An essay in which Murray Bookchin outlines his ideal system of food cultivation and criticizes the existing, capitalist system. Appeared in Radical Agriculture (1972), ed. Richard Merrill  [ !C BCBMB[B PPLT www.zabalazabooks.net “Knowledge is the key to be free!” Footnotes: 1. T.C. McLuhan, ed., Touch the Earth (New York: Outerbridge & Lazard, 1971), p.8. R a d i c a l 2. Ibid., p. 56. 3. Edward Hyams, Soil and Cultivation (London: Thames & Hudson, 1952), pp 274, 276. 4. Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (New York: Oxford Agriculture Univ. Press, 1962), p. 56. 5. Ibid., p. 57. 6. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, ed. and trans. David McLellan (New York; Harper & Row, 1971), p. 94. 7.See especially P. Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Mutual Aid (Boston: Sargent Publishers, 1955), and also: Conquest of Bread (New York: New York University Press, 1972). Murray Bookchin 8. See Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1972).  DDoowwnnllooaaddeedd ffrroomm LLiibbCCoomm ll ii bb ccoo mm .. oo rr gg xxx/{bcbmb{bcpplt/ofu specialized fossil-fuel technology in use today, we are beginning to see the emergence of a new technology—one that lends itself to the local deployment of many energy resources on a small scale (wind, solar and geothermal)—that provides a wider latitude in the use of small, multipurpose machinery, and that can easily provide us with the high-quality semi-(cid:976)inished goods that we, as individuals, may choose to (cid:976)inish according to our proclivities and tastes. The rounded eco-communities of the future would thereby be sustained by rounded ecotechnologies. 8 The people of these communities, living in a highly diversi(cid:976)ied agricultural and industrial society, would be free to avail themselves of the most sophisticated technologies without suffering the social distortions that have pitted town against country, mind against work, and humanity against itself and the natural world. Radical agriculture brings all of these possibilities into focus, for we must begin with the land if only because the basic materials for life are acquired from the land. This is not only an ecological truth but a social one as well. The kind of agricultural practice we adopt at once re(cid:976)lects and reinforces the approach we will utilize in all spheres of industrial and social life. Capitalism began historically by undermining and overcoming the resistance of the traditional agrarian world to a market economy; it will never be fully transcended unless a new society is created on the land that liberates humanity in the fullest sense and restores the balance between society and nature.   2 Radical Agriculture Murray Bookchin 11 humanity’s psychic and social well-being but for the well-being of the natural world as well. Our own era has gone further than this visionary approach. A century ago it was still possible to reach the countryside without dif(cid:976)iculty even from the largest cities and, if one so desired, to leave the city permanently for a rural way of life. Capitalism had not so completely effaced humanity’s legacy that one lacked evidence of neighbourhood enclaves, quaint life-styles and personalities, architectural diversity, and even village society. Predatory as the new industrial system was, it had not so completely eliminated the human scale as to leave the individual totally faceless and estranged. By contrast, we are compelled A griculture is a form of culture. The cultivation of food is a social and to occupy even quasi-rural areas that have become essentially urbanized, and cultural phenomenon unique to humanity. Among animals, anything we are reduced to anonymous digits in a staggering bureaucratic apparatus that could remotely be described as food cultivation appear ephemerally, that lacks personality, human relevance, or individual understanding. In if at all; and even among humans, agriculture developed little more than ten population, if not in physical size, our cities compare to the nation-states of the thousand years ago. Yet, in an epoch when food cultivation is reduced to a mere last century. The human scale has been replaced by the inhuman scale. We can industrial technique, it becomes especially important to dwell on the cultural hardly comprehend our own lives, much less manage society or our immediate implications of “modern” agriculture—to indicate their impact not only on environment. Our very self-integrity, today, is implicated ill achieving the vision public health, but also on humanity’s relationship to nature and the relationship that utopians and radical libertarians held forth a century ago. In this matter, we of human to human. are struggling not only for a better way of life but for our very survival. The contrast between early and modern agricultural practices is dramatic. Radical agriculture offers a meaningful response to this desperate situation Indeed, it would be very dif(cid:976)icult to understand the one through the vision of in terms not of a fanciful (cid:980)ight to a remote agrarian refuge, but of a systematic the other, to recognize that they are united by any kind of cultural continuity. recolonlization of the land along ecological lines. Cities are to be decentralised— Nor can we ascribe this contrast merely to differences in technology. Our and this is no longer a utopian fantasy but a visible necessity which even agricultural epoch—a distinctly capitalistic one—envisions food cultivation as conventional city planning is beginning to recognize—and new eco-communities a business enterprise to be operated strictly for the purpose of generating pro(cid:976)it are to be established, tailored artistically to the ecosystems in which they in a market economy. From this standpoint, land is an alienable commodity are located. These eco-communities are to be scaled to human dimensions, called “real estate,” soil a “natural resource,” and food an exchange value that is both to afford the greatest degree of self-management possible and personal bought and sold impersonally through a medium called “money.” Agriculture, comprehension of the social situation. No bureaucratic manipulative, centralized in effect, differs no more from any branch of industry than does steelmaking administration here, but a voluntaristic system in which the economy, society or automobile production. In fact, to the degree that food cultivation is affected and ecology of an area are administered by the community as a whole, and the by nonindustrial factors such as climatic and seasonal changes, it lacks the distribution of the means of life is determined by need, rather than by labour, exactness that marks a truly “rational” and scienti(cid:976)ically managed operation. pro(cid:976)it or accumulation. And, lest these natural factors elude bourgeois manipulation, they too are the But radical agriculture carries this tradition further—into technology itself. objects of speculation in future markets and between middlemen in the circuit In contemporary social thought, technology tends to be polarized into highly from farm to retail outlet. centralized labour-extensive forms on the one hand and decentralized, craft- In this impersonal domain of food production, it is not surprising to (cid:976)ind that a scale labour-intensive forms on the other. Radical agriculture steers the middle “farmer” often turns out to be an airplane pilot who dusts crops with pesticides, ground established by an eco-technology: it avails itself of the tendency toward a chemist who treats soil as a lifeless repository for inorganic compounds, an miniaturization and versatility, quality production, and a balanced combination operator of immense agricultural machines who is more familiar with engines of mass manufacture and crafts. For side by side with the massive, highly   10 Radical Agriculture Murray Bookchin 3 than botany, and perhaps most decisively, a (cid:976)inancier whose knowledge of “needs,” however irrational or synthetic these needs may be. A truly ecological land may be less than that of an urban cab driver. Food, in turn, reaches the outlook, by contrast, sees the biotic world as a holistic unity of which humanity consumer in containers and in forms so highly modi(cid:976)ied and denatured as to is a part. Accordingly, in this world, human needs must be integrated with those bear scant resemblance to the original. In the modern, glistening supermarket, of the biosphere if the human species is to survive. This integration, as we have the buyer walks dreamily through a spectacle of packaged materials in which already seen, involves a profound respect for natural variety, for the complexity the pictures of plants, meat, and dairy foods replace the life forms from which of natural processes and relations, and for the cultivation of a mutualistic they are derived. The fetish assumes the form of the real phenomenon. Here, the attitude toward the biosphere. Radical agriculture, in short, implies not merely individual’s relationship to one of the most intimate of natural experiences— new techniques in food cultivation, but a new non-Promethean sensibility toward the nutriments indispensable to life—is divorced from its roots in the totality land and society as a whole. of nature. Vegetables, fruit, cereals, dairy foods and meat lose their identity as Can we hope to achieve fully this new sensibility solely as individuals, without organic realities and often acquire the name of the corporate enterprise that regard to the larger social world around us? produces them. The “Big Mac” and the “Swift Sausage” no longer convey even the faintest notion that a living creature was painfully butchered to provide the Radical agriculture, I think, would be obliged to reject an isolated approach of consumer with that food. this kind. Although individual practice doubtless plays an invaluable role in initiating a broad movement for social reconstruction, ultimately we will not This denatured outlook stands sharply at odds with an earlier animistic achieve an ecologically viable relationship with the natural world without an sensibility that viewed land as an inalienable, almost sacred domain, food ecological society. Modern capitalism is inherently anti-ecological: the nuclear cultivation as a spiritual activity, and food consumption as a hallowed social relationship from which it is constituted—the buyer-seller relationship—pits ritual. The Cayuses of the Northwest were not unique in listening to the ground, individual against individual and, on the larger scale, humanity against nature. for the “Great Spirit,” in the words of a Cayuse chief, “Appointed the roots to feed Capital’s law of life of in(cid:976)inite expansion, of “production for the sake of production” the Indians on.” 1 The ground lived, and its voice had to be heeded. Indeed, this and “consumption for the sake of consumption,” turns the domination and vision may have been a cultural obstacle to the spread of food cultivation; there exploitation of nature into the “highest good” of social life and human self- are few statements of the hunter against agriculture that are more moving than realization. Even Marx succumbs to this inherently bourgeois mentality when Smohalla’s memorable remarks: “You ask me to plough the ground. Shall I take a he accords to capitalism a “great civilizing in(cid:976)luence” for reducing nature “for knife and tear my mother’s breast? Then when I die she will not take me to her the (cid:976)irst time simply [to] an object for mankind, purely a matter of utility....” bosom to rest.” 2 Nature “ceases to be recognized as a power in its own right; and the theoretical When agriculture did emerge, it clearly perpetuated the hunter’s animistic knowledge of its independent laws appears only as a stratagem designed to sensibility. The wealth of mythic narrative that surrounds food cultivation is subdue it to human requirements....” 6 testimony to an enchanted world brimming with life, purpose and spirituality. In contrast to this tradition, radical agriculture is essentially libertarian in Ludwig Feuerbach’s notion of God as the projection of man omits the extent its emphasis on community and mutualism, rather than on competition, an to which early man is stamped by the imprint of the natural world and, in this emphasis that derives from the writings of Peter Kropotkin 7 and William sense, is an extension or projection of it. To say that early humanity lived in Morris. This emphasis could justly be called ecological before the word “partnership” with this world tends to understate the case; humanity lived as “ecology” became fashionable, indeed, before it was coined by Ernst Haeckel a part of this world—not beside it or above it. century ago. The notion of blending town with country, of rotating speci(cid:976)ically Because the soil was alive, indeed the mother of life, to cultivate it was a sacred urban with agricultural tasks, had been raised by so-called utopian socialists act that required invocatory and appeasing rituals. Virtually every aspect of the such as Charles Fourier during the Industrial Revolution. variety and diversity agricultural procedure had its sanctifying dimension, from preparing a tilth to in one’s workaday activities—the Hellenic ideal of the rounded individual in harvesting a crop. The harvest itself was blessed, and to “break bread” was at a rounded society—found its physical counterpart in varied surroundings once a domestic ritual that daily af(cid:976)irmed the solidarity of kinfolk as well as an that were neither strictly urban nor rural, but a synthesis of both. Ecology act of hospitable paci(cid:976)ication between the stranger and the community. We still validated this ideal by revealing that it formed the precondition not only for   4 Radical Agriculture Murray Bookchin 9 more simpli(cid:976)ied an ecosystem—and, in agriculture, the more limited the variety seal a bargain with a drink or celebrate an important event with a feast. To fell of domesticated stocks involved—the more likely is the ecosystem to break a tree or kill an animal required appeasing rites, which acknowledged that life down. The more complex the food webs, the more stable the biotic structure. inhered in these beings and that this life partook of a sacred constellation of This insight, which we have gained at so costly an expense to the biosphere and phenomena. to ourselves, merely re(cid:976)lects the age-old thrust of evolution. The advance of the Naive as the myths and many of these practices may seem to the modern mind, biotic world consists primarily of the differentiation, colonization and growing they re(cid:976)lect a truth about the agricultural situation. After having lost contact web of interdependence of life-forms on an inorganic planet—a long process with this “prescienti(cid:976)ic” sensibility—at great cost to the fertility of the land that has remade the atmosphere and landscape along lines that are hospitable and to its ecological balance—we now know that soil is very much alive; that for complex and increasingly intelligent organisms. The most disastrous aspect it has its health, its dynamic equilibrium, and a complexity comparable to that of prevailing agricultural methodologies, with their emphasis on monoculture, of any living community. Not that the details that enter into this knowledge are crop hybrids, and chemicals, has been the simpli(cid:976)ication they have introduced new; rather, we are aware of them in a new and holistic way. As recently as the into food cultivation—a simpli(cid:976)ication that occurs on such a global scale that it early 1960s, American agronomy generally viewed soil as a medium in which may well throw back the planet to an evolutionary stage where it could support living organisms were largely extraneous to the chemical management of food only simpler forms of life. cultivation. Having saturated the soil with nitrates, insecticides, herbicides, Radical agriculture’s respect for variety implies a respect for the complexity of and an appalling variety of toxic compounds, we have become the victims of a balanced agricultural situation: the innumerable factors that in(cid:976)luence plant a new type of pollution that could well be called “soil pollution.” These toxins nutrition and well-being; the diversi(cid:976)ied soil relations that exist from area to are the hidden additives to the dinner table, the unseen spectres that return area; the complex interplay between climatic, geological and biotic factors that to us as the residual products of our exploitative attitude toward the natural make for the differences between one tract of land and another; and the variety world. No less signi(cid:976)icantly, we have gravely damaged soil in vast areas of the of ways in which human cultures react to these differences. Accordingly, the earth and reduced it to the simpli(cid:976)ied image of the modern scienti(cid:976)ic viewpoint. radical agriculturist sees agriculture not only as science but also as art. The food The animal and plant life so essential to the development of a nutritive, friable cultivator must live on intimate terms with a given area of land and develop a soil is diminished, and in many places approaches the sterility of impoverished, sensitivity for its special needs—needs that no textbook approach can possibly desertlike sand. encompass. The food cultivator must be part of a “soil community” in the very By contrast, early agriculture, despite its imaginary aspects, de(cid:976)ined humanity’s meaningful sense that she or he belongs to a unique biotic system, as well as to relationship to nature within sound ecological parameters. As Edward Hyams a given social system. observes, the attitude of people and their culture is as much a part of their Yet to deal with these issues merely in terms of technique would be a scant technical equipment as are the implements they employ. If the “axe was only the improvement over the approach that prevails today in agriculture. To be a physical tool which ancient man used to cut down trees” and the “intellectual technical connoisseur of an “organic” approach to agriculture is no better than tool enabled him to swing his axe” effectively, “what of the spiritual tool?” This to be a mere practitioner of a chemical approach. We do not become “organic “tool” is the “member of the trinity of tools which enables people to control farmers” merely by culling the latest magazines and manuals in this area, any and check their actions by reference to the ‘feeling’ which they possess for the more than we become healthy by consuming “organic” foods acquired from the consequences of the changes they make in their environments.” Accordingly, newest suburban supermarket. What basically separates the organic approach tree-felling would have been limited by their state of mind as early people from the synthetic is the overall attitude and praxis the food cultivator brings to “believed that trees had souls and were worshipful, and they associated certain the natural world as a whole. At a time when organic foods and environmentalism gods with certain trees. Osiris with acacia; Apollo with oak and apple. The have become highly fashionable, it may be well to distinguish the ecological temples of many primitive peoples were groves....” If the mythical aspects of this outlook of radical agriculture from the crude “environmentalism” that is mentality are evident enough, the fact remains that the mentality as such “was currently so widespread. Environmentalism sees the natural world merely immensely valuable to the soil community and therefore, in the long run, to man. as a habitat that must be engineered with minimal pollution to suit society’s It meant that no trees would be wantonly felled, but only when it was absolutely   8 Radical Agriculture Murray Bookchin 5 necessary, and then to the accompaniment of propritiatory rites which, if they bearing symbols of attributes. The new Carolingian calendars, which set the did nothing else, served constantly to remind tree-fellers that they were doing pattern for the Middle Ages, are very different: they show a coercive attitude dangerous and important work....” 3 One may add that, if culture be regarded as towards natural resources. They are de(cid:976)initely northern in origin; for the olive, a “tool,” a mere shift in emphasis would easily make it possible to regard tools which loomed so large in the Roman cycles, has now vanished. The pictures as of culture. This different emphasis comes closer to what Hyams is trying to change to scenes of ploughing, harvesting, wood-chopping, people knocking say than does his own formulation. In fact, what uniquely marks the bourgeois down acorns for the pigs, pig-slaughtering. Man and nature are now two things, mentality is the debasement of art, values, and rationality to mere tools—a and man is master.” 5 mentality that has even in(cid:976)iltrated the radical critique of capitalism if one is to Yet not until we come to the modern capitalist era do humanity and nature judge from the tenor of the Marxian literature that abounds today. separate as almost complete foes, and the “mastery” by human over the A radical approach to agriculture seeks to transcend the prevailing natural world assumes the form of harsh domination, not merely hierarchical instrumentalist approach that views food cultivation merely as a “human classi(cid:976)ication. The rupture of the most vestigial corporate ties that once united technique” opposed to “natural resources.” This radical approach is literally clansfolk, guildsmen, and the fraternity of the polis into a nexus of mutual ecological, in the strict sense that the land is viewed as an oikos—a home. Land aid; the reduction of everyone to an antagonistic buyer or seller; the rule of is neither a “resource” nor a “tool,” but the oikos of myriad kinds of bacteria, competition and egotism in every arena of economic and social life—all of this fungi, insects, earthworms, and small mammals. If hunting leaves this oikos completely dissolves any sense of community whether with nature or in society. essentially undisturbed, agriculture by contrast affects it profoundly and makes The traditional assumption that community is the authentic locus of life fades so humanity an integral part of it. Human beings no longer indirectly affect the completely from human consciousness that it ceases to exercise any relevance soil; they intervene into its food webs and biogeochemical cycles directly and to the human condition. The new starting point for forming a conception of immediately. society or of the psyche is the isolated, atomized man fending for himself in a competitive jungle. The disastrous consequences of this outlook toward Conversely, it becomes very dif(cid:976)icult to understand human social institutions nature and society are evident enough in a world burdened by explosive social without referring to the prevailing agricultural practices of a historical period antagonisms, ecological simpli(cid:976)ication, and widespread pollution. and, ultimately, to the soil situation to which they apply. Hyams’s description of every human community as a “soil community” is unerring; historically, Radical agriculture seeks to restore humanity’s sense of community: (cid:980)irst, by giving soil types and agrarian technological changes played a major, often decisive, full recognition to the soil as an ecosystem, a biotic community; and second, by role in determining whether the land would be worked co-operatively or viewing agriculture as the activity of a natural human community, a rural society individualistically—whether in a conciliatory manner or an exploitative one— and culture. Indeed, agriculture becomes the practical, day-to-day interface of and this, in turn, profoundly affected the prevailing system of social relations. soil and human communities, the means by which both meet and blend. Such a The highly centralized empires of the ancient world were clearly fostered by meeting and blending involves several key presuppositions. The most obvious the irrigation works required for arid regions of the Near East; the cooperative of these is that humanity is part of the natural world, not above it as “master” or medieval village, by the open(cid:976)ield strip system and the mouldboard plough. Lynn “lord.” Undeniably, human consciousness is unique in its scope and insight, but White, Jr., in fact, roots the Western coercive attitude towards nature as far back uniqueness is no warrant for domination and exploitation. Radical agriculture, as Carolingian times, with the ascendancy of the heavy European plough and in this respect, accepts the ecological precept that variety does not have to the consequent tendency to allot land to peasants not according to their family be structured along hierarchical lines as we tend to do under the in(cid:976)luence of subsistence needs but “in proportion to their contribution to the ploughteam.” 4 hierarchical society. Things and relations that patently bene(cid:976)it the biosphere He (cid:976)inds this changing attitude re(cid:976)lected in Charlemagne’s efforts to rename the must be valued for patently bene(cid:976)it the biosphere must be valued for their own months according to labour responsibilities, thereby revealing an emphasis on sake, each unique in its own way and contributory to the whole—not one above work rather than on nature or deities. “The old Roman calendars had occasionally or below the other and fair game for domination. shown genre scenes in human activity, but the dominant tradition (which Variety, in both society and agriculture, far from being constrained, must be continued in Byzantium) was to depict the months as passive personi(cid:976)ications promoted as a positive value. We are now only too familiar with the fact that the   6 Radical Agriculture Murray Bookchin 7