# Progressive Summary This book describes a degrowth scenario with an agricultural focus based on small farms. As befitting a degrowth narrative, it's all about making wise trade-offs. Agriculture involves trade offs between labour, energy inputs, and environmental impact. Because we are prejudiced against intensifying labour approaches, we have forced ourselves into a corner involving high energy inputs and high environmental impact. The future will depend on embracing more intensive labour, which doesn't have to be pure drudgery when done on a small scale. It will probably involve a mix of crop land (labour-intensive vegetable gardens), pasture (default livestock), and woodland. # Structured Notes ## Definitions agroforest - uses canopy trees to create additional three-dimensional space, maximising productivity through complex, multilayered polycultures encompassing below-ground tuberous perennials, perennial groundcover plants, shrubs, trees and vining climbers arable - land suitable for growing crops biointensification - replacing high-environmental-impact fossil fuels and agri-chemical methods with lower-impact biological ones default livestock - a term used by Simon Fairlie to refer to livestock that doesn't compete with humans for food; they are fed on matter that humans can't or won't eat, and turn that into food for humans (https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/eating-platter-clean) eutrophication - excessive nutrients in water from agricultural runoff that leads to excessive plant growth such as algae blooms husbandry - care, cultivation and breeding of crops and animals legume - member of the pea family macronutrients - protein, fat, energy organic farming - fertilizes crops from organic (living) sources, such as human or animal manure and cover crops. Protects crops from weeds or pests through living methods, instead of manufactured pesticides. ruderal - literally "growing out of rubbish"; organisms that invest in rapid growth to complete their lifecycles as quickly as possible. cereal - a grass producing edible grain extensification - enlarging the geographical bound of agricultural production via enclosure and colonial appropriation, and turning other landscapes such as forests or grasslands into farmland intensification - increasing the productivity of an area of land, as measured by yield or profit; often achieved by increasing inputs of labour, mechanical energy, fertilizer, water, etc permaculture - thorough cycling of human, animal and plant wastes, and imaginative optimization of available space to meet multiple human needs using skillfully applied manual labour regenerative agriculture - focuses on the symbiotic relationships between plants, which fixes carbon from the atmosphere and exudes it as sugars, and a plethora of soil life (including fungi) which feeds on the sugars and make nutrients from the soil available to the plants ## Chapter Summaries ### Chapter 2: Wicked problems This is a great chapter. Worth reading on its own. The political, economic and cultural dimensions of the metacrisis means that it can't be solved by a purely techinical solution. It is a wicked problem, which has the following characteristics: - There is no single definitive formulation of the problem. - There are no ‘right’, ‘wrong’ or precisely enumerable solutions. - Any solution is a one-shot operation, with no possibility of trial-and-error learning. - Problems are symptomatic of other problems. - No single authority is empowered to enact solutions. - The problems are caused by the people who must solve them. - The future consequences of the problem are excessively discounted. - The time window for solutions is running out. ### Chapter 3: Return of the Peasant Farmers still account for 20% of the global workforce. ### Chapter 4: The Farm as Ecosystem Ecologist Phil Grime describes 3 main evolutionary strategies tailored to different combinations of disturbances and resource availability: 1. High disturbance, low productivity: no strategy 2. Low disturbance, low productivity: stress-tolerator dominance 3. Low disturbance, high productivity: competitor dominance 4. High disturbance, high productivity: ruderal dominance Disturbance is any event that endangers an organism's well-being (eg fire, flood, frost, trampling, predation, etc). Productivity refers to the inputs and nutrients necessary for its growth and well-being. In the first case, no strategy is going to work. Conditions for life are non-existent. The second case favours pioneer plants (weeds) like meadow grass. The third case favours tough perennials. The fourth case favours ruderals. Perennial plants allocate more carbon to non-reproductive structures. Ruderal plants focus on producing seeds as a survival strategy. This framework also applies to people. We have gravitated towards higher productivity "competitor" strategies by seeking out more productive environments, or by making our environments more productive. Our most effective strategy has been to cultivate ruderals like wheat, rice and maize. The ten crops in descending order of land-take (taking up 75% of our cropland) are wheat, maize, rice, soybeans, barley, sorghum, dry beans, rapeseed, cotton and millet (Source: FAO-  STAT – 2017 data). 6 of these are cereals. Farming has been a strategy to shift landscape into the "ruderal space" of high productivity and high disturbance. It interrupts the ecological succession of land towards woodlands through continuous disturbance. However, the problem with this strategy is that it leads to environmental degradation. An alternative strategy is swidden agriculture (slash and burn) which embraces ecological succession, but cannot be intensified enough to feed the world's current population. Another strategy is pastoralism, which employs animals to graze on grass. We can't eat grass, but animals can. And grass can grow in arid regions where trees can't grow. The problem with this strategy is that it is land hungry. 70% of global agricultural land is grassland, mostly for grazing ruminants that only provide 9% of our calories and 17% of our protein. Calories and protein get lost along the way because we skip a trophic level - we don't eat the grass. The upside of pastoralism is that it is labour-efficient. A farmer can use animals to control large tracts of pasture. It is also an effective way to maintain fertility through the animals' manure. Ruderal farming is harder work than foraging or pastoralism, a fact hidden in the wealthy world because the work is done by machines or people we don't see. The stress-tolerator strategy is the best when energy availability is low. The world has a population of 7.7 billion people with a per capita land allocation of 1.6 acres. Faced with hard trade offs, we are probably best off pursuing a combination of arable farming, gardening, forest gardens and swidden. ### Chapter 5 - The Arable Corner In the 1960s, the Green Revolution introduced high-yield cereals. Since then, we have begun forming a global civilization based on wheat, rice and maize. This boxes us into a trap that amplifies population growth, while requiring high inputs of water, energy-intensive fertilizer and pesticides, and genetically uniform crops - producing the very poverty it purports to solve. The Green Revolution boosted the ruderal characteristics of annual cereals, breeding them to allocate more resources to seed than to stem. It served the interests of cash-poor governments rather than cash-poor people, and prevent a "red" revolution that would have equalized wealth. There is a danger that the arable corner locks in injustice. For example, genetically modified crops like golden rice, which is engineered to produce more Vitamin A, is defended on the grounds that poor people can't have access to a balanced diet, so the only option for them is the genetic fortification of staple foods. Poor people are permanently denied access to fresh vegetables and whole foods that would secure their biological well-being. > The fact that it seems plausible to suggest it at all shows how mentally trapped we are in cereal-state thinking and its casual inequalities: wealth for the few, poverty for the many; fresh fruit and vegetables for the few, cereals for the many. Perhaps there’s a shorthand way of saying all this. Civilisations that produce a lot of ruderal crops also tend to produce a lot of effectively ruderal people – people who have to subsist on rubbish, who lack the opportunity to build a rounded and resilient existence, who are condemned to be servants rather than beneficiaries of ‘civilisation’ and who, all too often, have few choices but to follow the ‘live fast, die young’ pattern of ruderal organisms. > archaeologist Jennifer Pournelle strikes an appropriate note of caution: ‘Reckless transformations of entire agronomic systems into production of any single, easily divisible, transportable, marketable and transformable crop is not the hallmark of statehood: rather the tocsin of impending collapse. States resilient over millennia do not convert all available biomass into one risible foodstuff.’ The most viable option would be planting annuals in small gardens or farms, interspersed with perennials. ### Chapter 6 - A Note on Alternative Agriculture Conventional farming is actually a historical anomaly of the past 100 years. What currently goes by the name of alternative agriculture has been the historical norm. When people make the argument that modern technology has released us from human toil, this glosses over the legacy of European colonialism, which solved the problem through slavery. That agricultural development must be solved through labour substitution and not labour intensification is a prejudice from European history. Agriculture is a series of trade offs between labour, energy input and environmental impact. Husbandry Alternative agriculture solves these trade offs through biointensification. Biointensification has more to do with gardening than farming. It's about growing 20 cabbages to feed yourself, rather than 20,000 cabbages to sell to a wholesaler. The long-term ecological tendency is to revert to a low-disturbance, low-input and low-productivity state. Agriculture of almost any kind works against this tendency. There is almost no such thing as "natural" agriculture. > The notion of alternative agriculture as natural agriculture often finds expression in the idea that well-raised crops bursting with natural health can better resist pests and diseases than those artificially propped up with fertilisers and pesticides – the manifestation of a common metaphor: ‘the balance of nature’. There’s probably a grain of truth to the idea of naturally healthy crops, but ‘the balance of nature’ is an inert and problematic metaphor suggesting two weights at a standstill on lever scales. If there’s any balance in the natural world it’s not like this. Rather, it’s a temporary equilibrium representing the aggregate outcome of innumerable organisms pursuing their destinies and reacting back on one another. Proponents of alternative agriculture rely on some truisms: - nature abhors a vacuum - nature abhors monoculture But in early-successional states, nature tolerates monocultures typified by competitor or ruderal organisms. > Attempts to prove that diverse crop polycultures yield more biomass, calories or other nutrients than monocultures acre for acre haven’t been conspicuously successful, except in the special and non-generalizable case of legume mixes. > > But the strongest arguments for crop diversity aren’t about total productivity. They’re about growing an appealing and balanced diet, security against the failure of single crops, supporting wild biodiversity, establishing beneficial interactions at the farm or farmscape level and producing a full range of products for local needs without assuming that global infrastructures based on cheap fossil energy can import them from afar in perpetuity. Permaculture comes closer than organic farming or regenerative agriculture to meeting the demands of the future. Organic farming is often lower yield, and so could lead to land-hungry extensification. With regenerative agriculture, there is a risk that it draws down on existing stocks of nutrients in the soil. There is also a limit to how much carbon it can sequester (the most generous estimate is 15% of carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Carbon pool in remaining fossil fuel reserves is about 4.1 trillion tonnes, so it's safer to leave it in the ground. Four themes that should inform any vision for a sustainable, low-energy, agricultural future: 1. Biointensive, with human labour being the key input. 2. Involves biomimicry, with limits, since farmers seek different outcomes from wild ecosystems. A mix of crop land, pasture and woodland. 3. Trade offs that balance crop output with labour input, crop nutrition, soil health and GHG emissions, preventing completely satisfactory solutions. 4. A lot of small farms distributed widely, with farmers making a larger percentage of the population. ### Chapter 7 - The Apothecary's Garden Garden culture is different from field culture. It focuses on healthy fresh fruit and vegetables. Physical and mental well-being are enhanced by outdoor exercise and connectedness. A garden can be the source of medicinal plants and other non-food crops. The gardener can act as their own grocer, apothecary, personal trainer and builder's merchant. > Of course, our modern arable civilisation also furnishes garden crops, at least for the wealthy. Most supermarkets have an aisle or two devoted to perfect-looking fruit and vegetables, often grown far from the point of sale. But it seems fair to say that their real forte lies in presenting oil, fat, starch and protein derived from a handful of global commodity super-crops grown on mass scales in endlessly tempting but unhealthy combinations, which is one reason why obesity and other diet-related health problems are a growing global issue. Fresh produce is the one commodity that doesn't seem to have economies of scale. It's cheaper to produce food in your garden than to buy it in a supermarket, even without factoring the cost of environmental degradation. That's probably due to lower transaction costs. Gardens are also more productive ... > Human attention and ingenuity always addresses itself most keenly to the key limiting factor it faces, and when you’re working to produce food for your household from a small area, rather than paying someone to produce it for a market, that limiting factor is usually the productivity of your land. In wealthy countries, growers have more access to financing, so it's cheaper to pay someone to grow your food. But this doesn't apply to most people on the planet. Small farms have survived better than small factories in the face of economic globalization. As global crises ratchet up, this is likely to continue. > Generally, if rural smallholders can operate without too many top-down distortions, they respond by producing food abundantly, and there’s a good case for building that abundance from small-scale, garden-based strategies geared to household self-production for both ecological and social reasons. ### Chapter 8 - Beasts of the Field (and Garden); Beyond Shopping Aisle Ethics Livestock require more land, water and energy than vegetables or cereal crops. They also produce more environmental negatives, such as GHGs, soil acidification, and water eutrophication. Current livestock numbers mean that a family of 4.45 people is accompanied by one whole cow, 70% of a sheep, 60% of a pig and a goat and 15 poultry. The difference between "shopping aisle ethics" and "peasant ethics": - Within the current political economy and the food system associated with it's more ethical to eat vegetables than meat. - It's even better for the environment if we support local, low-energy farming, and this system will involve livestock, because they serve as tappers, cyclers, and providers of inputs and nutrients that are harder for people to access unaided. Fertility management is livestock's most important job on a low-energy farm.energy farm. Providing meat, eggs and milk is a bonus. For example, pigs (on larger scales) and poultry (on smaller scales) can turn over a field or garden bed (plough it), spread their dung on it (fertilise it), and eat weeds and pests prior to planting (apply pesticides). About a quarter of the world's entire land surface is devoted to permanent meadows and pastures to feed our livestock. > So one problem with the narrative that livestock are climate villains is the way it displaces attention from both fossil fuels and economic inequality, with its tall tales that cows are worse than cars, that trees can offset power stations, that judicious tweaks to the fossil-fuelled political economy can make it sustainable, and that the global wealthy can remedy their outsize carbon footprints through lifestyle changes like turning vegan. The argument that we should tackle environmental crises by avoiding meat is like saying we should tackle economic inequality by boycotting luxury cars. ### Chapter 9 - The Fruited Thorn: Agroforesty > Woodland usually comprises mostly perennial plants, so in theory a woodland agriculture might deliver that strong perennial vision I described earlier. Trees and shrubs indeed have much to commend them for human ecology, including fuel, construction material, shelter, nitrogen fixation, water management, livestock fodder, a resource for biodiversity and pest management, and objects of beauty. The reproductive tissues of trees (fruits and nuts) provide food for humans. Nuts can come with a large protein and energy package, but are often protected by a hard shell. Fruit is mostly energy-rich sugar, and is easier to access, being "essentially a bribe from trees to animals to spread their seed." Trees are sparing with these gifts, however, because they are long-lived perennials, and take a long time to reach sexual maturity. Temperate-climate commercial fruit growers breed smaller, short-lived trees on dwarfing rootstocks with higher nutrient requirements and which need artifical support and heavy pest protection because they don't allocate much energy to stems and defence. Agroforesty can provide all the food that people need in moist, low-latitude biomes, where cereals are not well-suited, and where perennials are rich in fat, protein and energy. Many tropical garden cultures will also grow yams, sweet potatoes or rice as annuals. In higher latitudes, such as France, wheat yields twice the per-acre macronutrients as nuts. This is because there is less sunlight and perennials pull back on reproduction. > the potential is high for combining annual crops with perennial grassland and woodland crops in mixed agroforestry systems. In addition to forest gardens, these systems often involve ‘alleys’ of annual crops or pasture between rows of trees, possibly akin to the cultivation of ‘sparsely distributed garden-sized patches’ of annual crops between perennial ones. > We’ve now discussed, however briefly, the human ecology of field crops, gardens, livestock and wood crops with a view to constructing more sustainable farm systems for the future out of this raw material. Earlier, I mentioned the idea of people re-wilding themselves in the context of that future – spreading out across the landscape like other organisms do to skim its flows sustainably rather than concentrating so as to mine its stocks, practising the arts of self-reliance, knowing how to fill the larder, and knowing how to stop when the larder is full rather than pursuing an economy of endless accumulation. ### Chapter 10 - Dearth > What’s clear from famine history is that the people at highest risk aren’t farmers with good land access, or people (usually urban) with strong citizenship entitlements, but those caught in between: poor (usually rural) people exposed to local or global market fluctuations who possess neither good land access nor good political leverage. > Estimates for the number of people globally who currently suffer chronic hunger vary from about 800 million to 2.5 billion – possibly more than 30% of the entire world’s population. This is in a world where the average real GDP per capita has increased almost threefold in the last 60 years, suggesting that economic development as such isn’t the issue. But global wealth concentration might be. > > Meanwhile, the majority of international land sales in Africa, now the most foodinsecure continent, are biofuel concessions, while land reallocation to export agriculture in the famine-prone Horn of Africa fuels conflict and resulting food insecurity in the region. All this surely upends the supposed dangers of food insecurity in a small farm future. A more likely culprit behind contemporary food insecurity is the march of economic modernisation, and its tendency to capture the gardens of rural people in poor countries while offering little in return. > trendspotting urban billionaires who are parlaying their inedible wealth into remote tracts of farmland to safeguard against future uncertainties ### Chapter 11 - Can Alternative Agriculture Feed Us? > If rural people outside your city are generating your food, what are you or your city generating for them in return? Saying that cities generate wealth isn’t good enough if it’s wealth that rural people can’t tap. Of course, cities do contribute to general human well-being and it would be foolish to insist that everyone must provide all their own food and other resources. But it’s not a bad starting place for testing one’s assumptions. To put it another way, asking if your locality can feed its population starts posing questions about power and the geography of colonialism, both local and global. ### Chapter 12 - Households, Families and Beyond Care needs to be given to protecting the rights of women and preventing an intensification of patriarchy in a smallholder farming society. ### Chapter 13 - Complicating the Commons **commons is a resource, a community, and a set of social protocols** > A commons isn’t the private property of any single person, nor is it controlled by a state or public authority ostensibly in the general public interest. Rather, it’s a resource used by a group of people who organise among themselves to determine the nature of their individual and collective use. As commons activist David Bollier puts it: ‘A commons is a resource + a community + a set of social protocols.’ **commons are exclusive** > A commons is not a free-for-all. Of course, this raises questions about who’s in and who’s out, on what grounds, whether the ins become a closed clique or caste, and whether the outs can make a livelihood without access to common resources. Although modern proponents often present the commons as more co-operative than other economic institutions, their potential exclusivity needs to be taken seriously if they’re advanced as a true model for political co-operation. **harding's tragedy of the commons wasn't wrong** > While Elinor Ostrom’s work is often invoked as a disproof of Hardin’s tragedy of the commons, she herself stated that his model isn’t wrong; it’s simply one possible outcome among several. **tight commons** > Property regimes of all kinds are intrinsically social. Ultimately, they can only function through widespread and ongoing consent. In the tight farming situations of the future, the real need will be to replace the extractive, inequitable and speculative private property regime of our existing political economy, which is justified with the increasingly threadbare myth that private self-interest generates public benefit, with collective agreements about a fairer distribution of private property that enables most people to access small parcels of productive farmland. In such a situation, smallholders would develop innumerable local commons over time that optimised responsible use of the local ecological base. I don’t mean to understate how intensive that process would be – the joys and frictions of neighbourliness, the endless curation of interactions, tensions and gossip that go into creating local forms of cooperation up to and including a formal commons. But that’s not currently the most challenging task. The most challenging task is to develop the collective agreements over the private property rights enabling widespread access to farmland. This is what I call creating the ‘tight commons’, and it’s key to a small farm future. > Perhaps the enthusiasm for commons in alternative economic thinking arises more from a commitment to human solidarity in the face of contemporary crises and the cold workings of modern property markets, and less from a detailed interest in how commons practically work. **liminal urban commons** > There are likely to be difficult tensions around this point in the move towards a small farm future. In crisis situations, there are often a lot of people on the move with profound unmet needs, and the sedentary ‘who’s in/who’s out’ logic of a traditional agricultural commons isn’t a humane basis for meeting them. This has prompted various practical and theoretical attempts to rethink commons in a more fluid, open and inclusive way fitted to present circumstances, for example in the concept of ‘liminal’ urban commons applied to inclusive self-help initiatives arising during Greece’s economic crisis. I don’t mean to deny that this kind of commons will remain important, but my argument is geared more to avoiding and stabilising crisis situations by building local agrarian autonomies, and as this happens I suspect that liminal commons will probably transition towards more recognisably traditional forms of agricultural commons. **problems with usufruct** > I’ve made a case for private property as a building block for those local agrarian autonomies. In fact, I’d argue there’s a case for largely inalienable private property in a small farm future. Why inalienable? Well, consider an alternative like usufruct, which is sometimes advocated in alternative economics circles. The idea is that nobody ‘owns’ the land, but that individuals can have the right to its ‘fruit’. In other words, you can farm the land and make your living from its produce. Usufruct is, in Murray Bookchin’s words: ‘the freedom of individuals in a community to appropriate resources merely by virtue of the fact they are using them. Such resources belong to the user as long as they are being used. Function, in effect, replaces our hallowed concept of possession.’ > > The problem lies with the ‘as long as they are being used’ because it leaves unclear who gets to decide what counts as appropriate use. Consider the allotmentholder ejected from her plot because the allotment association deems she’s not using it properly. Perhaps she thinks she’s allowing wild plants to grow to encourage beneficial insects, whereas the association considers her untidy plot to be ruined by weeds. Who’s right? And who gets to decide? Or consider the dispossession of Native Americans justified by John Locke on the grounds that they weren’t ‘improving’ their land as Europeans did. Again, who’s right? And who gets to decide? **virtues of private property** > The difference between usufruct and private property is security of tenure, and it’s this that renders property as freedom in a ‘three acres and a cow’ sense. Security of tenure also works as a good bet against enclosure, engrossment and the financialisation of farming. If you’re the possessor of inalienable property rights, then nobody can turf you off or increase your rent and squeeze more surplus and productivity gain out of you. > The advantage of money is that it’s more fluid and less ‘sticky’ than established status hierarchies > The problem is to strike a balance between this fluidity and the danger that it permits an influx of speculative capital raised elsewhere to heat land prices beyond the capacities of the local farm economy. The best way of avoiding this danger is to limit the possibilities to accrue liquid capital. Such limitation is in keeping with the idea of an economy based on tapping renewable local flows of energy and resources, rather than drawing upon concentrated stocks. > > One way of achieving this balance is heavy gift or estate taxes to prevent the concentration of wealth by stopping its transfer at death from parents to children. In this way, farmland can circulate back into the market at affordable prices. A downside is that this breaks the generational link between a family and its farmland that can act as a foundation for good long-term land husbandry. Still, the burdens of taking on and honouring the lifework of one’s parents weigh heavily on some people. Estate taxes offer an escape – and historical evidence suggests that small-scale proprietors can be unsentimental about inheritance if they’re confident of obtaining land to make a livelihood by other means. ### Chapter 14 - Going to Market > In heavily monetised societies, you may not trust your neighbours, but you have to trust the state in the form of your coin. In small farm societies, it’s more likely to be the other way around. > human symbolic systems like money are potentially limitless, whereas humans themselves and the physical world they inhabit aren’t. If our limitless symbolic systems are allowed to drive the flow of service from this real physical world, then it’s likely that the physical world and some of the people in it will suffer degradation. It seems wiser to establish trust by setting limits around our symbolic systems that are plausibly driven by the capacities of the physical world and its human inhabitants. > Historically, a debt-financed commercial capitalism exploded out of Europe in a colonial expansion that reorganised local economies into a global profit-maximising nexus later turbo-charged by the exploitation of fossil fuels. ### Chapter 15 - The Country and the City # Rough Notes Humanity today still depends on 3 crops – rice, maize, wheat – which were domesticated about 7000 BCE and are still being grown using techniques that would have been familiar to any ancient farmer. They are all cereals and members of the grass family. They provide about 40% of our energy and protein. They fit well into the logic of modernism, because they: - are amenable to mechanised agriculture - store well - can be efficiently transported - are visible to government taxation and record-keeping - can be processed into other tradeable foodstuffs Computers have a million times more processing power than the ones available 50 years ago, but global wheat yields are less than 9 times higher than in ancient Rome. > In dimensions that matter most to our continued existence, we're less distant from our ancient counterparts than we sometimes think. ## Energy All of our energy comes from the sun, which manifests in different forms of flow - sunlight, wind, ocean currents. Life dips into this flow to create intermediate stocks - roots, wood, animals. A small farm society would be "oriented to skimming energetic flows rather than mining energetic stocks". In 2017, 15 million tonnes of wheat were produced in the United Kingdom, enough to feed the country's 66 million people. The on-farm energy use was 35 million GJ, less than 1% of the country's total energy consumption. Based on this, it requires 16 litres of gasoline on-farm to produce one adult's entire annual food energy requirements. Nearly 7 of those litre-equivalents are currently devoted to synthetic fertiliser. Organic wheat would use less energy. ## Soil Global reserves of phosphorus is concentrated in 5 countries, and "peak phosphorus" is a "geostrategic ticking time bomb". Small farms are probably better equipped to conserve soil, because of their capacity to close the loop of local flows. ## Water In 20 years, global supply of water will only meet 60% of demand. ## Capitalism French industrialist Louis Marlio coined the term neoliberalism to describe the movement coalescing around Austrian economists Ludwig Mises and Friedrich Hayek. History of capitalism can be described in the following 7 trends: 1. The formation of local agrarian capital, with an ambiguous relation to capitalism as such. 2. The emergence of rentier capitalism based on Ricardian landlordism, and then other forms of non-landed rent. 3. The formation of a capitalist world system through the connection of trading empires. 4. The emergence of entrepreneurial industrial capitalism. 5. The transformation of industrial capitalism into monopolistic corporate capitalism. 6. The development of neoliberalism, in practice if not in theory as the deregulated globalisation of capital. 7. The emergence of a de-materialised capitalist Empire. ## Modernity Capitalism isn't an innate feature of humanity, but is backed up by culture. The relevant culture here is modernity. Modernity began in the 16th century and came to full flowering in the 20th century. It is defined by the following aspects: - Society inevitably changes, and usually for the better - Rising individualism and self-creation of citizens (which in turn leads to consumerism) - Some people benefit at the cost of many others (eg slaves) > Sociologist Göran Therborn defines being modern as being ‘unbound by tradition, by the wisdom of our fathers, by the skills of our masters, by any ancient authority. To be modern is a cultural time orientation to the present and toward the future’ > The idea of ordinary people coming into history and creating themselves as individuals must be counterposed with the experience of modernism – the alienating, mass-scale, monolithic, rationalised, expert-led, bureaucratic grid through which much of modern life is lived. Even as this grid provides some of us with levels of material comfort unknown to most people in the past and to ever new ways of creating ourselves aesthetically, it seems to deny us ways to create ourselves materially and spiritually – no land to grow food for ourselves, no capacity to maintain or mend the machines upon which we increasingly rely and that come to us wreathed in layers of electronic sophistication that might as well be magic, no autonomy of action in the face of policies and procedures laid down minutely by the organs of state power. > > This modernist phenomenon of well-paid and materially comfortable but meaningless and alienating work is increasingly apparent, and instead of labouring the point I’ll simply mention the resonant titles of two recent books that explore the malaise: Bullshit Jobs and The Case for Working with Your Hands. It’s tempting to dismiss this as over-privileged moaning, what’s sometimes sardonically described as a first-world problem. But I think we should take it more seriously, if only because first-world problems usually become whole-world problems. > > The problem is a whole-world one for two reasons. First, it creates large numbers of people with a lot of money in their pockets to draw down on global resources but no capacity to restore the resource stocks they’re depleting through their work, as – for example – farmers can. Second, it fosters a kind of morbid cultural psychology that invests feelings of alienation and incompetence or, worse, a narcissistic embrace of modernism’s capacity to deliver endless personal service. There’s something to be said for experiencing the objective resistance of the non-symbolic world to a narcissistic sense of mastery – a broken tractor, a hail-ravaged crop. Of course, such things are no joke for people living on the margins of subsistence. But the reason they’re living on the margins of subsistence isn’t usually because of the objective resistance of the non-symbolic world. Instead, it’s because the narcissism of somebody else’s symbolic economy has offloaded the risk onto them. > > This, then, is the crisis of modernist culture – the ability to create ourselves as individuals and protect ourselves from the vicissitudes of the non-symbolic world, set against the ability to alienate ourselves as individuals and offload the consequences of our self-creation onto other people (including future people) and the non-symbolic world. In view of the other crises we face, the only convincing way I can see of transcending this crisis is to start making ourselves as individuals in less materialised ways that are more engaged with the Creation, the non-symbolic world, around us. The small farm future I describe in these pages is the most convincing form I can see that transcendence taking. > > One reason the prospect of a small farm future sits awkwardly with modern culture is that it flouts a sense of progress. Small-scale agriculture was what people did in the past, but we’ve now progressed beyond it. It’s hard to shake off this view because when we think about history through the lens of modernity we tend to use spatial metaphors with binary moral overtones. We move forwards, upwards or onwards, we lift people up out of poverty, we support progressive ideas and we don’t look back – but when we do, we see backward societies where a lot of people farmed. > ... it’s possible that people may have to embrace the old human essences of being > biological, labouring, suffering creatures after all, which isn’t an unenticing vision for everyone. > The other feature of small-scale farming that people often single out as problematic is that it can involve hard physical work. This is strange inasmuch as a capacity for hard, disciplined work is a characteristic feature of modernity, and the supposed indolence of non-modern peoples has frequently prompted criticism from their modernist observers. It’s not even as if we denigrate hard physical work. Consider our celebration of mountaineers, explorers, sportspeople, and gym members. > > The difference, I think, is that these are people working hard physically in ways that make them stand out as exceptional individuals, or at least that dramatise an individual life project – thoroughly modernist pursuits. Small-scale farmers, on the other hand, merely work physically in order to create their daily livelihoods. I’ve noticed this even at alternative farming conferences, where much emphasis is placed on being innovative – in other words, celebrating one’s individual exceptionalism. Of course, there’s a lot to be said for innovation, so long as it’s clear why we’re innovating, who’s benefiting and what the wider consequences are. But we seem loath to accept that working moderately hard to create a modest local livelihood using standard, well-established farming methods and spending the rest of our time creating ourselves through simple low-carbon activities like walking in the woods, visiting friends, reading a book, playing the guitar or making love constitutes a worthwhile form of modern life. > > I’d argue that, ironically, we’ll be making true progress – we’ll be truly modern – when we let go of older modernist traditions that insist our lives must get more moneyed, automated, commodified, materialised, mediated, individually crafted and so on. It’s not that there’s nothing worth celebrating or defending in the traditions of modernity, but doing so requires a nuanced and creative response to changing times that acknowledges modernity’s downsides. # Quotes