Sovereignty, Subsistence, and Revolt (pt. I)

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I. Sovereignty, Subsistence, and Revolt

Gustav Landauer posted:
One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle talkers and credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another – One day it will be realized that Socialism is not the invention of anything new, but the discovery of something actually present, of something that has grown…We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men.




We have arrived, as a species, at a peculiar juncture in the development of our shared world-system. An interdigitating set of political-economic and ecological crises looms large, threatening centuries of deprivation for our descendants, if not outright extinction. An absurdly unjust system of global capitalism, benefitting a tiny minority of kleptocrats and criminals, staggers mindlessly toward oblivion. As unrest grows and these crises intensify, it has become painfully obvious that no reform of this revolutionary state-capitalist machine is possible. It will destroy itself, and us with it, plunging us into debt-serf neofeudalism or worse, if we do not stop it.

I think that one of the most significant problems we face is that most communities have no effective control over their subsistence routines- that is, we lack what Via Campesina calls “food sovereignty”. A bare majority of us live in urban areas, and most of our subsistence routines are almost entirely conducted by others- usually organised at some level into large corporations, state-owned entities, and the like. Those that live in rural areas and work the land are still largely at the mercy of state intervention and international market forces. This arrangement has multifarious pernicious effects, but one of the most significant is that the corporate state has almost total control over the preconditions for life of the vast majority of human beings across much of the planet.

Clearly, subsistence routines that are conducive to socialism must be sought if we are to, paraphrasing Landauer, stop being the (corporate) state and start creating genuinely socialist institutions for our communities. Although many great political theorists have addressed agriculture in the English language, it is an unfortunate reality that most of the material in the Western tradition has been by white european men with little agronomic experience and a deeply held set of preconceptions about how agriculture “should” look, shaped by their experiences with european states under capitalism.

The range of imagination displayed in the agricultural imaginations of, for example, communists and anarchists is illustrative. Most communist agricultural theory implicitly assumes that an agricultural model developed by capitalists on the plains of Kansas to grow grain in the 1920s is definitionally the most efficient and “scientific” model for the agricultural sector. Those anarchists who don’t share the western “scientific” agricultural analysis tend to venerate an agricultural model developed under hierarchical feudalism, i.e. Proudhounian yeoman smallholder agriculture, or deny that agriculture can be practiced at all (primitivists). I believe this is an area where Westerners can benefit from a close examination of modern anthropological theory concerning agriculture. The failure to carefully scrutinise the evidence and theory around these issues will prevent the conception of genuinely revolutionary agroecologies. Such a theory is extremely urgent for reasons I will outline later, but which I am sure many of you are aware.



Fig 1. Otherwise intelligent people actually still believe that this will happen irl lmao

In order to take an initial crack at this, I will rely almost entirely on the work of noted anthropologist and agrarian-ist James C. Scott, whose oeuvre I have ploughed through (PUN FULLY AND GRATUITOUSLY INTENDED) over the last year or so and who has, I think, written some of the most lucid and interesting work on these topics.

Discussion of Sovereignty, Subsistence, and Revolt (pt. I) on tHE r H i z z o n E:

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II. Zomia, state space, and agroecology


James C. Scott was trained as an anthropologist, and has written ethnographies of Southeast Asian peasant groups as well as books on theories of resistance and state power. His latest book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia is an historical account, an ethnographic survey, and a theoretical framework. In this, he describes how pre-1950 lowland Southeast Asian (SEA) states shaped their agroecology, and how the diverse and flexible subsistence routines and cultural characteristics of upland SEA groups acted to evade or prevent the emergence of states. In This Post, I will attempt to summarize the argument with An Economy Of Words, but hopefully without leaving out anything important. If sth sounds wrong it is prob my fault- there's a podcast where he lays his argument out here if you want it from the horses' mouf w/o reading book.

(online copy of the book available here: http://zinelibrary.info/files/Scott%20JC%20-%20The%20Art%20of%20Not%20Being%20Governed%20-%20An%20Anarchist%20History%20of%20Upland%20Southeast%20Asia.pdf)

II.A Zomia

Scott's region of interest is Zomia, basically the SEA massif. Scott begins with the observation that, like many states, SEA states never climbed hills very well- as a general rule of thumb, he notes, their control generally didn’t extend to areas with an elevation greater than 300m. This left an enormous chunk of the continent effectively out of state control, or nearly so, for millenia. He's particularly interested in the region of Zomia bordered by the Han, Burman, Thai, Viet, Khmer, etc traditional states and sprinkled with Tai/Shan statelets, where the pattern is particularly clear, although the analysis travels easily as far as Afghanistan and I believe has more general implications.



Fig. 2 Zomia

II.B State space

Scott initially approaches the question of why state control did not extend into the Zomian highlands from the perspective of the state. The classical SEA state is run for the benefit of a state-making group, like the aristocracy of one of the lowland Khmer or Burman empires. The state, within its ambit, conducts its affairs. These consist mainly of concentrating population for the purposes of appropriation and control of the surplus of their production (usually grain and corvée labour). If the state is prosperous and its control is not too onerous, some people will go along voluntarily. Otherwise, the state engages in settlement programs, slave raiding, and slave wars to build its population base. It’s worth noting that the vast majority of classical SEA wars ended with the resettlement of population, not the capture of territory. The Thai saying encapsulating this activity is, Scott notes, “Put the vegetables in the basket. Put the people in the muang (settlement)”.

Once the population is settled within the "core" of the state, it must be fed. The "core" of the state is usually, therefore, cultivated intensely. Almost without exception, the cultivation method chosen is flooded field rice padi growing. These cores thus form the "padi core" of the state, which is usually a lowland plain with access to water (somewhere along a river, not usually the deltas which tended to be malarial). Padi growing, like most sedentary monoculture techniques, is spectacularly convenient for the state. To assess taxes, one merely needs to know the amount of land under cultivation and the expected yield for the region. If you don't like someone, it's easy to find their food and burn them out. It is labour intensive, so people must stay where they grow, and it stores and travels relatively well, so surplus can be appropriated and projected where the state needs it. It requires irrigation works which can be operated by the state to determine who gets water and who doesn't. It’s labour intensive, but with lots of captured workers, the return per area is unparalleled.



Fig 3. Padi rice cultivation

This is a typical padi field, flooded. It's worth noting that flooded field padi cultivation is actually probably not an ideal way to plant a rice field. It is, however, legible to the state- it can be easily understood and manipulated in an administrative fashion. It's a great staple and a great way of projecting power.

The limit of state space in the Southeast Asian context, then, was the physical extent to which a state could project its power. In thermoeconomic terms, the energy surplus of the state was in the form of grain. When all you’ve got is labour (animal or human) and grain, the extent to which you can project power is limited by the fact that labour needs to eat. The Ancient Chinese Saying encapsulating this concept is, as Scott notes, “Never make a grain sale over 1000 li” (400-500km depending on dynasty). In other words, if you’re hauling grain to the garrison on your border, and your ox team eats all your grain before you get there, that garrison is going to be pretty useless. In any case, it is important to note that this limit is not fixed- the ambit of even the most powerful SEA states was said to be reduced to just outside the palace walls during monsoon season, so hard was the going in the country.

Scott conceptualises state space in SEA, then, as clusters of states projecting what he calls fields of power:



Fig 3. WHOAooahh

Note that in this scheme, there are zones where one state can project power, expressing its sovereignty, and there are also zones of conflicting sovereignty and no sovereignty. Scott notes that zones of conflicting sovereignty can be just as stateless as zones of no sovereignty (“no man’s land”).

Ok, so you’ve read this far and basically you’ve got some kind of retarded venn diagram. I’m sorry. But here’s where it gets fucked up. What if you imagine the circles in that retarded venn diagram... ON A TOPAGRAPHIC MAP??



Scott uses a kind of weird paint/topographic map metaphor which I’m going to skip, but which can be heard in the talk linked above if you like. Basically terrain has friction. When you move guys into mountain hexes, it costs more movement points. State power projection works the same way. Humans and oxen don’t climb mountains well, even close ones, so power projection is abrogated by terrain difficulty for whatever form of movement the state is using in that terrain. So when you think of the mandalas of power displayed above distorted by a map of terrain friction, you get something like this:



Fig 4. Shan statelet Mungyang, located near the China/Burma border. Broken lines are travel times on flat terrain, solid ones are adjusted for terrain grade.

As you can see, much of SEA is fairly difficult going- it takes three days to get to Wan Kong, 50km away, although on flat terrain it would take less than two. This is a simple case of a single statelet, justifying the use of the round perimeters- in the case of larger states, we can imagine them “spreading out” easily where terrain friction is low (valleys, plains) and “drawing up” where terrain friction is high (hills, mountains). This is a persuasive explanation for the historical “borders” of most classical SEA states.

II.C Non-state space- the “Shatter Zone”

We’ve now defined a basic framework for operating a classical SEA state- what their primary resources are (labour and grain), how they manage them (settling populations into regimes of sedentary monoculture), how they project power to express sovereignty (shipping grain), and the limits to that projection (hungry pack animals). These states obviously do not exist in a vacuum, however. They shape and are shaped by non-state space in an ongoing dialectical process.

Before we get into this too deeply, I want to stress a point that Scott makes about civilisational narratives. In SEA states, to this day, highland peoples are framed by state peoples as “our living ancestors” or some variation thereof. Terms like “raw”, “uncooked”, “uncivilised” are used to describe highland peoples, where “cooked”, “civilised” are used to describe state peoples. This is more or less analogous to the “primitive/modern” discourse in the West- the implication is that some practices, however cotemporaneous, are in fact representative of some earlier stage of development, that Highland peoples are in the waiting room of history.

This can be dispensed with immediately as ahistorical nonsense. A simple example in the vein of our discussion here is the recent (post-17th-18th century) agricultural practices of highland SEA groups. Many, if not most, of these groups practice swiddening (slash-and-burn for you liberal trots). Swiddening in the SEA jungles is laborious, and many native plants are subject to a variety of diseases. No surprise, then, that “primitive” highland swiddeners immediately adopted steel machetes and New World crops like potatoes, cassava, etc as they became available. It is thus obvious that even the most basic cultural practices of these groups are not relics of a bygone age, but fully integrated into the modern, globalised economy (for better or worse).

This “raw/cooked” teleology is, always and everywhere, promulgated by the state. More frequently than not, it is presented as a voluntary process; barbarians attracted like moths into the luminous center of the civilised state. The reality is, of course, more complex. There are clearly times when a stable, well-governed, prosperous state is an attractive prospect to people on its periphery. On the other hand, the historical record is rife with examples of groups fleeing the demands of an oppressive state, or the chaos of a collapsing one. This gives rise to a kind of cyclical state lifecycle, in which the neonatal state collects (forcibly or otherwise) population in its core, the ascendant young state attracts non-state peoples to its wealthy “luminous center” for trade or settlement, and the decrepit, oppressive, or collapsing state struggles desperately to hang on to its serfs as they flee into the open frontier. The result of this dialectic is what Scott refers to as a “shatter zone” in non-state space.

A “shatter zone” stands in sharp contrast to state space, although they grade slowly into one another. In state space, we travel quickly on flat roads. Although there may be multiple self-identifying ethnicities present in state space, language and culture are relatively homogenous from one end of the state to the other. Thais are outwardly Thai, even if they used to be Akha- they dress like Thais, speak Thai, eat like Thais, live in settled Thai communities (we’ll touch on this cultural plasticity a bit more later). By contrast, the hills of the Zomian massif are a bewildering riot of language, custom, religion, culture- literally millions of different cultures are present in Zomia. Moving from one village to another a few kilometres away means, more often than not, needing a guide and interpreter just to get around the second village, no matter how familiar one is with the first! For an agent of the state, this space is illegible.



Fig 5. Distribution of some opium fields hill groups in Vietnam

It is worth noting, at this juncture, that the cultural “shards” of this zone are not present as thin slivers on a map- they, too, are shaped to the terrain. Scott notes that the pattern is, again, closely related to elevation. We may see pockets of Hmong people scattered around the map in Figure 5, seemingly willy-nilly, and wonder how it’s possible that there could be so many isolated Hmong communities. To make sense of this, we have to realise that, first, non-continuity doesn’t imply isolation- all of these communities are in contact (trade, family relations, tribute, raiding/warfare, etc) with one another. Secondly, all of these communities are above 700m or so in elevation (not coincidentally, good land for growing poppies, the lucrative cultivar of choice for the Hmong). We can actually create a crude elevational “hierarchy” of state and non-state space, like “0-300m – state; 300-700m – Karen/Akha; 500-700m – Lisu; 700+m – Hmong” (I just made this up and it is wrong but you get the idea).

How, then, was this pattern generated? Scott holds that the formation of shatter zones are caused by state-building projects. A familiar example for some of us is Ontario during the wars between colonial European powers. In the Zomian case, this is primarily a function of the precocious, frequently unstable Han state. The expansion of the Han state and the various conflicts occurring around its borders had the effect of driving group after group before it for literally thousands of years. Scott makes the fascinating case that Han Chinese identity is, in fact, a state identity, using a variety of textual sources to demonstrate that “uncooked” peoples were considered “tribes” until they started paying taxes, thus “entering the map” and becoming “cooked” or “Han”. This can be summed up as “states make tribes”- the “ethnicisation” of a people is generally a semantic operation performed by the state. So when we look at, say, Yunnan and wonder, “why are there so many Chinese minorities there?”- that’s a snapshot of the wavefront of fleeing peoples scrambling to escape the Han state before stateless spaces started to disappear entirely. The “Han” in Guizhou or Guangdong (or wherever, really) were “tribes” once, too, but they were assimilated into Han identity before the absurd Western notion of fixed ethnicity became hegemonic.



Fig 6. Fringe of the “shatter zone” of the Han state

In any case, the net effect is wave after wave of different groups pushing into the same upland territory, displacing groups that came before them and pushing them deeper (and higher) into the hills, or bypassing those groups and heading directly for the highest mountains, as the case may be. This all results in some extremely complex relationships between state and nonstate groups, which I’m not going to enumerate here. I do, however, want to emphasize that there isn’t any bright line between the two- people are constantly drifting across the frontier in one direction or another depending on the fortunes of states, of hill tribes, the vagaries of the seasons, etc (“tribes make states” just as much as “states make tribes”). Importantly, the identities of the people are constructed with (partial) reference to these relations.

II.D Agroecologies of state evasion and state prevention

We’ve seen how the Zomian shatter zone is inherently illegible to the state just by virtue of the density of different groups, as well as the difficulty of the terrain. Interestingly, their agricultural practices seem carefully optimised to maximise this illegibility. Scott holds that this is not, in fact, primarily a function of environment. Although the hills are certainly a distinct ecological niche, it is still completely possible to perform sedentary rice monoculture there. The Lisu actually do this:



Fig 7. Lisu people working a rice field

Far and away the vast majority of hill groups, however, engage in subsistence routines that are much more illegible to assessment, appropriation, and control. These include a spectrum from hunting and gathering to swiddening to limited sedentary polyculture (pastoralism is less common in SEA than among other stateless groups, but we can throw that in there as well). What’s notable about this is that although the specific routines vary widely, they are all extraordinarily difficult to appropriate a surplus from. Scott holds that this is not merely a coincidence by virtue of environment, but rather represents a conscious cultural choice on the part of these groups. That is, they are choosing to engage in cultural practices which are illegible to the state because they want to evade existing state projects and prevent new ones from springing up in their midst. The highly egalitarian Lisu are the exception that proves the rule- they traditionally lived far enough away from state projects to not fear their rice fields being a juicy target for an external state, and have the excellent tradition of murdering uppity headmen, effectively preventing states from arising internally.

OK, so let’s pretend we’re fleeing one of the interminable conflicts in Yunnan and we want to live in the hills, safely under the radar of the marauding Han state, and smoke opium all day instead. What the hell are we going to eat? Fortunately, Scott has included a quick reference guide to escape agriculture:



Table 1. MAN IM GETTIN HANGRY UP IN HERE

This is a sample of some crops Scott discusses. Immediately we are drawn to opium, given that we want to smoke it and it has very high value and stores well, but it’s labour intensive and we can’t live on it alone. So, we need something else that isn’t going to take away time from our trade crop and won’t be easily appropriated or destroyed when the state inevitably tries to wipe us out or force us to live in some hellhole city. And there it is- Cassava!

Let’s think about swiddening and growing cassava for a moment (in reality, in a given swidden, we’d probably have 50+ different crops growing, all scattered around the clearing, but let’s stick with a simple case for illustration- it’d actually be possible to live off cassava monoculture alone, so this isn’t too ridiculous). Because cassava doesn’t need much attention, it’s not a problem if the swiddens are far away from where we live right now. We can wander around the forest cutting a bunch of different clearings all over the place. Cassava also stores in the ground; after it’s ripe, you can leave it there for a couple years and come back later to pull it out, so if we need to fuck off for a while, it’s not a big deal. If we add in polyculture, it’s even better, since the things crops visibly sticking out of the ground (millet, maize, etc) are more likely to attract the attention of the state (or neighbours, animals, etc) than some innocuous-looking cassava.



Fig 8. Obviously the thing to do with cassava is to make pringles

If we put ourselves in the sandals of the tax collector, we can clearly see the contrast with sedentary flooded field padi monoculture. In the rice padis surrounding our comfortable city home, we take a few measurements, determine how many mu are under cultivation (no local knowledge is required to do this, in the worst case we might need a cadastral map of some kind), and tell the hapless peasant how many catties of rice he owes in the fall. If he gets uppity, we burn him out or shut down the irrigation works to his field. When the rice ripens, it all ripens at once, and we can just cruise around from peasant to peasant collecting tax all at once. If we want to collect taxes from the opium cassava people, we first have to traipse around the jungle to find the swidden. We have to walk around and count everything that’s growing in the swidden (could be potatoes, could be cassava, could be something else..), how much is there, and (somehow) figure out when it ripens (almost guaranteed to not be all at once, if the cultivator wants to eat year-round). Then we have to find the cultivator, tell him how much he owes, and AH FUCK IT I AINT GETTIN PAID ENOUGH TO BE OUT HERE. In sum then, cassava is a crop we can plant basically anywhere, is nigh-impossible absent massive expenditure of resources to find, destroy, or appropriate, and lasts literally years hidden in the ground. Unsurprisingly, states have been banning cassava cultivation for quite some time now!

Before proceeding, we should also take note of the lifestyle that this type of agroecology facilitates. Because our food can be basically anywhere for as long as we care to leave it there, our society of opium-addicted primo cassava chefs can congregate and fission off at will, moving from site to site and collecting and leaving behind other groups as they see fit. This is exactly the pattern we see in most hill groups, and is exactly what makes them so hard for states to pin down into settled communities.

II.E Loose ends, social constructionism

Although I’ve summarised here (hopefully comprehensibly) the main thrust of The Art of Not Being Governed, I’ve left out huge chunks of the argument which I want to briefly touch on here. As I alluded to above, we have to see choices that non-state groups make about agriculture in the context of the total social ecology they have constructed to prevent and evade state formation. This includes practices of mobility and social fissioning mentioned above. It also includes social plasticity. If we are hungry Miao (bad harvest?), and the Thai state’s doing pretty good, it’s hugely useful to stop being Miao and start being Thai- and this is in fact what happens all the time! The members of most of these groups see no contradiction in having multiple cultural identities that can be adopted as necessary/convenient, including both state and non-state identities.

More contentiously, Scott includes two nigh-universal traits of Zomian hill groups in his schema of state-evasion-and-prevention social technologies: millenarian religious heterodoxy and illiteracy. I don’t want to get into this too deeply (we can develop it later if you guys want), but I do want to touch on these traits briefly because they’re important parts of the argument and I think illustrate some other, useful directions this kind of model can go outside of agriculture itself.

As far as religious heterodoxy goes, Scott notes that hill tribes tend to take up a religious identity that is almost always in direct opposition to the religious orthodoxy of the most important regional state actor. So before the introduction of Christian missionaries to these regions, you see, for instance, an orthodox Buddhist Burman state with some seriously funky heterodox Buddhism (charismatic redeemer figures etc). This is maybe unsurprising in light of the fact that a lot of the people fleeing a state for the hills are going to be persecuted sects, royal pretenders, lumpen clergy, and sho on *wipes nose*. A lot of the religious practices are modified forms of earlier state/lowland religious practices, eg Hmong geomancy is basically identical to early Han geomancy with layers of accreted practice on top. With the introduction of messianic Christianity, many of these groups immediately converted with alacrity, seeing obvious parallels between the Christ story and their own tales of exodus, marginalisation, and the eventual return of a redeeming god-king. Christian or not, many of these groups have an extremely strong millenarian bent and the area seems to generate prophets every few decades. My impression of Scott’s argument is that he basically sees this as the social equivalent of generating mutations for natural selection. Groups that have been homogenous “ethnicities” for centuries will suddenly come under the sway of a prophet, part of the group will fission off under the prophet and totally alter their cultural practices. The example of the Karenni/Red Karen is a good one- in the 1820s, some Karen millenarians claiming to be Shan princes converted a group of the egalitarian Buddhist Karen to a hierarchical Karenni statelet structure!



Fig. 9 Red Karen lady in Chiang Rai, near Thai/Lao border.

This ability to undergo ethnogenesis, or identity shifting, Scott argues, is at least partially underwritten by the universal illiteracy among these groups. Almost all of them have some kind of “loss-of-writing” myth or story, in which, in the distant past, the group was literate, but either had writing stolen from them (spirits/Chinese people broke their tablets) or it was lost by carelessness (we wrote our letters on slices of Cassava and a monkey ate them). Scott sees this as a deliberate construction to avoid the imposition of a particular identity or history on these people. Since all transmission of historical accounts is oral, these accounts (while often quite detailed and accurate), can be shifted subtly to emphasize this or that aspect of the group’s history, wars with neighbours can be downplayed or forgotten, etc. This plasticity actually seems to be tremendously important for, paradoxically, maintaining the identity of the group in the face of hegemonic narratives.

To be clear, Scott does not deny the importance of environment in shaping culture, he just believes it’s a constraint on the options from which groups choose to construct their identity rather than a sole determinant.

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III. Implications, prospects, and challenges

Hopefully at this point, having skimmed that overlong summary or listened to Scott’s talk, you’ve got the gist of the argument. But why do we care? If you listened to Scott’s talk or read my summary closely, you noticed that Scott explicitly says his model applies only to pre-1950 Zomia. Why do we care about how classical SEA states operated?

Scott’s selection of 1950 is not arbitrary, as this was approximately the time that all-weather roads, oil-powered vehicles (trucks and helicopters, etc), and all of the rest of the modern technologies which use energy to compress time and space became widely available to state projects in SEA. Those of you who are familiar with the Burman campaign of the Second World War will recall that as late as the mid-40s, donkeys and humans were still the most reliable way to get around outside of the Irrawaddy valley. It’s only when we see the availability (and massive expenditure) of energy surplus in the form of fossil fuels (in addition to grain) that we get an expansion of state space into the uplands and the genuine expression of state sovereignty throughout the space encompassed by the nominal borders/claims of that state. In other words, it is only oil that allows the state to project power beyond the natural limits imposed by agroecology.

Fossil fuels being a finite resource, this state of affairs is (barring some cornucopian SOLAR EVERYTHING fantasy) transitory and ephermal. State space, particularly in absurdly large “nations” with patches of fairly rugged terrain like Amerikkka and KKKanada, will certainly contract to its agroecologically and thermoeconomically defined limits. We need a base of theory that will allow us to deal with the transition into this state of affairs constructively.

But is this model actually applicable outside of its specific context? Obviously I believe it is, although Scott makes no such claim. I believe the Zomian analysis travels easily into Central Asia, for instance Afghanistan/Pakistan. From the history of trade and raiding (mostly raiding) of sedentary agriculturalists by mobile, pastoral hill peoples, to the religious heterodoxy of the groups living on the highest mountains (Ismailis), it’s a pretty straightforward transposition. Even in European history, we see the same pattern in the interaction of the Romans with the Caledonii, for instance (or even later, between the English state and the Highland Scots). Throughout feudal history across the world we see escaped and fleeing serfs is a major concern of states (or state-like entities, feudal lords and the like) I’m not much of a comparative historian, so I’ll leave the historical points for the discussion.

More importantly, to me, is that this work is a sort of capstone on ideas that have been laced through Scott’s work for decades. Scott is speaking not just as a historian, but as someone with direct experience with the agroecology of state and non-state actors. The pattern, across the world, is extremely striking. Everywhere we go, we see states attempting to enforce sedentary monoculture as the sole mode of agricultural production, displacing polyculture, transhumance, swiddening, etc. This is done under different auspices, usually some kind o f “civilising” narrative. Prime culprits of late have been white European states. Indeed, European peoples are so culturally inured to state-legible and state-appropriable forms of agriculture that they literally believe that this is the only possible mode of large-scale food production!! Let’s look at a couple examples from other places:

Illegible agriculture:



Fig. 10 A polyculturalists’ field in Sierra Leone. Does this just look like an abandoned junkyard to you? Congrats, you’re a bougie Westerner and completely qualified to run a colonial agricultural improvement scheme! The careful placement of individual plants, as well as the construction of wooden erosion-abatement structures, gives a messy appearance that looks nothing like European agriculture. These techniques require an enormous amount of local knowledge and experience (what Scott refers to as métis, as opposed to techne), but are vastly better suited to the locality for producing large yields with minimal labour inputs, preserving soil structure and preventing erosion, and evading taxation and appropriation!



Fig. 11 A typical layout of fields in a pre-Stolypin reform Russian village. Each household would tend numerous strips around the village. This gives each household equal access to the range of grades, soils, and ecological niches in the area. Sorting out who’s growing what requires in-depth local knowledge, taxation is impossible, “looks messy”.

Legible agriculture:



Fig. 12 An Ethiopian village which has been resettled to “improve productivity”. The rigid lines of this settlement are typical of Western high modernist agricultural “improvement” schemes, where rigid conformity to a surveyor’s lines is more important than the actual lay of the land. It should be noted that schemes like this were very common in Eastern Africa, even under indigenous socialist regimes- they are in no way the exclusive purview of Western powers, although the idea is fundamentally a rationalist “scientific” Western one.



Fig. 13 Post-Stolypin reforms. Instant hierarchy has been produced in the village as some plots are obviously better than others. Easy to tax, terrible for the peasants who got the short end of the stick (not even that great for the folks who did well since they’re missing a bunch of potential ecological niches now).

These kinds of interactions happen absolutely everywhere, which is why I believe Scott’s work can provide a framework for developing something like a theory of the social- and agro-ecology of groups in contact with states.

Why is this important, though? Grocery stores exist, who cares about Cassa-



Fig. 14 oh my god we all gonna die la

Figure 14 depicts the time constraints we’re under, here. Some of you have seen this in the Science thread so I won’t belabour this too much, but basically this is a heat map displaying the average projections for drought conditions from something like the 13 best drought models we have. The scale reflects the relative change in hydrogeology from 1990 (so deserts that are strongly in negative territory are going to be venusian hellscapes whereas rainforests might just be kind of parched). -3 to -5 on that scale is approximately the extent of the change that coincided with the Oklahoma dustbowl. Let’s just briefly pretend I overlaid this next figure on Figure 14:



Fig 14. World agricultural production

So we’re staring down permanent dustbowlification of the majority of the agricultural land on this planet within two to three decades if Business As Usual continues.

Predicting the future is a fool’s game, but we can easily sketch out the constraints under which the future will take place. We know that peak oil means the contraction of state space, and we know that climate change is going to ruin the ability of states to appropriate energy surpluses in the form of sedentary monoculture. We know we have to get this thing done within the next couple of decades or start falling back, as communities, to the still-arable lands of the North. We know there will be problems with climate refugees and with migration. We know we need to develop the tools to tackle food production under constantly-shifting ecological conditions.

I believe we need to immediately build the kind of theoretical base that will allow us to address practical questions about where to put our energy in the limited time we have. Scott’s analysis is powerful in part because it allows us to instantly dismiss the kind of garbage that is peddled as genuinely materialist thought around the organisation of subsistence routines (and thus, our lives). For instance, the ongoing debate between primitivist anarchists, social ecologists, etc can just be dismissed out of hand. The primitive-civilised narrative is a state narrative. It doesn’t reflect reality. The question is not “should we abandon “civilisation” (whatever that is)?” but “what kinds of cultural practices are appropriate for the goals we are trying to achieve?” I believe this puts the focus much more clearly on trying to determine generally where we want to be, in what kind of communities, what our relationship to states (or corporate fiefdoms, state-like entities etc) will be, and what contingency plans will be available to us. How will we feed our revolutions? Can we envision a stable ecology of state and non-state groups, where the open frontier of non-state space underwrites the democracy of the states (ie, oppressive states will collapse like SEA classical states because their populations leave)? I believe if we can answer this kind of question (which obviously will require praxis as well as prefigurement), we’ll be well along the way to having a genuine toolkit of revolt against this nightmare corporate state.

Thanks for reading!!

Edited by shennong ()

#3
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i hambly submeet dees 2 u 4 peer revue

Edited by shennong ()

#4
meet me in st louis
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sweet op. i have no questions off-hand but really appreciate the poasts
#5
Poronto
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shennong posted:
Unsurprisingly, states have been banning cassava cultivation for quite some time now!



wd v much appreciate some more info about this.

#6
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#7
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guidoanselmi posted:
sweet op. i have no questions off-hand but really appreciate the poasts



feel free to take the thread wherever, theres a lot of ground in Scott's ideas that i didn't touch, and theres a lot of stuff that he doesn't deal with at all like class, distortions to agricultural systems as a result of the availability of oil, etc etc. so riff away if something catches your eye

#8
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discipline posted:
Isn't cassava filled with cyanide tho??!?



cyanogenic glycosides, yeah. you have to prepare it properly to eat it (like fava beans, sorghum etc), it often times just gets ground up as flour.

#9
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from Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon:

“Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?-- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,-- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,-- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe til the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,-- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.”



"To rule forever," continues the Chinaman, later, "it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call...Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,-- to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,-- 'tis the first stroke.-- All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Devastation."

#10
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whoops double post. anyways great thread. i want to do this thing

Edited by babyfinland ()

#11
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littlegreenpills posted:

shennong posted:
Unsurprisingly, states have been banning cassava cultivation for quite some time now!

wd v much appreciate some more info about this.



I'm trying to remember where I read about this, and I can't offhand. I know that cassava cultivation has been restricted or prohibited at different times in both Latin America and SEA, sometimes explicitly to starve out guerillas (cassava is sometimes called farina de guerra in latin america- flour/staple of war, Scott notes) but mostly due to concerns about "land degradation", more honest states will say something about depleting the treasury or the need to boost productivity or whatever. From Scott:

To the padi state, whether precolonial or colonial, such easily accessible and labor-saving subsistence crops, though valued in a pinch as famine foods, were a threat to state-making. The state's interests were best served by maximizing padi land or, failing that, other important cash, export crops such as cotton, indigo, sugar cane, and rubber, often using servile labor. Access to New World escape crops made the economics of escape as tempting as its politics. Colonial officials tended to stigmatize cassava and maize as crops of lazy natives whose main aim was to shirk work. In the New World, too, those whose job it was to drive the population into wage labor or onto the plantations deplored crops that allowed a free peasantry to maintain its autonomy. Hacienda owners in Central America claimed that with cassava, all a peasant needed was a shotgun and a fishhook and he would cease to work regularly for wages.

Cassava, like many root crops, has a large impact on social structure that, in turn, bears on state evasion. This impact makes for an illuminating contrast with grain cultures generally, and with wet-rice cultures in particular. Wet-rice communities live by a single rhythm. Planting, transplanting, and harvesting, and their associated rituals, are closely coordinated, as is water control. Cooperation in water management, crop watching, and labor exchange is rewarded if not mandated. Not so with root crops like sweet potates and cassava. Planting and harvesting take place more or less continuously according to the choices and needs of the family unit. Little or no cooperation is required by the agronomic characteristics of the crop itself. A society that cultivates roots and tubers can disperse more widely and cooperate less than grain growers, thereby encouraging a social structure more resistant to incorporation, and perhaps to hierarchy and subordination.

#12
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ive never eaten cassava. whats it like
#13
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babyfinland posted:
from Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon:

“Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?-- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,-- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,-- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe til the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,-- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.”



"To rule forever," continues the Chinaman, later, "it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call...Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,-- to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,-- 'tis the first stroke.-- All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Devastation."



man amen to this

#14
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babyfinland posted:
ive never eaten cassava. whats it like



you've never had tapioca?

#15
tardy on these heaters
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shennong posted:

babyfinland posted:
ive never eaten cassava. whats it like

you've never had tapioca?



oh i guess so

#16
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i'm not a big fan of cassava or anything and subsisting on it alone is a pretty fucking miserable diet but it can be done and its up there in the top 5 "plant this if you expect to get steamrolled by an army" crops.

i should point out that almost none of the Zomian hill groups are what we would call "self-sufficient", it's extremely difficult to eke out a living on some of that terrain without resorting to Lisu-style sedentary ag. i dont have a number but i wouldn't be surprised if historically a quarter to a half of the calories of hill groups came from trade with the lowlands. it's a lot easier to wander around looking for amber and trading it to khmers or whoever for rice than growing fuckloads of cassava, but the cassava is what'll keep you alive when the khmers decide they're just going to take your amber and burn your maize field down
#17
meet me in st louis
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So scanning back through the OP, I wonder if there's a way to rationalize decentralized, "illegible" farming with taxation? With satellite imagery and sufficient plant density it's quite possible to tell the difference between different areas where crops are planted and what is arable. I imagine this isn't really the desired conclusion of what you wrote but if you're looking for intermediary steps toward this ideal, this may play a role.

Also, I'm curious what implications this would have for places like the US that have a dramatically weakened diversity of plants. Start planting your monsanto seeds without roundup and and a tightly controlled environment and you're not going to bear fruit.



#18
meet me in st louis
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shennong posted:
i should point out that almost none of the Zomian hill groups are what we would call "self-sufficient", it's extremely difficult to eke out a living on some of that terrain without resorting to Lisu-style sedentary ag. i dont have a number but i wouldn't be surprised if historically a quarter to a half of the calories of hill groups came from trade with the lowlands. it's a lot easier to wander around looking for amber and trading it to khmers or whoever for rice than growing fuckloads of cassava, but the cassava is what'll keep you alive when the khmers decide they're just going to take your amber and burn your maize field down



i guess there's farm animals (horses, donkeys mules) for a reason. i don't have the first hand experience, but is grazing on grass sufficient to keep working animals in good shape? or do they require more energy-dense staples that require growing?

#19
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i need to do some work but i will return and answer all qs i promise!!
#20
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guidoanselmi posted:
So scanning back through the OP, I wonder if there's a way to rationalize decentralized, "illegible" farming with taxation? With satellite imagery and sufficient plant density it's quite possible to tell the difference between different areas where crops are planted and what is arable. I imagine this isn't really the desired conclusion of what you wrote but if you're looking for intermediary steps toward this ideal, this may play a role.



Ok, this is an important question because it allows us to tease out some of the differences between sedentary monocultures and other agroecologies that I didn't really address, and in a modern context as well. If the question is "can illegible agriculture be made legible" I think it's probably possible with the technology we have now (whether we'll still have that tech base in a hundred years I dunno).

In some sense, with the structure we have now, it doesn't even really matter how much land is under cultivation or what crops are being grown because if you want to do any kind of market exchange you're producing a traceable record of what you sold. We don't depend on grain for energy surpluses and so the direct appropriation of crops isn't really important to modern capitalist societies (yet, anyway).

The fact that we're actually still practicing agriculture similarly to pretty much every classical corvee-labour driven feudal state is pretty fucking bizarre, but can be explained basically by a combination of cultural inertia (which I touched on in the OP, there just isnt that much out there in terms of theories of alternate agricultures), scientism, and oil path-dependency.

The scientism is basically a function of agronomy as it was studied in the late 19th and early 20th century. Pretty much every significant agronomic study during this period was performed on monoculture study plots, which makes perfect sense when you're trying to control variables and figure out basic things like "how does plant growth vary as a function of plant density". Since people were already used to seeing big ol' monoculture or, at best, simple polyculture plots (this is particularly true of the midwestern States which was the hotbed of early scientific agriculture), I guess it made some amount of sense to them to just scale everything up. Unfortunately this turns out to be probably the most brittle way of practicing agriculture, even if it makes the science tractable.

Oil path-dependency is just that we've got a monoculture system now that we can't get away from (even after basically everyone acknowledges that it's at best problematic and at worst genocidal) because we've substituted oil for labour (fuel for tractors, harvesters, threshers, transportation, as well as oil-based pesticides replacing traditional weeding/cultivation techniques). We'd need a LOT more people on farms to even keep the monoculture system we have going (like imagine harvesting a few thousand acres of corn by hand).

Polyculture, swiddening etc aren't amenable to things like combine harvesters (can't be used in fields with mixed crops, really) and they're even more labour intensive than monoculture techniques, so in order to reconcile polyculture or other agroecologies with the state system we have now, you're talking about massive, massive shifts in the basic structure of society. That's going to happen whether we like it or not, and I really don't know what role states are going to have in the transition. If their behaviour to present is any indication, they're going to go down with the ship..

Also, I'm curious what implications this would have for places like the US that have a dramatically weakened diversity of plants. Start planting your monsanto seeds without roundup and and a tightly controlled environment and you're not going to bear fruit.



Yep, that's a huge problem. I guarantee GMO crops aren't going to be viable long term for the reasons you outline here. The dirty secret of American corn growers is that they've had massive, massive crop failures every couple of decades. Like they'll breed a particular strain, it'll become the dominant monoculture (this was happening before GMO crops, GMO is just a specific case of this behaviour), and then some blight will come along and wipe out every single corn farmer in the midwest. The fact that there haven't been massive problems with this in the States is almost an entirely a function of the fact that a few growers have been smart enough to keep growing some of the 20-30 different landraces of corn that we have. Like the whole monoculture system is literally underwritten by a bunch of little farmers in Oklahoma growing some corn landrace no one's ever heard of!!

#21
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guidoanselmi posted:
i guess there's farm animals (horses, donkeys mules) for a reason. i don't have the first hand experience, but is grazing on grass sufficient to keep working animals in good shape? or do they require more energy-dense staples that require growing?



yeah, you can graze a work animal on grass if you're just dragging things around the farm or whatever, but for pack animals you're probably going to need a supply of grain dedicated as feed to keep them going in rough terrain. particularly in the SEA context, there's no way to graze a pack animal in the hills really, which is why you see the use of donkeys and people more than oxen or whatever (I also don't think oxen are particularly good at negotiating rough terrain but I'm not sure about that)

#22
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another thing i want to emphasise is that polyculture, swiddening, etc are all high-skill, high-experience techniques. like if you just start throwing crops together without understanding something about companion planting you're going to fuck up pretty badly.

unfortunately these skills aren't really widespread in the west (swiddening is unheard of, obv). we've actually managed to basically deskill our farmers by making everything "scientific" and legible- you can pretty much buy a grain farm out of the box and if you're ok doing heavy labour not fuck too much up after a year or so.

on the other hand that crazy-looking sierra leone plot is the culmination of generations of hard-won experience and handed down knowledge and lore. we still have a little bit of that in the west but we need to revive it bigtime and propagate those skills as much as possible among the soon-to-be-peasantry imo
#23
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its pretty much going to be collapse of the roman empire style stuff isnt it
#24
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it doesn't need to be that way, but i think we need to be prepared for it. G William Skinner has some interesting stuff on Chinese peasant communities and the manner in which they opened/closed themselves to the outside world in accordance with what was going on (ie around dynasty changes they tended to close up, particularly in the case of foreign occupation- it then became job 1 of the occupiers to get them opened up again to restart the economy).

G William Skinner posted:
As the dynasty wore on, developments external to the rural community led first to constricted political opportunities, then to constricted economic opportunities, and finally to endemic disorder. In response, local communities began to close up, and in a specific sequence: normative closure first, then economic closure, and finally what might be termed coercive closure. Then, with the establishment of the next dynasty external developments were reversed. First peace and order were restored; then a commercial revival recreated the structure of economic opportunity; and finally, as the intricate bureaucratic system and the attendant examination system were brough to optimal working order, the structure of political opportunity was rebuilt. In response, local communities opened up again, relaxing first the coercive aspects of their closure, then the economic, and finally the normative.



So that's one model of an peasant response to the kind of disorder and chaos we might see. I think maybe on a little bit more of an upbeat note we need to be looking carefully at Cuba during the Special Period. they made the transition from the same American "scientific" agriculture system we have to something that is much closer to legitimately sustainable in about 5 years, which tells us that this can be done on the timescales we're talking about and in a way that will probably mitigate the worst of the climate effects

#25
Poronto
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i KNEW the most important thing in the world was food. eh tom
#26
desire be, desire go
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great thread. it is somewhat worrying that combating this sort of extra-state existence is exactly what militaries have been orienting themselves toward in the GWoT (then again, that's hardly new in a wider sense, i should probably reread mille plateaux and cyclonopedia. or maybe dig through mp's notes).

but enough focus on the pessimism of destruction, on to the pessimism of construction. you mention we still have "a little bit" of practical skill in the west. can you elaborate (,he says americanly), or maybe suggest googlable phrases
#27
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mistersix posted:
(then again, that's hardly new in a wider sense, i should probably reread mille plateaux and cyclonopedia. or maybe dig through mp's notes).



rereading cyclonpedia: was considering doing this myself, as was khamsek, and i think crow was going to read it for the first time? shennong i think you'd probably like the book as well. G00n project?

#28
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babyfinland posted:

mistersix posted:
(then again, that's hardly new in a wider sense, i should probably reread mille plateaux and cyclonopedia. or maybe dig through mp's notes).

rereading cyclonpedia: was considering doing this myself, as was khamsek, and i think crow was going to read it for the first time? shennong i think you'd probably like the book as well. G00n project?


i'd be down w/ this

#29
desire be, desire go
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yeah sounds like a good idea
#30
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mistersix posted:
great thread. it is somewhat worrying that combating this sort of extra-state existence is exactly what militaries have been orienting themselves toward in the GWoT (then again, that's hardly new in a wider sense, i should probably reread mille plateaux and cyclonopedia. or maybe dig through mp's notes).



this concerns me as well. if there's one thing histories of these groups tells us it's that we can expect people operating outside of, or working to change hegemonic agricultural paradigms will be viewed as an existential threat to the state to the extent that they impede rent extraction or provide an escape option to the lower classes. we can expect violence, which is another reason why it's critical to get a lot of this groundwork laid now, while the state is still just mucking around raiding the occasional raw milk producer.

mistersix posted:
but enough focus on the pessimism of destruction, on to the pessimism of construction. you mention we still have "a little bit" of practical skill in the west. can you elaborate (,he says americanly), or maybe suggest googlable phrases



sure. there are still older forms of peasant agriculture performed in various Western (mostly European) states that would be easily adaptable to post-oil agriculture, although a lot of this knowledge is being lost as we speak and Europe is frankly completely and utterly fucked w/ climate change so i dunno what's going to happen to that experience.

some of that has been transported to North America and elsewhere as "French intensive" techniques or "biointensive" techniques (the lineages of some of these things are pretty suspect and there's a lot of overlap). there are distinctive British horticultural traditions which are present to various degrees in organic ag there as well as in North America. there's also some weird-ass esoteric shit like biodynamic agriculture which uses some kind of astrological calculations to determine planting dates??? my understanding is that this is mostly bullshit and is to be avoided which you may have guessed from the "disputed" tag on the wiki article

North America has its own traditions of course, most of the indigenous ones have been lost (except things like the "3 sisters" (maize/beans/squash polyculture) etc). some of the colonial knowledge is still kicking around, there's been a revival of interest in the American South in the use of older ingredients in cooking, culturing unique landraces of various crops that are present in the South, etc. that's going to be pretty useful as Southerners migrate Northward. after that you've got the whole organic farming tradition descending from old dead guys like FH King to non-dead people like Eliot Coleman (Coleman draws a lot on traditional European season-extension techniques like cold frames etc). this tradition includes everything from no-till techniques to raised beds. There are a lot of organic farmers in the North America and they're basically going to be on the vanguard in terms of resisting corporate hegemony over agriculture as well as exploring more appropriate techniques.

some newer developments are things like "permaculture" and "agroecology". Permaculture is basically forest gardening. it's imo not well grounded in agronomy and the actual techniques they promote are very frequently suspect (chicken greenhouses). there are a lot of really fucking good horticulturalists who claim to be doing "permaculture" though and are worth listening to on a practical level. the permaculture folks have their hearts in the right place and "get" closed nutrient loops better than most of the "organic" farmers, generally.

"Agroecology" is confusingly named imo because an "agroecology" is just an ecology thats been modified to support a human subsistence routine. it's more like "Ecological agriculture" and is kind of an attempt to academically synthesize a lot of the knowledge we have about organic agriculture and articulate it in the context of our scientific understanding of ecology. it's not really a practical set of techniques or experience but it's a good example of how the liberal academy is responding to some of this stuff

#31
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babyfinland posted:

mistersix posted:
(then again, that's hardly new in a wider sense, i should probably reread mille plateaux and cyclonopedia. or maybe dig through mp's notes).

rereading cyclonpedia: was considering doing this myself, as was khamsek, and i think crow was going to read it for the first time? shennong i think you'd probably like the book as well. G00n project?



im up to my ass in like 5 books and a couple of textbooks atm, i guarantee i wouldnt be able to keep up, but i have added this to my "to read" list lol

#32
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Highly informative thread. The most recent issue of monthly review had a pretty good introduction to cuba's agroecology movement and shifting economy since the 90s which is worth reading: http://monthlyreview.org/2012/01/01/the-paradox-of-cuban-agriculture
#33
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koren posted:
Highly informative thread. The most recent issue of monthly review had a pretty good introduction to cuba's agroecology movement and shifting economy since the 90s which is worth reading: http://monthlyreview.org/2012/01/01/the-paradox-of-cuban-agriculture



This is great, thanks! I need to look at it more closely, hopefully we can discuss this more.

#34
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working through it
#35
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koren posted:
Highly informative thread. The most recent issue of monthly review had a pretty good introduction to cuba's agroecology movement and shifting economy since the 90s which is worth reading: http://monthlyreview.org/2012/01/01/the-paradox-of-cuban-agriculture



OK, a couple points on this piece. The lead author, Altieri, is one of the central figures of the "agroecology" movement I mentioned in my reply to Mr. six above. Not familiar with Funes-Monzote. The second chart in the piece really gets to the core of the success of the Cuban ecological agriculture program. They import oil, cereals, beans, half their meat, and a little of their seafood. they've got staple roots, eggs, fruit, veg, sugar covered almost completely. Amazing stuff, and disenheartening to hear the later description of the Cuban gov't backing away from that approach and reinvesting in monocultures.

A few other notes on things that stuck out to me:

No other country in the world has achieved this level of success with a form of agriculture that uses the ecological services of biodiversity and reduces food miles, energy use, and effectively closes local production and consumption cycles.No other country in the world has achieved this level of success with a form of agriculture that uses the ecological services of biodiversity and reduces food miles, energy use, and effectively closes local production and consumption cycles.



I don't know anything about Cuba but unless they're composting human waste on a really large scale, their "production and consumption cycles" are not closed. I prefer the term "nutrient loop" because it encourages thinking about the actual nutrients that are cycling through the ecosystem. it's not sufficient to merely recycle "food waste" nutrients into the system. we need to realise that agronomy doesn't end when the food is delivered to the table. we have to be as interested in the shit of the people eating the food as we are in the food itself. food's great, we know a lot about it, but we don't know very much about how to process shit from the enormous populations we have in a way that is both safe and closed-loop. my feeling is that the size of the conurbations we have now is inherently unsustainable, there's just too much centralised shit and converting the sewer system of a place like new york into a compost system would be sisyphean task. but its something to think about.

The main demonstrated advantage of GM crops has been to simplify the farming process, allowing farmers to work more land.



This is a really simple way of describing what's wrong with the system we've got. The money in agriculture is investing in ways of making ag more "efficient" from the point of view of minimising labour inputs (both in terms of skill and time) into the farming process. Zero thought has gone into the robustness or resilience of the system. The note about the size of a midwestern family farm increasing from 600 to 2000 acres is pretty astonishing, when you think about it. If you have a hundred acres of veg you can feed literally thousands of people (labour inputs are way higher of course), for perspective.

Forty days after Hurricane Ike hit Cuba in 2008, researchers conducted a farm survey in the provinces of Holguin and Las Tunas and found that diversified farms exhibited losses of 50 percent compared to 90 to 100 percent in neighboring farms growing monocultures.



.. and this is why building agroecologies that are resilient and robust matters in the context of climate change.

Cuba represents 2 percent of the Latin American population but has 11 percent of the scientists in the region. There are about 140,000 high-level professionals and medium-level technicians, dozens of research centres, agrarian universities and their networks, government institutions such as the Ministry of Agriculture, scientific organizations supporting farmers (i.e. ACTAF), and farmers organizations such as ANAP.



This is really important to me on a personal level because one of the great failings of the Western academy of the 20th century has been its complicity and silence on these topics which has benefitted no one except a tiny elite (that's not to rag on agronomists specifically, its been the institution as a whole). Those of us who came up in the academy I think have a special responsibility to rectify this. For me, I would very dearly like to be able to run a farm that operated as an agricultural extension service for that region that doesn't depend on grants, and publish in publicly-accessible journals etc. I don't think traditional academia is really reformable at this point in most of the West (at least not on timescales that matter) so I think a lot of this work is going to happen outside of the cloister, which is probably for the best.

Many farmers are also using integrated food/energy systems and generate their own sources of energy using human and animal labor, biogas, and windmills, in addition to producing biofuel crops such as jatrophaintercropped with cassava.



yes. YES. YESSS.

Given these realities, embracing agroecological approaches and methods throughout the country’s agriculture can help Cuba achieve food sovereignty while maintaining its political autonomy.



I'm really glad to hear this sentiment being expressed, although I'm not sure whether its Altieri here or Funes-Monzote or both. In any case, this closely reflects the main point of the OP, which is that the specific type of agroecology (in my sense, not in Altieri's) that underlies your subsistence routine is a strong determinant of your political economy. we need to contextualise the work of folks like Altieri in a broader vision of social ecologies of both state and non-state actors.

#36
The Future is Here
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That's grrreatt, I just want to add that its not incompatible with hunter gatherers, its really common for hunter gatherers to do exadctly that kind of complex super knowledge based small scale agriculture
#37
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absolutely, as I mentioned above the subsistence routines of hill groups in Zomia run the gamut from hunting and gathering to sedentary ag. hunting and gathering in that terrain is extremely difficult, tough work so it's common to see a mixture of hunting/gathering and swiddening, for instance
#38
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this is a bit of a tangent but i looked at low tech mag for the first time in a while today and they have a great article about chinese wheelbarrows:

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarrow.htm



this is an interesting example of a technology which can serve to project grain surpluses (and other things obviously) in state space with relatively little investment in roads, no investment in pack animals, etc. looking at something like this makes it immediately obvious how terrain friction affects state space- no way in hell are you going anywhere with one of those things in the highlands of yunnan, for instance, but on the plains you're going to be zooming around with hundreds of kilos of cargo and just a few humans managing the whole lot
#39
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would u have any recs for sources of practical growing advice shennong?; im reading some forest gardening & sepp holzer permaculture books atm but you said theyre a bit dodgy?

ill start planting a 10x10m allotment at the end of the month myself & im talking with some restless permaculturalists so something'll probably develop over the course of the year...

i hope to try and build a polytunnel; i guess experiment with more exotic plants, try simple food processing to 'add value'... this is my current 'plan' such as it is.

there are a lot of unknown unknowns & tho ill have support from people i reckon itll be messy
if you have any advice for GIYers im all ears tho!!
#40
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if you want to do a polytunnel, i'd really strongly recommend checking out some of Eliot Coleman's stuff (mentioned briefly above). i own this:

http://www.amazon.ca/New-Organic-Grower-Techniques-Gardener/dp/093003175X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329023950&sr=1-1

and it's just awesome. it covers polytunnels and other season extension techniques. I've been told this guy:

http://www.amazon.ca/Four-Season-Harvest-Organic-Vegetables/dp/1890132276/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_c

is basically the same thing with some more emphasis on season-extension. I'd definitely spend some time with Coleman's stuff, the guy literally wrote the book on a lot of these techniques. The New Organic Grower has basically a complete system for growing veg basically year-round in a Maine-type climate, and will get you versed in cover crops and how to optimise crop rotations, organic soil amendments, all that good stuff.

10x10 is a pretty good size, but it's small enough that you may want to look into some space-conservation techniques like companion planting that will let you get a lot of species into small beds. Depending on how good the soil is on your allotment you may want to check out raised bed techniques as well.

as far as permaculture stuff goes, my major problems with it stem from (a) some fairly bizarre notions about ecosystem productivity that crop up fairly frequently in the literature and (b) a lot of promotion of unproven techniques that probably no one's ever really tried.

(a) manifests itself in the whole notion of "food forests" or "forest gardening". A lot of the more problematic permies say stuff like "no one needs to fertilise the forest", which is true but has nothing to do with the suitability of forests for producing crops. no one needs to fertilise forests because no one extracts enormous quantities of nutrients from their soil. the productivity of some forests is pretty high, and if you can grow on an alfisol with a thick A horizon you're probably going to get good results, but that alone isn't a reason to prefer a forest-type ecology to a plain-type ecology (a lot of forests have really thin A horizons with poorly developed soils and are really shitty for growing on, for instance).

i actually think this notion cropped up from Fukuoka's farm. my understanding is that some of the forest-gardening folks were strongly influenced by Fukuoka's satsuma orange orchard, where he pretty much just intercropped a bunch of root crops and herbs with his orange trees. that was described by some of the western vagrants who ended up working on his farm as a "food forest", but it's really an intercropped orchard. that's just fine, it's just not the be-all end-all of small scale ag, and some people get really religious about the canopy-level schemas and shit which may or may not be useful in different contexts. ymmv depending on the text you're reading.

anyway the lack of a solid theoretical background among a lot of the authors results in a lot of magical thinking and you get a lot of bourgie western transition-town types who are under the impression that the status quo can be maintained if we just have food forests or whatever. like you get people swearing that they can build soil structure and add nutrients to the soil w/o amendments and all while removing nutrients in the form of food and flushing their shit out to sea (even among permies shit-composting is still pretty rare, which needs to change asap). a little common sense and the principle of conservation of mass will go a long way to sorting the wheat from the chaff here.

(b) happens mostly, I think, because permaculture has built up a lot of buzz around it and now you have "permaculture teachers" with zero theoretical or practical background running around in cities teaching permaculture techniques that are at best unproven. so you end up with shit like, as i mentioned, chicken greenhouses, which might be useful to illustrate concepts like using waste heat and incidental fertilising from animals or whatever but are probably not actually things you want to build

All that said, the permaculture movement is still extremely important right now because they're obsessive about closing loops, minimising inputs etc and there's a lot to be learned from them. i can't comment on the books you're reading as I'm not familiar with Holzer, but glancing at his wiki page it looks like he's doing high-altitude orchard stuff. if you're in a substantially different ecological niche, the techniques in there might not be super useful. local growers are always going to be a more valuable source of information about specific techniques than books, so it's great you've got help from some local permies.

as a final note, if you're just getting started i'd probably stay away from exotics for the first season, it'll be a lot of hassle and if you're still getting the tunnel set up and figuring out what's going on with the soil it could be more a pain in the ass than it's worth
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