of food production and the world of information production?

I’m not sure – if there is, I think it’s probably around such issues as the production of food demanding ongoing physical work over periods of time that are determined by the rhythms of the natural world and not by the choice of the worker, with rewards demanding that the marginal cost of production is quite low relative to the total cost of production. In the world of peer production of information – a new WordPress widget, for example – the work is more modular, determined by the choice of the worker, and with marginal costs of production quite high relative to the total cost of production. And the social kudos gained from producing the widget is much higher than the social kudos gained from producing, say, a carrot. So there’s that. But I think the main thing that’s going on here is that info-tech peer production is essentially an elite pursuit, only available to those in highly privileged positions within the global political economy, whose ability to produce stuff for free rests upon a lot of other people working hard to service their basic needs. The same might be said of a home veg grower who gives most of her produce away or volunteers at a community garden.

In that sense, the peer production of free stuff is made possible by hidden exploitation within the global political economy, and probably therefore stands in a somewhat less revolutionary position to that political economy than Mason supposes. But I think he’s still right that there’s a possibly terminal crisis afoot in that political economy, and that the networked, educated individual may have a role to play in ushering us towards something else. And this is where his critique may connect up with my conception of the supersedure state that I outlined recently.

Here’s how things may unfold. Conservative forces will try to maintain capitalism-as-usual – debt-fuelled growth, austerity and inequality, ever more draconian immigration control, authoritarian state power, connivance with multinational monopolies and so on. But, despite achieving short-term successes and creating a lot of misery, they won’t triumph everywhere, partly as a result of opposition from Mason’s networked, educated people (among others), partly because of exogenous pressures like energy prices and climate change, and partly because they won’t be able to deliver what capitalist political economies have always ultimately been able to deliver to enough people in previous eras to guarantee their survival – increasing wealth and consumer luxury.  Generally, states will weaken, and civil society will have thrust upon it the responsibility of providing for basic needs.

This will turn out to be a lot harder than many people thought – including networked, educated individuals who discover that securing a steady supply of food, clothing, energy and shelter isn’t as easy as producing a WordPress widget. Nevertheless, their instincts towards open collaboration with strangers, lateral thinking, environmental care and shared space will stand them in good stead when it comes to rethinking community provisioning from the ground up. As per my analysis of the supersedure state, states will gradually retreat towards their core centres and populations, which will be increasingly remote from and inaccessible to the majority of people living within their de facto boundaries. Commercial, cash-crop oriented export farming will start to lose its economic rationale, and this is the point at which new, locality-oriented forms of ‘peer production’ of basic necessities may step into the breach. There will be numerous challenges, false steps and failures, but there may also be interesting models, social innovations and successes.

That, at any rate, seems something to aim at. I don’t think we’ll see the world that Mason would like to see – essentially one of free or nearly free basic necessities, universal basic income and a lot of volunteering, leisure and peer production of info-tech. But I think we might see, at least in some places, a world that’s better than that, based on local work, community self-provision and wider political networks of amity within the increasingly empty and moribund shell of a larger body politic left over from 20th century capitalism. In that sense, it’s a world that may have similarities with the one built by the organised, leftist working-classes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Let’s just hope that history doesn’t then repeat itself too much.

The supersedure state

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I said that I wanted to focus on the shape of possible agrarian, post-capitalist states of the future in my forthcoming writing, so I thought I’d anticipate that here by reproducing my article from the current issue of The Land magazine (Issue 22, 2018, pp.28-30). The editors of that august journal in their wisdom entitled it ‘The human hive’ (and accompanied it with some beautiful woodcut illustrations of an apian nature), but here it goes under my preferred title of ‘The supersedure state’. My next few posts are going to attend to various other items of business – though some of them do bear on this theme – but I thought I’d lay this out now as a kind of organising concept for the things I want to write about agrarian states, which I’ll try to fill out in more detail on this site shortly. So I’ll be coming back to this – but in the meantime, of course I’d welcome any comments. I’m not sure if this is exactly the same version as the one that appeared in The Land, but I think it’s close enough.

oOo

The tumult of recent political events in many western countries has brought a new word to the lips of political commentators – populism. Generally, populism and its personification in figures such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage has been presented in mainstream circles as a dangerous political turn, a threat to the established order of things, and not without good reason. But for those who’d like to replace the present global neoliberal economy with a more local, more equitable and more land-based or agrarian society there are overlaps with populism that raise a few questions – in particular, these three:

  1. ‘Populism’ means a politics of or for ‘the people’, which doesn’t sound like such a bad idea – so what’s the problem with it?
  2. Are there any fruitful links between the populisms now emerging in contemporary western countries and an older and now largely forgotten politics associated with peasant parties in various countries during the 19th and early 20th centuries, a politics known as ‘agrarian populism’?
  3. If populism threatens the established order, perhaps that’s no bad thing and represents a political opportunity of some kind – but what kind?

The answer to the first question is that populist positions often involve an over-simplified contrast between ‘ordinary people’ and a scapegoated ‘elite’, which is seen as thwarting the interests of the former – and there are tacit rules of inclusion and exclusion regarding membership in both categories that aren’t politically innocent. In the populist politics of Brexit, for example, ‘ordinary people’ has a nationalist coding that excludes migrants, including long-term residents from continental Europe, especially East Europeans. And the ‘elite’ has a class and political coding that mostly references liberal, urban, left-wing ‘chattering classes’ rather than the chief wielders of economic power.

So the problem with a populist politics of the people is that ‘the people’ is usually a less inclusive term than it appears, and the solution to their problems is usually more complicated than the humbling of the elite that’s proposed. Nevertheless, it might still be plausibly argued that in the present era of neoliberal globalisation, there are elites which organise against the interests of ordinary people, and the latter have not been well served by the game of ping-pong between lookalike politicians that passes for democratic politics. That argument can be taken in numerous directions, some of which might endorse an anti-elitist politics for ‘ordinary people’ without endorsing any of the populisms currently on the table, from Donald Trump’s Republican presidency to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership.

Spooling back a century or so, it becomes a little easier to grasp what a populist politics of ordinary people against the elite meant. In various countries – the USA, Russia, Mexico and India, to name a few – most ‘ordinary people’ were small-scale and typically self-sustaining (or ‘peasant’) farmers, many of whom considered their interests to be in conflict with various political, financial, colonial or aristocratic elites in their home countries, and organised an anti-elitist populist politics of the people accordingly, for example in the form of the US Populist Party, which put up presidential candidate James Weaver in 1892. In the 1920s, economist Alexander Chayanov published key works of the Russian ‘neo-populist’ school, which emphasised the resilient and self-perpetuating nature of the Russian peasant household economy1. The US Populist Party merged with the Democratic Party in 1896 and fizzled out thereafter, partly because US politics ultimately delivered a good deal of what the populists had wanted, albeit not quite in the form they’d wanted it – a greater share for workers in national wealth, but in the form of an urban-industrial workforce and depopulated farmscapes2. For his part, Chayanov was summarily tried and shot in Stalin’s gulag in 1937. Perhaps these two contrasting endpoints for populism in the USA and the USSR symbolise the 20th century fate of agrarian populism in general: squeezed out in the Cold War rivalry between capitalism and communism, neither of which were notably sympathetic to independent peasantries. Even so, agrarian populism has had a complex afterlife through the 20th century and into the 21st, inflecting pro-peasant and anti-globalisation politics represented in figures like Vandana Shiva and in the food sovereignty movement. And there are also various points of crossover here with the traditions of right-wing populism that typically emphasise the local and the rural, ‘indigenous’ traditions over cosmopolitanism, individual independence over state dirigisme, and so on.

I can’t trace here the complexities of these inflections and crossovers – though it’s unfortunate that the eclipse of agrarian populism as a living political tradition obscures the lessons that today’s agrarian activists might infer from it in negotiating those complexities. But to answer my second question above, I’d suggest that, yes, there probably are fruitful connections to be drawn between these populisms old and new – but the issues facing us today aren’t exactly the same as those facing the small farm populists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The most obvious difference is that there are hardly any small-scale farmers in the ‘developed’ countries any more. Peasant or agrarian populism as a politics of ‘the people’ makes sense when a large proportion of the people are peasants or agrarians. It looks less convincing in a modern urban world where only a small minority of people directly work the land. However, the chances of sustaining this world indefinitely in the face of the numerous environmental crises it’s provoked seem slim, as do the chances of achieving a fair distribution of resources in the neoliberal global political economy that sustains it by systematically rewarding the few at the expense of the many. For these reasons, a contemporary agrarian movement has arisen which has a lot in common with the agrarian populist and neo-populist movements of a century ago, emphasising self-reliant, low impact, low energy, land-based lifestyles, a fair distribution of resources, greater political autonomy and so on – in other words, the kind of world described by the Land’s manifesto on the inside cover of this magazine.

But that movement remains quite small and – compared to the stormy agrarian politics of the 19th and 20th centuries, which toppled numerous empires, aristocracies and colonial powers – it operates in a world where revolutionary thirst for change no longer has much traction. This seems to have prompted a few alternative thinkers among leftists and greens to embrace the ersatz tumults of recent electoral politics in the west such as the Trump and Brexit results as at least some kind of new opening in the moribund politics of neoliberalism-as-usual, and therefore something to be welcomed3. The death of liberalism and globalism in the face of the new populisms has been gleefully embraced by these thinkers as a hopeful sign that a more egalitarian green localism may be in the offing – perhaps in much the same way that Marxists of old used to think that a dose of capitalism was a necessary evil for every society to go through if it was ever to experience the joys of socialism. But the path from right-wing populism to green localism doesn’t seem intrinsically more likely than numerous other possible paths, and though it’s tempting to share in the schadenfreude directed at once sanctimonious centrists in their dismay at the current turn of events, there are some problems with cheerleading the death of liberalism. Chief amongst them is the danger that with the death of a globally-oriented liberalism might come the death of the public sphere, defined as “rational-critical debate about public issues conducted by private persons willing to let arguments and not statuses determine decisions”4, as seems to be happening under the star of the new populism in countries such as Russia and Turkey. The outlook for an equitable and sustainable agrarian localism is bleak in these circumstances – so maybe defending the liberal public sphere from the Trumps, Putins and Farages of this world is a pressing task for a contemporary agrarian populism.

However, we’re undoubtedly now living through a populist moment in which such figures are at least temporarily ascendant while familiar liberal-global institutions such as the EU appear to be unravelling, so it’s as well to try to plot a course from where we now are to where the contemporary agrarian movement might like us to go. It seems clear that the populist politicians now in power are unequal to the task of their sloganeering: they will not be able to “make America great again” or “take back control”. But perhaps they’ve nonetheless instinctively realised what still escapes the mainstream – that liberal-democratic global capitalism is dead in the water and needs refashioning. Academic political economist Wolfgang Streeck comes to much the same conclusion in his recent analysis of the chronically growing debt, stagnant growth and rising inequality gnawing away at the vital organs of the global capitalist beast:

“Contemporary capitalism is vanishing on its own, collapsing from internal contradictions, and not least as a result of having vanquished its enemies – who…have often rescued capitalism from itself by forcing it to assume a new form. What comes after capitalism in its final crisis, now under way, is, I suggest, not socialism or some other defined social order, but a lasting interregnum…a prolonged period of social entropy, or disorder”5

There are various ways in which this interregnum might get filled, some of them extremely worrisome. But I’d like to suggest how an equitable agrarian populism might step into the breach on the basis of the following four ‘might-come-true’ predictions:

  • National and individual incomes in most of the rich western countries will decrease along with the volume of international trade – a process that in the UK will be hastened by Brexit but is likely to happen anyway. The possibilities for ducking the implications of this scenario through scapegoating are numerous, but there’s a chance that eventually it’ll prompt a more sober reorientation of national and local economies to the more immediate needs of the citizenry.

 

  • The de jure territorial reach of the central state in the west is likely to remain much as it is now for the foreseeable future, but its de facto power outside its core regions (in England, London and the southeast) is likely to wane as the ratio between public service benefits and tax income becomes ever more unpromising. Weakened governments will retrench around core areas and industries, leading to (semi-)benign (semi-)neglect elsewhere.

 

  • The returns to large-scale commodity-crop farming and large-scale landownership outside the state cores will diminish to the point of redundancy. Large-scale landownership in these areas will start to become politically and morally risky in the context of impoverished local populations looking to supply their needs from local resources increasingly through non-monetary means.

 

  • The preceding developments will resist resolution by any singular means – no high-tech solutionism, fiscal windfalls, sweeping political or religious revitalisation movements and so forth. Attempts to organise and provide for regional populations will be predominantly local, piecemeal, experimental, practical and plural, and they’ll enjoy varying degrees of success…

 

…or to put it another way, something like Detroit may soon be coming to a sleepy English village near you.

If this situation occurs, there will doubtless be scope for numerous elements of our present political traditions to recombine in various more or less successful ways in the changed circumstances, and the same is true of landholding traditions – rentiers and tenants, owner-occupiers, collective property and commons. Streeck is probably right that a single defined social order won’t prevail. Since Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714), political scientists have been fond of using apian metaphors for politics, so I’m inclined to do likewise and call what I’m describing here a ‘supersedure state’. In the normal succession of a bee colony, the mass society decides that the ruling queen is no longer fit for purpose, builds some orderly alternative structures, and after a brief power struggle a singular new ruling queen emerges. Supersedure occurs, by contrast, when the existing queen goes missing in action without any orderly alternative structures to replace her. In these circumstances, the workers try to cobble together a new queen out of whatever’s to hand that will best do the job of maintaining the colony, but usually end up producing a smaller, weaker queen. I think our human colonies may likewise see more of such weakened, cobbled-together successor states – ‘supersedure states’ – in the disorderly future that Streeck predicts, and less of the smoothly revolutionary politics of the past. As the Land’s manifesto persuasively states: “Capitalism is a confidence trick, a dazzling edifice built on paper promises. It may stand longer than some of us anticipate, but when it crumbles, the land will remain.” The traditions of agrarian populism seem best suited to creating a modicum of stability, prosperity and justice in this politically weakened, land-oriented aftermath of capitalism – better, at any rate, than obvious alternatives such as neo-feudalism, neo-fascism or revitalising cargo cults seeking to restore capitalism, communism and other modernist nightmares.

However, a network of pluralist agrarian supersedure states probably isn’t the most likely contender for the future shape of the world. If the curve of politics in disparate countries of the world today – the UK, the USA, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, India, China – is anything to go by, we may be more likely to see ruthless neo-mercantilist international economic competition between countries, fractious distributional conflicts within them, and nationalist-nativist populisms trying to breathe life into all sorts of arbitrary boundaries between people and peoples. This is not an enticing prospect, so perhaps it’s a good idea to address how an agrarian populist future of supersedure states might be wrested from this other mode of populism.

The short answer is a two-pronged approach, the first of which aims to buttress wherever possible any or all permutations of peasant, family-based, small-scale, local market oriented, diverse and high nature-value farming. Historically, this fits comfortably into various populist agendas, agrarian and otherwise, and is the sort of thing readily found in UKIP election manifestoes. The second aims to buttress wherever possible a liberal public sphere, rational-critical debate, small state local democracy based on the power of arguments rather than statuses accruing from membership in closed categories of ‘the people’, ‘the real people’ or ‘ordinary people’, an egalitarian economic localism combined with a plural political internationalism, and so on. These sorts of things won’t be found in UKIP election manifestoes, and doubtless sound a lot more like the old-fangled neoliberal globalism which most populists, with some justification, want to overturn. But the key is the combination of the two prongs. The first without the second creates a reactionary nationalist back-to-the-landism which can conceal all sorts of modernist horrors under the pretence of a romantic peasantism – the ‘Ringing Cedars’ movement in Russia being one contemporary example. The second without the first easily results in neoliberal globalism as usual. Each prong draws on old political traditions. The intention, however, is not to replicate those traditions but, just as with Peter Kropotkin’s idea of creating a new anarchist future out of communal past traditions, to build “an absolutely new fact, emerging in new conditions and leading inevitably to absolutely different consequences”6.

There’s no inevitability about successfully creating this kind of ‘absolutely new’ politics, but it does seem possible that it will become a more obvious and attractive option than it presently seems as the drawbacks of conventional agriculture and conventional politics of both the mainstream and reactionary-populist varieties make themselves apparent. Admittedly, I’ve barely addressed the numerous difficulties and contradictions that would be involved in making this politics work. But here, in a nutshell, is the opportunity I mentioned in my third question above: the opportunity to create a tolerably prosperous, egalitarian, sustainable future based on an agrarian localism of supersedure states from the political tumults of the present moment.

Notes

  1. Chayanov, A. [1986]. The Theory of Peasant Economy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
  2. Postel, C. 2007. The Populist Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  3. Examples here include green thinkers like Paul Kingsnorth and John Michael Greer, and august voices on the left like the New Left Review.
  4. Calhoun, C. 1992. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.
  5. Streeck, W. 2016. How Will Capitalism End? London: Verso.
  6. Kropotkin, P. 1993. Words of a Rebel. Montreal: Black Rose

An Oxford education

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Perhaps I should essay a brief report here on things I heard and learned at the 2018 Oxford Real Farming Conference that I attended a couple of weeks back. If I try to lay it all out in connected prose I’ll probably come grinding to a halt after about 5,000 words, so I thought I’d present it mostly in the form either of little news snippets or of one-sentence assertions…the latter being things I heard people say, or thoughts I had while listening at the conference. So I don’t necessarily agree with all of these assertions, some of which are mutually contradictory anyway. But that’s fine. Most of the time, I don’t even agree with myself. Anyway, here goes.

oOo

The biggest name at the conference was secretary of state for the environment, food and rural affairs (and arch-Brexiteer), Michael Gove. Quite a coup for the ORFC to get him not only to attend, but to agree to an unscripted Q&A session.

The audience listened in increasingly open-mouthed astonishment as Gove critiqued the inequities in the subsidy system that rewarded wealthy landowners, bemoaned the poor state of agricultural soils under the existing agricultural regimen, restated his opposition to neonic insecticides, critiqued the economic externalities involved in cheap food and emphasised the importance of supporting farmers for delivering environmental benefits.

There are numerous reasons to be sceptical about Gove’s agenda. Undoubtedly, the Tories are trying to re-position themselves as environmental champions again, probably because they’re aware that hardly anyone under the age of about 45 voted for them at the last election (remember David Cameron’s hug-a-husky moment, before he switched to ‘green crap’). And Gove is probably trying to resurrect his career after the long knives of the Brexit campaign.

Still, maybe it’s still better to have a DEFRA secretary at least saying these kind of things than, as before, saying the opposite and/or steering well clear.

Unlike Owen Patterson, Gove doesn’t hail from the landed wealth wing of the Tory party. As a famous doubter of expert opinion and trasher of professional lobbying, DEFRA – much more than the Department of Education – could be just the place where his talents can be put to best use.

The debate in the Tory party at the moment resembles the 19th century debate over the Corn Laws between landed capital, manufacturing capital and financial capital.

The carpets of Conservative Party HQ are seamed with blood.

Gove was equivocal on glyphosate. Expect chemical no-till farming to become the new green.

Everybody now seems to accept that the writing’s on the wall for large-scale landowners pocketing public money via farm subsidies – even the Country Landowners Association (sorry, now the Country Landowners and Business Association) who were in attendance. One positive outcome of Brexit, I think, that I predicted some time ago…

…but while this change will probably have some marginally beneficial consequences for social equity in the country at large, the money is unlikely to be redeployed in farming, but removed from it entirely. So probably tough times ahead for the already struggling medium-scale farm. Example: there are plenty of holdings that keep 2 breeding sows and plenty that keep 2,000. There are very few that keep 200. Is this a problem? I think so.

Farmers have four options: Get big, get niche, get out or get bankrupt.

Gove said there’d be support for upland stock farmers. Good news for James Rebanks. Bad news for George Monbiot. Relevant reading: another brilliant article from the pen of Simon Fairlie, ‘Return of the shepherd’ The Land, Issue 22.

The basic payments scheme inflates land prices (DEFRA).

No it doesn’t (CLA)

When Britain quits the EU, the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principles written into EU law won’t be transferred to British law.

When Britain quits the EU, there will be a regulatory gap, both in terms of legislation and regulatory staff.

Brexit is a great opportunity for Britain to set more appropriate local standards for food and farming.

Any post-EU trade deals Britain makes after a hard Brexit will potentially shatter local standards for food and farming, particularly a trade deal with the USA.

But any post-EU trade deals will have to be ratified by parliament, so if our elected representatives don’t like them they can throw them out.

If only it was as simple as that.

US farm animals are dosed with twice as much antibiotics as British ones.

Economic protectionism is a good idea, but only within a wider consociation of essentially amicable states. Otherwise the risk is the kind of trade-war bellicosity of the 1930s, potentially lurching into actual war. But presently there’s no global mechanism to achieve local protectionism and global consociation.

A system of cheap food depends on a system of cheap labour.

Britain currently imports a large part of its agricultural workforce from Eastern Europe, partly because of economic demand for labour from the weaker east European economies, but also because East European workers come with a range of agricultural skills that are in short supply in Britain, mostly through the running down of a proper framework for agricultural education.

In the context of Brexit, the supply of East European workers is dwindling.

Agricultural colleges are concentrating on graduate education, turning out students who want to be farm managers, rather than farm workers.

Allotment gardens available for student use at one agricultural college were derelict.

When faced with a 50-50 choice between investing in labour or investing in machinery, farm managers usually opt for machinery.

Machinery is generally high cost and large scale (= labour saving). The result is that the farm landscape is fitted to the machinery, rather than fitting the machinery to the farm landscape.

Much of the time, machinery sits in the shed. It can do the job it’s designed to do much more quickly and cheaply than human labourers. But without human labourers, much additional environmental work that could be done on the farm – hedging, ditching, woodland management etc. – doesn’t get done.

Nobody wants to work on farms any more.

Lots of people want to work on farms, but the opportunities are limited.

Working on farms is now a lonely occupation – and more dangerous, because of the human lack.

We need to grow more vegetables in the UK.

The UK government’s recent agricultural policy emphasised the need to ‘Grow more, sell more and export more’. Actually we should be trying to grow better, sell better and eat better.

New entrants to farming somehow need access to land. Or do they?

Dispersed grazing provides opportunities for new entrants.

Secure agricultural tenancy rights would take the heat out of the battle to secure access to land.

But there would be a hot battle to gain secure agricultural tenancy rights.

There is a long-term battle being fought between proponents of food democracy and food control. An Uberisation of the food system is occurring, in which the controllers of the software capture the majority of the value.

The food system is dependent on self-exploitation by its workers. It’s not a good system.

Something like 75% of the value in the food sector is captured beyond the farm gate.

Government benefits for the low waged working in the food processing and retail sector are an implicit subsidy to the process/retail industry.

We need shorter food chains.

France does a better job than the UK of controlling land concentration and retaining small-scale agriculture. But is it at the expense of accepting a patriarchal gerontocracy?

The number of farm holdings in the UK is reducing at a rate of about 2% per annum.

There is a precipitous decline in biodiversity and wild species numbers in Europe – and it’s largely due to farming practices.

The focus of the land value tax debate has been on property uplift, not on agricultural land as an enduring public good.

We tend to think of tax as a source of government revenue or for incentivising behaviours. We should also think of it as a means for preventing patrimonial, anti-democratic wealth accumulation.

Landowners capture the majority of the uplift value associated with turning land over to residential property development.

No they don’t.

Yes they do.

Traditional landed estates should be preserved because they’re a good way of handing down agricultural land through the generations.

No they’re not.

It took a war to reform Britain’s antiquated systems of property ownership and social security.

Brexit is like a war. But hopefully with fewer casualties.

Yes, hopefully.

Somebody at the conference I’d not met before had read my paper on perennial grains. They even agreed with it, and felt the Land Institute’s response missed the point. Validation! By Jove, it was all worthwhile…

A spade is a spade is a spade, but a perennial is not a perennial is not a perennial. Seeds are seeds. Fruits are fruits.

No they’re not.

Yes they are.

Etc.

Complicating the commons

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A happy new year to you from Small Farm Future. So many things to write about in 2018…especially after getting back from the ninth Oxford Real Farming Conference, the biggest and best yet. The main theme I want to examine this year is the political shape of the state, specifically the agrarian states that I hope in the future may hold some promise for getting us out of the mess we’re currently in. On that note, my article on what I call the ‘supersedure state’ has just been published in the latest issue of The Land Magazine1. I’ll be republishing it on this site soon. At the end of this post, I’ll lay out a brief menu of things I’m going to be writing about here at SFF in the first part of the year, but first I want to anticipate my theme of the agrarian state by offering some further reflections on the concept of ‘the commons’ – which I’ve written about before, but feel moved to address further in the light of some of the presentations I heard at the Oxford conference, and of the interesting interview with George Monbiot in The Land.

Politically and intellectually, it seems like the idea of the commons is gaining traction – probably because the state and the market, its major rivals, have acquired something of an image problem in recent times. Politically, ‘the state’ has become associated with the unresponsive, centrally planned economies of communist regimes, and ‘the market’ with the flagrant inequalities and value-scouring short-termism of contemporary capitalism and/or neoliberalism. Intellectually, the story that’s often told about the commons starts with Garret Hardin’s notorious ‘tragedy of the commons’ argument that resources are over-used to the point of exhaustion in a commons because nobody has an individual interest in preserving them, and proceeds by way of Elinor Ostrom’s counter-analyses demonstrating various successful resource-preserving commons arrangements – some arising spontaneously through community-level agreements – to argue that the commons, rather than the state or the market, is the way forward2.

There’s much to commend these views, but they also involve some over-simplifications. The one that I particularly want to highlight here is our tendency to assume that markets and capitalism are complementary, if not synonymous. But they’re not. Historically, there’ve been plenty of market societies that weren’t capitalist, and plenty of capitalist societies (including our present one) which are not conspicuously market-friendly.

A capitalist society is one that secures its collective reproduction as an unintended side-effect of competitive profit maximization3, and only in certain rather unusual circumstances does that manifest in the development of widespread ‘free’, private markets of the kind identified in economic theory. As various thinkers have shown, markets are about exchanging goods through the medium of money, whereas capitalism is about using money to create more money, and one of the main ways capitalists do so is by using political patronage to help them create monopolies that limit market freedom. This is pretty much the situation we’re in today with the food system, and indeed in most other parts of the economy – as the economist Herbert Simon put it, we live in an organizational economy in which most economic transactions occur within corporate or government organisations, not in a market economy where they occur primarily in markets4. If we truly lived in a market economy, there would probably be something like 2 million farms in Britain, rather than the present 200,000.

Now, an attentive reading of Elinor Ostrom’s book suggests not that commons are a widespread and successful way of organising economic production, but on the contrary they’re rare and fraught with difficulty. To cut a long story short, in agricultural settings they usually only work at relatively small scales among groups of people who are relatively poor and who have relatively equal social standing, exploiting relatively extensive resources that are relatively low in value such as woodlands or grazing. People didn’t generally organise pre-capitalist agrarian societies predominantly through commons in the Hardin/Ostrom sense because it would have been a nightmare to do so, and the same is true a fortiori in contemporary society as we search for an alternative, post-capitalist economics. There are those who extend the concept of commons nowadays beyond agriculture into other realms, such as the notion of the ‘digital commons’. I’m not sure how convincing the parallel is, but if indeed there are commons in the digital world they don’t seem a whole lot more influential within it than traditional commons are within agriculture.

This would be a dispiriting conclusion if it propelled us back towards the dualities of state/market or communism/capitalism. But since, as I argued above, there’s nothing intrinsically capitalist about private markets, it doesn’t have to. My argument is that we should develop much more extensive private markets in food. If that happened, we’d find that the landscape would fill with lots of small-scale proprietors, who’d develop commoning arrangements between themselves as appropriate. And if they were supported by the state, this would really help to keep capitalism at bay.

A lot of the people who enthuse the most about commons are the kind of people who are themselves small proprietors, or aspire to be. I think they sometimes see their private ownership of land as a necessary evil in a capitalist society, whereas I’d suggest that it’s a desideratum for a non-capitalist society. Let’s have a look at these lyrics from Dick Gaughan’s song, The World Turned Upside Down, which expresses classic commoning sentiments:

This earth divided
We will make whole
So it will be a common treasury for all

The sin of property
We do disdain
No man has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain

For me, the key phrase here is “sell the earth for private gain”, and I take ‘gain’ to mean ‘unfair advantage’ – what economists call ‘rent’ in the technical sense of a situation in which monopoly control of a scarce, in-demand good enables the controller to name their price, however extortionate. But that isn’t necessarily the situation that obtains if I buy a plot of land and grow food crops on it which I sell at a local market. In that case, ‘property’ just means I’ve bought the right to an income stream from the land that will hopefully enable me to cover my ordinary living costs, just as a plumber does by charging out the costs of their time, tools and skills. Nor does the fact that I ‘own’ the land necessarily mean that I have an unchallenged right to do what I like on it or with it – the wider polity that has accorded me the right to derive income from it might, if it so chooses, forbid me from engaging in any number of damaging activities on it or from passing it on to my children if in so doing that would confer ‘private gain’ or rent. It can persuasively be argued that, in the UK, the state doesn’t intervene nearly enough in the ability of private property owners to extract economic rent, resulting in extravagantly high land prices. But that isn’t intrinsically an argument against private property as such.

Consider the alternative of a propertyless world in which the land indeed is a ‘common treasury’. Perhaps I’d like to use the land in my environs to produce clean water and energy and to grow some food for myself. Perhaps you’d like to build a road through it, making it easier for you to commute to a bigger town where you earn your salary as a commodity broker. Imagine if every single land or resource use decision had to be thrashed out individually within your ‘community’. Having spent more of my life than I care to recall in community meetings trying to agree on – well, just about anything – I do wonder if people who call for commons as a general way of organising everyday life have ever actually tried it. It brings to mind Oscar Wilde’s witticism about socialism: the trouble is, it takes up too many evenings.

In his recent writings, George Monbiot argues for a land value tax, with the revenue thus gained being divided, after paying for public services, between communities which then set up democratic structures to manage its dispersal5. I agree that this is a good idea, subject to the nature of the democratic structures and the difficulties of forging a meaningful consensus at the level of the ‘community’. George gives various examples of how private property can deliver community benefits, especially when the planning process is participatory. I think he’s right, but for me it’s a stretch to call this a ‘commons’ – really, we’re talking about local determination of fiscal residues from the revenues of a larger centralised state, which has already top-sliced money for public goods, and mostly about collective private benefit from private ownership. I’d prefer to think of it as a reinvigorated public sphere within a society of private property right-holders. It’s something I’d endorse, particularly if the ‘public’ we’re talking about is one that’s substantially oriented to self-sustenance on the basis of local land and natural resources, with strong oversight from a centralised state at higher and lower geopolitical levels to defend public interest over private property rights, and also private interest over public appropriation. But I don’t think it helps to call it a commons or to suppose that it’s something radically different from an economy grounded in the state or the market. Because if you do, you tend to obscure or even scorn what you most need to develop – widespread private property rights, strong local markets, and a centralised state oriented to public wellbeing by regulating both.

One other thought on this. If you develop such a social order, you’ll get a lot of small local businesses and not so many large corporations. Is that what you’d want? A century ago, there were more firms manufacturing cars in France alone than there are in the whole world today. Today, there are only two manufacturers of large airliners in the world, and two major computer operating systems (OK, three, maybe four). Some might talk about economies of scale, though I’m not convinced that this is the only reason these huge monopolies have emerged. But there are also diseconomies of scale in the way that humanity shapes the world to fit its mega-monopolistic ways . Much of the technology that we take for granted today (but maybe don’t need) might not survive in a true state-market political economy of the kind I’m describing, rather than in our present organisational political economy. Perhaps that’s no bad thing?

oOo

Anyway, how to conjure such a state-market political economy out of our present mess is the main thing I want to focus on in my upcoming writing. Not that I necessarily have any brilliant ideas for snapping my fingers and making it happen. But there are a few lines of enquiry I want to pursue. Some of them take me back to the debates I was having here at Small Farm Future about this time last year in the thick of the Brexit-Trump imbroglio. I think it’s about time I – cautiously – picked up a few of those threads again. Cautiously, but maybe also quickly – I’ve already prepared a retrospective on Mr Trump a year on and I fear that it may be rendered obsolete either by the 25th amendment or the global consequences of his argument with Mr Kim Jong Un about the size of their, er, buttons. But let me at least try to cultivate an aura of calm. All in good time. So what I’m planning to offer readers in the first part of this year in addition to ruminations on the agrarian state is posts on the size of my garden, the number of cow legs I can reasonably manage, some juggling with an olive branch, a bracing dip into the deep waters of anthropological theory and Mesopotamian history, some brief trips to India, Cuba, Oxford and Alt-America, a wrecker’s guide to system theory, that perennial favourite of this site – energy futures and societal collapse – and a few tips on fencing, though possibly not of the kind you’d imagine in a blog ostensibly devoted to farming. At the same time, I’m trying to focus on a larger-scale writing project, so it’s possible my posts will be less frequent than they have been recently. But I hope you might stop by here and have a read or – still better – leave a comment…though please note that if you’d like me to reply it’s best to leave your comment at Small Farm Future and not at the various other waystations of cyberspace to which my posts sometimes migrate. À bientôt.

Notes

  1. C. Smaje. 2018. The human hive. The Land 22: 28-30.
  2. G. Hardin. 1977. ‘The tragedy of the commons’ in G. Hardin & J. Badel (eds) Managing the Commons, W.H. Freeman; E. Ostrom. 1990. Governing the Commons, Cambridge UP.
  3. See more detailed discussion here
  4. H. Simon. 1991. Organizations and markets. Journal of Economic Perspectives. 5, 2: 25-44.
  5. eg. 2018. ‘Reclaiming the commons’ The Land 22, 12-15.